Groups gathered at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, looking to leave the country on Monday. © Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
New York Times: Intelligence Warned of Afghanistan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances
WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials.
By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital.
President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.
The drumbeat of warnings over the summer raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.
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WNU Editor: If true. This tells me that the White House made the decision to ignore all the intel warnings, and proceed with the withdrawal anyway. Consequences be damned.
On a side note. German intelligence did not believe Kabul would fall .... German spies saw Kabul fall as 'rather unlikely': report (DW).
More News On Reports That U.S. Intelligence Did Warn The White House That The Collapse Of The Afghan Army Was Likely
Intel Agencies Warned of Afghan Collapse as Biden Publicly Downplayed Possibility -- National Review
CIA warned of rapid Afghanistan collapse. So why did U.S. get it so wrong? -- NBC
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The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is, by most accounts, the least-proud moment for the seven-month-old Biden administration. The situation — and the false assurances and projections that led up to it — have played into long-standing GOP arguments that President Biden isn’t up to the job.
But as Republicans continue to prosecute that case, something interesting keeps cropping up: former Trump administration officials seeking not just to bash Biden, but to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s own actions on this front.
That goes particularly for the deal the Trump administration cut with the Taliban last year. And we’re talking about many of its top foreign-policy figures.
The most recent examples are former acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.
Haley tweeted Wednesday, “To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.”
To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) August 18, 2021
Of course, it was the Trump administration itself that focused on diplomacy with and negotiated with the Taliban, quite literally cutting a deal “with the devil” despite plenty of criticism of that posture. Haley also played up potential talks with the Taliban as early as January 2018 and was still around when process began in earnest in mid-2018.
Top military officials, for example, are furious at Biden’s national security team because they wanted to start evacuating vulnerable Afghans as early as May but were not allowed to do so, multiple officials told NBC News. After their advice not to pull out was disregarded, Pentagon brass sought to exit as soon as possible in the interest of troop safety and planned to get all troops out by as early as July 4, according to a senior official.
As the July date approached, the White House grew concerned and ordered the military to delay and keep troops until Aug. 31, the official said.
On Wednesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley said that the Afghan government fell faster than anyone expected.
“Intelligence clearly indicated multiple scenarios were possible: one of those was an outright Taliban takeover following a rapid collapse of the Afghan Security Forces and the government,” Milley told reporters at the Pentagon. "However, the timeframe of a rapid collapse, that was widely estimated and ranged from weeks, months, and even years following our departure. There was nothing that I or anybody else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”
A senior intelligence official also said Wednesday that the Afghan government “unraveled even more quickly than we anticipated.”
But the official added: “We consistently identified the risk of a rapid collapse of the Afghan government. We also grew more pessimistic about the government’s survival as the fighting season progressed.”
CIA officials were taken aback by the rapid pace of the military’s pullout, including the dead-of-night withdrawal from Bagram Air Base in July, according to a former official. And many officials are expressing annoyance at the State Department, which officials say was extremely slow in processing the paperwork needed to deal with Afghan translators and others eligible for resettlement.
“Interagency coordination, especially among warfighters, diplomats and intelligence officers, is critical at times like this,” the former official said. “Obviously, it was deficient.”
MAYBE it's the military industrial complex playing in the shadows and helped or encouraged or just informed the Taliban a couple weeks ahead and just told them "pssst, Biden ordered to pull out at date X, here's the plan" :D
I wouldn't put it past them.
Actually I'd be somewhat disappointed if they didn't. I have high expectations of those demons.
OR.. and that's way more likely, the military industrial complex sees FAR higher return rates by not putting fear into you, but instead put fear into Congress, telling them you all are terrorists.. now that would be smart.. because Pelosi will pay anything.. and the 3.5 Trillion Dollar infrastructure bill will have a few billion assigned to concentration camps for dissidents, I mean covid patients and people who came into contact with a covid patient, or an idea, like that the election was indeed stolen to usher in the great reset and get rid of nationalist Trump.
But hey, that's conspiracy theory, right? Even if everything points to that.. the purposeful destruction of the economy.. telling you borders are racist, pitting you against each other.. now that's craftsmanship.. and they'll blame China, while they want to be like China.. they want to rule you CCP style. No questions about elections, no handing over of router logs, no need to explain the trillions missing at the Pentagon according to its own audit and that"plane "(which somehow looked like a rocket) flew into that office where the auditing was taking place. No more questions of anything. Like why they defund the police to replace it with a federal police. No questions about the deficit, modern monetary policies,... AND you'll own nothing and be happy with the election outcomes and that they want to use carbon and global warming to take your rights further, while they of course fly dozens of times per year in private jets which produce 10 fold more emissions per unit weight, but whatever...
YOU accepted it when they decided who is essential and who not and you went along with it all
It's a coup
It's global
They used the fake PCR test for that
And silenced scientists for years and literally trained them to be obedient
Look at fred. PhD. Knows nothing of the world. Foams at the mouth when you bring up the election. Trained. Demands evidence. Ignores it when you present it over and over. Programmed.
And he will send you to the "covid camps".. if you can't see what's going on..I don't know
..
Good luck
Immediately before the events of last week, the U.S. intelligence community was largely in agreement that the Afghan government could endure for at 90 days at most, providing at least some breathing room for an organized, efficient withdrawal of American boots on the ground. This prediction was already a downgrade from a spring assessment, however, which gave the Afghan regime two years to hold together.
An anonymous senior administration official shared with the newspaper that by July, as the situation started to deteriorate amid the Taliban’s steady territorial gains, the intelligence bodies did not indicate a clear prediction of Taliban takeover.
Maybe the German assessment is not as bad as it looks.
Did the Germans have as much of a spy effort in Afghanistan as they had a military effort?
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