Were any changes made at CIA after getting Afghanistan so wrong?
Washington Examiner:
CIA director ‘proud’ of Afghanistan analysis despite disastrous Taliban takeover
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Hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan allies and interpreters were still in the country when the U.S. left before the end of August.
Burns said Wednesday during an Aspen Security Forum discussion that he was “very proud … of the analysis, with all of its imperfections, that we tried to provide to policymakers over the six months leading up to the withdrawal.”
The CIA director prefaced this by admitting the agency had not predicted the Taliban would take over the country as fast as they did and that “all of us have lessons to learn from experiences like that.” He suggested that the CIA had at least gotten it less wrong than other parts of the U.S. government.
“As the president has said publicly, none of us anticipated that the Afghan government was going to flee as quickly as it did, that the Afghan military was going to collapse as fast as it did,” Burns said. “Having said that, I think CIA at least was always on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum in terms of highlighting, you know, over the course of the spring and the summer, the obvious ways in which the Taliban were advancing rapidly and how this was hollowing out in many ways, not just the political leadership but also the military.”
Burns shared the CIA’s assessment in July 2021, when he did not say he believed the country would fall in half a year, let alone in less than a month.
President Joe Biden and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley both misled about the size of the Afghan army in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul last August.
Biden had dismissed the chances of a Saigon-like situation in July 2021. He added that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
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No one has been held to account for this fiasco. It appears to be a massive failure across the board with the military and intelligence agencies getting it dead wrong along with the administration officials. With this much poor judgment, there should have been consequences for those who were dead wrong.
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