President Joe Biden is being slammed from all sides for the chaos in Kabul and the decisions leading to it. In a comment that is being widely quoted, Biden himself said on July 8 that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” One of the questions, therefore, being argued is whether or not his administration’s decisions leading to the U.S. military withdrawal were based on faulty intelligence or on policy decisions to ignore accurate intelligence assessments as to what was happening in Afghanistan. If the intelligence was accurate, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t also fakes and lies about what the assessments said that were being spread around.
In a report posted yesterday, ABC News stated that just days ago a U.S. military analysis predicted that Kabul could fall within 90 days but not by the weekend. “This is a crisis of untold proportions,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) told NBC News Sunday, Aug. 15, as Taliban militants swept into Kabul. “This is an intelligence failure. We underestimated the Taliban and overestimated the resolve of the Afghan Army.”
But unnamed U.S. officials are saying that in fact key intelligence assessments had consistently informed policymakers that the Taliban could overwhelm the country and take the capital within weeks — essentially repeating the 1975 fall of Saigon. “[U.S.] leaders were told by the military it would take no time at all for the Taliban to take everything,” an anonymous U.S. intelligence official told ABC News. “No one listened.” Other intelligence sources said that Biden and his team of advisers had reached their decision about the U.S. military’s withdrawal — which was all but completed on July 4 — based on a variety of factors that went beyond Kabul’s fate.
