IN AFGHANISTAN, BIDEN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HE DIDN’T KNOW
There is a lot we don’t know, and now we know that those who should know don’t really know, and don’t even know what they don’t know.
Such is evident from the spectacular catastrophe of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. For an eventuality that was first proposed when he was vice-president more than 10 years ago, Biden and his advisers simply didn’t know what they should have known, namely that the Taliban was hours, not weeks, away from capturing Kabul.
It all brought to mind the most (in) famous press briefing issued by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as both the youngest (in the 1970s) and oldest (2000s) American secretary of defence. Rumsfeld, who died six weeks ago, would have had a comment or two on Biden’s bungling pullout, but would have been sympathetic.
In February 2002, after the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and with the Bush administration turning its attention toward Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about weapons of mass destruction controlled by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His response gave succinct expression to accumulated wisdom in the intelligence community about knowing what you don’t know.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” Rumsfeld said. “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
Indeed. Rumsfeld would go on to entitle his autobiography, “Known and Unknown.”
The Biden White House did not know that it did not know what the prevailing military situation was on the ground. Either that, or it did know, and chose to ignore it, which would attribute a level of incompetence and cruel disregard that is not justified based on what we know that we know. But there are things that we don’t know, too.
Rumsfeld himself experienced the frustration of reading intelligence reports that left him uncertain about what he knew.
Two days before the second anniversary of 9/11, Rumsfeld wrote to Steve Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, about what he knew he did not know about Iraq and Afghanistan: “The lack of clarity as to who the enemies are, and what the problems are from an intelligence standpoint in Afghanistan and Iraq is serious.”
Six weeks later, on Oct. 23, 2003, Rumsfeld followed up, relating that he did not even know what he did not know: “I have no visibility into what kind of intelligence we are getting from the interrogations of the 35 or 40 of the top 55 Iraqis we have captured. Please get me some information.”
Those short memoranda — called “snowflakes” by those who worked with Rumsfeld — were released earlier this year, following a four-year freedom of information battle in the courts.
The Rumsfeld snowflakes from nearly 20 years ago illustrate a chronic, bipartisan problem in national security intelligence: despite — or perhaps because of? — the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for the myriad American intelligence agencies, the bloated behemoths do not deliver what they ought to deliver.
That is not a specifically American problem, nor is it related only to Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are coming up on the second anniversary of when the novel coronavirus first began circulating in Wuhan, China. The world’s collective intel forces are powerless, it seems, against the stonewalling of the Chinese Communist Party over its role in inflicting a pandemic on the whole world.
With a single, solitary infectious disease laboratory in the single, solitary source city of COVID, should not the West’s massive intelligence forces be able, by now, to tell us at least roughly what happened in Wuhan?
Independent of demanding proper accountability from the world’s most malignant regime, that intelligence is necessary to prepare for the next time China’s Communist regime decides to prioritize its own prestige over global health.
Across a range of foreign policy issues — Russian hacking, the Iranian nuclear program — there are more unknowns than knowns. Even with relatively uncomplicated information, we appear to be taken aback by migrations of slow-moving refugees when they arrive at the borders of the United States or the European Union.
We can certainly blame Biden for the graceless exit from Afghanistan. As former U.S. president Barack Obama reportedly once said to an aide, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to (foul) things up.” But the problem goes back much further and seems to be without a solution.
We only know that we just don’t know.