Washington can’t help but blame disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan

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A US Chinook helicopter flies near the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, August 15, 2021. Rahmat Gul / AP Images

Washington can’t help but point fingers as it scrambles to determine who is responsible for the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan.

Biden blamed Trump and the Afghan forces, intelligence officials say it is a political failure, and policymakers blame an intelligence failure.

“The rapid collapse came as no surprise to the intelligence community. It was policymakers who were surprised,” said a former NSA general counsel.

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In April, nearly 70% of Americans supported the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan following a 20-year conflict. This week that number has dropped to 49% as the American public watched in horror as the Taliban enter Kabul and desperate Afghans trying to flee the country.

Meanwhile, in Washington, it began to be pointed out who was most responsible for the collapse of the US-backed government house of cards, a disaster that some have described as the president’s “Saigon moment”. Joe Biden.

Biden and his advisers criticized former President Donald Trump for making a deal with the Taliban to withdraw troops, and accused the Afghan government and army of not having the “will” to continue a fight that the United States has started. Trump said Biden was right to withdraw his troops from Afghanistan, but blamed him for the chaotic nature of the withdrawal.

On the intelligence side, current and former officials have described the botched pullout as a political failure. And on the political side, lawmakers, diplomats and some defense officials have blamed an intelligence failure.

But for anyone who had watched the war closely since its inception, this week’s events were entirely predictable.

The Taliban had been making headway throughout Afghanistan for some time, and in July they claimed to have control of 85% of the country. It was also widely known that the Afghan army was plagued by corruption and lack of discipline.

The U.S. intelligence community noted these details in its annual threat assessment, which was released less than a week before Biden announced the troop withdrawal in April. “The Taliban are likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan government will find it difficult to keep the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws its support,” the report said.

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Still, Biden and his advisers said they were taken aback by how quickly the Taliban took control of the country.

Douglas London, the former CIA counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia, wrote this week that “while it is certainly practical to describe the shock and error of calculation that US officials claim on Afghanistan’s tragic and rapid fall to the Taliban as an intelligence failure, the reality is far worse. “

“It is a convenient diversion of responsibility for decisions made due to political and ideological considerations and provides a scapegoat for a political decision which is otherwise unable to offer a convincing defense,” he said.

London, who retired in 2019, added: “The decision Trump made, and Biden ratified, to withdraw U.S. forces quickly came despite warnings projecting the outcome we are now witnessing.”

Robert Deitz, who was previously the NSA’s General Counsel and one of the CIA’s leading attorneys in the late 2000s, also attributed the rapid collapse of the Afghan government to the refusal of policymakers to heed the warnings. of the intelligence community.

“There are no political failures and intelligence successes. There are only political successes and intelligence failures,” he told Insider. “Keep in mind that policymakers can say whatever they want about news, and the news community actually cannot respond due to classification issues.”

Deitz added that “the intelligence and defense communities have both been aware of the growing power of the Taliban in recent months. The rapid collapse came as no surprise to the intelligence community. It is the policy makers. who were surprised. “

One of those decision-makers, Republican Representative Peter Meijer, told the Washington Post that he wanted Congressional hearings on the Biden administration’s withdrawal plan. Meijer, an army veteran who worked in Afghanistan as a conflict analyst, also questioned intelligence coming from the White House.

“I think the underestimation of the lifespan of the Afghan government is an intelligence failure to level Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and downplays the rise of ISIS,” Meijer told the Post.

Some have also criticized Defense Ministry intelligence for overestimating how long the Afghan military has spent two decades and $ 83 billion in training and supplies could hold back the Taliban.

A Democratic congressional adviser told Politico this week that Pentagon officials informed lawmakers about the information last month and that it was “exaggerated.”

“The Taliban were not only planning this offensive, but were working with tribal / ethnic divisions to be able to gain control quickly for a long time,” the aide said.

Other officials said the chaos was rooted in a larger problem.

“For many of us who served there, the focus is more on the incredible institutional failures,” a former senior defense official told Vanity Fair. “The failure of the US military to build cohesive security forces is a 20-year failure. And I think we need to look at that from a political perspective and understand what went wrong. over a longer period. “

While it is clear that the Biden administration mismanaged some aspects of the withdrawal – particularly the delays in evacuating the Afghans that aided the United States during the war – the reality is that the American failure in Afghanistan will not can be attributed to a single president, administration or agency.

Four administrations – two Democrats and two Republicans – presided over a 20-year conflict that was mismanaged from the start. It was also a conflict that they constantly misled the public that the United States was turning a corner in Afghanistan.

“We definitely need to do a retrospective as a nation – the president at the bottom – on how part of this transition could have been more seamless,” former New York congressman Max Rose told Vanity Fair. , who served in Afghanistan. “But make no secret, this overall result of Taliban control over Afghanistan was inevitable. This was how the film was going to end.”

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