Did CIA know that government of Afghanistan was ready to collapse...?

[kentuck]

Last edited Fri Aug 27, 2021, 07:53 PM - Edit history (1)

...and that the Afghan Army was just going to disappear?

Was everyone wrong about when they thought Kabul would fall?

It fell very quickly. The President resigned and left the country and their Army disintegrated.

America was caught with its proverbial pants down when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul.

They had no choice but to improvise. They started destroying all the records at the Embassy and then had to move out of the Embassy for security purposes.

President Biden had to send in more troops to supplement those assigned to the Karzai Airport.

It was chaos as the Taliban gathered in Kabul to choose their leadership and to plot a course for their country's future.

It is a good bet that no one expected the fall of Kabul to be so quick? Whatever plans were on the table had to be re-calculated.

Joe Biden is the President and he has to accept responsibility for whatever happens at the airport.

However, it appears that the former President set him up for failure? He knew that Biden had wanted out of Afghanistan for many years, as did the majority of Americans. Biden decided to complete the game by following Trump's plan. He only had 2500 troops and a deadline to get them out of the country.

Everything was going better than expected until yesterday. A suicide bomber killed and wounded over 30 Americans and killed over a hundred Afghans. It was a bloody and tragic day.

The Americans are in a position they never expected to be. They thought they would have the Afghan Army for security around the airport, not the Taliban.

Now, under the most extreme and unpredictable conditions, they are attempting to evacuate as many Afghans as possible before the Americans make their final exit.

They do not expect the next four days to be smooth sailing.

[msongs]

1. I suspected that was likely but the cia did not call me. oh well nt

[Hoyt]

2. Don't know about CIA, but there is a video of Hillary Clinton saying just

that in May, 2021.

Someone should have listened to her, and in 2016.

Honestly, the only deadline Biden had was apparently suggested by some publicist who thought it would be cute to be out by 9/11. The idea that Biden was locked in by trump’s deal, is ludicrous.

[kentuck]

4. He was locked in only so far as they both agreed that the US should be out of Afghanistan.

Biden never followed the May 1st deadline set by Trump. He wanted to set his own date. He never planned on sending any new troops back into that country.

[Hoyt]

5. Yeah, he thought it would be a "cake walk." Obviously, it was not.

[kentuck]

6. A leader is judged by how they handle the unexpected moreso...

...than how they handle the expected and predicted, in my opinion.

[Hoyt]

8. Recovering from a blunder doesn't make it right.

We do seem on the road to ending this, ugly as it is, but it would have been better to plan this out more.

[kentuck]

10. Yeah, when Kevin McCarthy calls someone "weak"...

it does get your attention.

It seemed to be planned well enough, until the Afghan Army fell apart and their President skipped the country.

Then all hell broke loose and there was no turning back.

And we are where we are.

[abqtommy]

3. I have no confidence in the CIA. At all.

[haele]

7. I think too many of them fell into a confirmation bias trap.

Instead of keeping their mouths shut and letting analysts do their jobs, I think they let the Warhawk holdovers and nattering pundit experts talk and talk to justify their biases and thwarted needs to continue the Great Afghan Adventure and that bled into the Intel reports.

I'm not an expert, I've just read too many pie in the sky policy reports that didn't address root causes over the years.

Haele

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. If they didn't know they knew less than any informed American citizen.