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An intelligence assessment produced over the past month assessed that the Taliban were pursuing an all-out military victory in Afghanistan, a source close to intelligence said, despite ostensibly for peace talks in Doha and even though the administration continued to push back. express confidence in these talks.
Some officials insist Biden received bad advice from some of his top military and intelligence advisers. A White House official pointed to comments by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley three weeks ago when he suggested that Afghan forces have the capacity to fight and defend their country, and that A Taliban takeover was not won in advance.
“A full berth,” the official said.
Military officials, in turn, said they were in fact prepared for the worst and had urged the State Department for weeks to start removing embassy workers in Kabul. Pentagon officials have used the words “frustration” and “sh * tshow” to describe their feelings about Washington and Kabul.
Officials said they warned the State Department that a last-minute emergency evacuation – if necessary – would be all the more difficult as more staff remained.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that the Defense Department had “absolutely ‘anticipated’ the possibility of the Taliban making significant gains across the country,” but declined to say whether the president had been informed. “One of the things we couldn’t anticipate and didn’t anticipate was the degree to which Afghan forces sometimes surrendered without a fight,” Kirby said.
A State Department official admitted that there had been real friction with the Pentagon in recent weeks, as the department resisted military advice to close the US embassy in Kabul earlier. A senior administration official, however, said they were operating on the intelligence community’s assessments that the fall of Kabul was not imminent. So the State Department felt it was making the appropriate decisions, the official said.
A senior intelligence official issued a statement on Sunday defending the work of the community, saying that “we have noted disturbing trends in Afghanistan for some time, with the Taliban at their strongest, militarily, since 2001. Strategically, a take rapid control of the Taliban has always been a possibility. ”
Diplomats are also frustrated. “House. Angry,” said the one who has just returned from Afghanistan. Two other US diplomats who served in Afghanistan said the chaos could have been avoided, or at least alleviated, if steps had been taken earlier to get people out. Although Biden’s National Security Council holds many meetings, diplomats said, it doesn’t make many quick decisions – and in this situation, they believe, precious time has been wasted.
In a statement, a senior administration official said Biden’s national security team “has embarked on months of extensive scenario planning and is ready for this challenge.” Despite the rapid collapse of Afghan forces and government, the official noted that the United States Embassy had been closed “safely and quickly, following an effective and secure military withdrawal that ensued. much completed in early summer.
“We are now laser-focused on the rapid and safe evacuation of people, including US citizens, local embassy staff and partners, and other Afghans,” the spokesperson said.
Overestimation of Afghan forces
In defending the withdrawal, Biden and Pentagon officials have repeatedly overlooked the capabilities and advantages of the 300,000 Afghan national defense and security forces. Yet the idea of a cohesive Afghan army that could hold its place in a fight seems to have been a fiction of $ 88 billion – the amount of US tax dollars spent to bolster the Afghan army and police. Plus, it’s a myth the United States should have seen coming, experts say.
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, has repeatedly warned over the years that the Afghan army suffers from corruption, drug addiction, theft and tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers”. These fictitious soldiers would be added to the payroll so that corrupt officers could collect their salaries. In October 2019, the United States helped remove some 50,000 of these soldiers from Afghan military books.
This was just one of the many problems plaguing the Afghan military and police forces. Officials sold weapons for money, stole the salaries of their subordinates and sometimes left them without enough food or water, as documented in the quarterly reports of the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction of Afghanistan for years.
Without US military support and US contractors, Sopko warned in March after the release of the 2021 report on the high risk list for Congress that “the survival of the Afghan state as we know it” was in jeopardy. . He was right, and it happened much faster than anyone expected.
Even though the Taliban avoided attacking US forces, it has led a brutal and continuous assault on the Afghan army, carrying out as many as 120 attacks per day over the past year. The attack set the stage for what was to come as US forces withdrew and handed over bases and equipment to Afghan forces – a lightning-fast blitz across the country in which Afghan forces often surrendered without fighting or fleeing their positions.
In late July, as the Taliban began to advance, Milley said Afghan forces were withdrawing from outlying provinces to consolidate their forces and protect population centers, including Kabul and provincial capitals.
The picture is now much clearer and more worrying: Afghan forces were collapsing on the periphery before collapsing around major cities, culminating in the Taliban takeover of Kabul, meeting little or no resistance.
“A total collapse of morale”
Intelligence assessments have for years warned “that in the absence of the US military, the Taliban would continue to make gains in Afghanistan,” Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said on Monday. in a press release.
But US officials have also overestimated the willingness to fight Afghan security forces and the risk of a total psychological collapse of those forces once US troops withdraw. In recent weeks, assessments have continued to reflect growing concern over how quickly the Taliban could take control of Kabul. Earlier this summer, intelligence assessments estimated that it could be around six months before the Afghan government collapses. Just a week before the fall of Kabul, an assessment estimated that the Taliban could take control of Kabul just 90 days after the US left, which also turned out to be far from the base.
“I think the absence of combat really highlights that it was not about the capabilities, the training, the equipping of the Afghan forces,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center. strategic and international studies. “My assessment is, in conversations with Afghan officials over the past two days, that one of the key factors was a complete collapse in morale. If you stand up for your government and your country, and are ready to die for it, you’re going to have to think there’s a chance of winning. ”
It also became clear that the Taliban had “various types of intelligence, military and diplomatic support from virtually every government in the region, possibly with the exception of India,” Jones said, pointing to China. , Pakistan, Iran and Russia, whose Military Intelligence Service, the GRU, aided the Taliban.
“From what senior Afghan officials tell me, is that they made their own little cost-benefit calculation,” Jones said. “They no longer have the support of the United States, the Taliban have almost every major country in the region providing a combination of diplomatic, military and intelligence support. The game was over and their chances of winning a war were slim then. , or even zero. ”
This psychological element is difficult for the intelligence community to measure in advance, said a person familiar with the internal debates.
“These non-technical issues, like the will and affinities of a certain population, are very difficult to predict,” said this person. The fog of war amid escalating chaos makes it even more difficult, they added, when the intelligence community tries to keep pace with agents who find themselves in a spiraling security environment and who are potentially compromised in matters of signals intelligence.
In the absence of reports on the speed of the collapse of Afghan forces, therefore, many officials believed there would be a protracted civil war that could save the United States and its allies more time.
The administration’s assessments of the security situation in Afghanistan are so false that the Pentagon declared as late as Friday that Kabul was not under threat of imminent collapse. On Sunday, Taliban insurgents entered the city, the Afghan president fled the country as his government collapsed, and the United States sent thousands of troops to Kabul to facilitate a safe evacuation of embassy workers American.
As of Monday morning, at least two people died in the chaos as desperate Afghans flooded Kabul airport and clung to departing US military planes.
“We were clear on the risks. We planned for every eventuality,” Biden said on Monday. “But I have always promised the American people that I will be frank with you. The truth is, it happened faster than we expected. So what happened? Afghan political leaders have abandoned and fled the country. The Afghan army collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. “
Barbara Starr of CNN contributed to this report.
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