Who is responsible for the Afghanistan catastrophe?
US intelligence warned Biden of potential disaster, say officials
WASHINGTON – The blame game in Washington intensified Tuesday as critics – including leaders in Congress – pounced on claims by embattled Biden administration officials that they had no clue a blitzing Taliban would take Afghanistan so quickly and without a fight.
President Joe Biden has sought to spin the crisis as one that was inevitable, largely out of his control and a development that took the White House by surprise.
“This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” he said in a televised address Monday. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”
But a wide variety of experts, including some current and former U.S. intelligence and military officials, counter that the White House had ample warnings of just such an impending catastrophe.
They say an intensive inquiry is needed to find out who knew what and when about the probability of the crisis now engulfing Kabul, and why Washington appeared to be blindsided by such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces.
“This is a policy failure. It was a rushed withdrawal against the advice of the intelligence community and the U.S. military,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who spent 26 years in the CIA, including significant time on the ground in Afghanistan. “Ultimately, we’re much less safe now as a result.”
One senior staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the nation’s spies and analysts, confirmed that the U.S.-gathered intelligence flowing in from Afghanistan was dire.
“There are plenty of questions being raised about what went wrong, and a lot of finger-pointing about who screwed up and whether the intelligence was correct and if it went to the right people,” said the senior committee staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive committee matters. “Because if it did, obviously this was more of a policy failure than an intelligence failure.”
The raft of questions now go far beyond why the Biden administration had to beat such a hasty retreat that it stranded – some say betrayed – legions of loyal Afghan military and civilian allies now at the mercy of Taliban militants. There is also the question of how America could leave behind so many potentially sensitive classified documents and expensive, deadly weapons – including Black Hawk helicopters, Humvees and possibly shoulder-fired missiles.
And then there is another big question looming over the latest round of recriminations: Did the CIA and Pentagon simply miss many months worth of apparent efforts by the Taliban to buy off and win over Afghan
civilian and military leaders in what was essentially a bloodless coup? Or did the Biden administration and Congress choose to ignore that intelligence, as well as the clear signs that the Afghan military could not possibly defend its own capital?
“The idea that President Biden, with four decades of experience and multiple trips to Afghanistan, somehow has faith in the Afghan army is ludicrous,” said Polymeropoulos, who retired from the CIA Senior Intelligence Service in 2019.
Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell defended his colleagues Tuesday on Fox News.
“The intelligence community for the last 20 years has been more pessimistic than any other organization in the U.S. government about how this was going and whether victory was possible. So to blame intelligence now infuriates me, absolutely infuriates me,” he said.
Calls to investigate
The Senate Intelligence Committee already is combing through all of the intelligence gathered in and about Afghanistan, the Senate staffer confirmed, and is working with Democrats and Republicans on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees to coordinate a series of planned investigative hearings into actions taken by the White House, Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies.
“We owe those answers to the American people and to all those who served and sacrificed so much,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In its defense, the Biden administration circulated a long list of talking points on Capitol Hill claiming that the administration knew that there was “a distinct possibility” that Kabul would fall to the Taliban. But the White House memo stressed: “It was not an inevitability. It was a possibility.”
Some current and former U.S. national security officials contend there were no such illusions about whether Afghan troops could withstand pressure from the Taliban without U.S. support. They cited U.S. military intelligence assessments from June that concluded that the Taliban could overrun government forces within 90 days, or as soon as 30 days.
“This was a political failure. The intelligence community got this right,” Rep. Mike McCaul of Texas, top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told MSNBC. “I got the briefings. I can’t go into detail. But they predicted, within six months, then three months. Actually, the Taliban worked even faster.”
When asked about those military intelligence reports, Biden said last week that he was not considering any change of plans even though the Taliban had already taken at least seven provincial capitals in a span of several days with little or no fighting.
Meanwhile, the CIA also was developing similarly stark intelligence and sharing it up the chain of command, sources said.
“We have noted the troubling trendlines in Afghanistan for some time, with the Taliban at its strongest militarily since 2001,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told USA TODAY. “Strategically, a rapid Taliban takeover was always a possibility . ... We have always been clear-eyed that this was possible, and tactical conditions on the ground can often evolve quickly.”
Long-predicted outcome
For many years, most U.S. spies and soldiers working the Afghanistan account have assumed that the current worst-case scenario was not only possible, but likely.
That’s not the fault of rank-and-file U.S.-trained Afghan forces, who have fought heroically and sustained heavy casualties even in the face of massive government corruption and wavering political and financial support from Washington.
“But all the institutional stuff – the poor morale, corruption, poor leadership, poor accountability, no pay – that was a problem 15 years ago when I was an advisor” in Afghanistan and it never got fixed, said Mike Jason, who retired in 2019 as a U.S. Army colonel after 24 years commanding combat units in Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, Kosovo and Kuwait.
The subject of how long Afghan forces could fend off the Taliban came up repeatedly during U.S. military meetings, including two that Jason attended in 2007 and 2001, he said. Each time, the consensus was that the Afghan army would fall immediately after the withdrawal of U.S. forces – if not sooner.
“So now, lo and behold, the army collapses. Well, no kidding,” Jason said. “When the (U.S. aid) money started drying up and the Taliban comes in with better paychecks and we are telegraphing internationally that we’re out of here, at some point you’ve got to make a calculation for yourself and the safety of your family.”