Now that it is clear to everyone how badly we screwed up the Afghanistan withdrawal all the predictable things are happening. Fingers are being pointed, asses are being covered, spin doctors are working overtime to put lipstick on the pig. Biden surrogates are claiming it was Trump’s fault. Trump is claiming it is Biden’s fault. Experts all over the place are saying “I told you so”. Democrats are blaming Republicans and Republicans are blaming Democrats.
But underneath all this petty and useless silliness there are at least two serious questions:
1. How come the intelligence community once again got it so wrong? There have been plenty of journalists over the past 20 years who have written about how corrupt the Afghanistan army was, how many “ghost soldiers” were kept on the payroll to enrich commanders, how poorly they were trained and led, how often they sold their weapons. There have been a number of articles explaining how in Afghanistan tribal links matter more than organizational links, and how often and easily fighters switched sides for money or tribal advantage. There have been a number of articles about how massive amounts of US aid money to Afghanistan just “disappeared” into the pockets of corrupt officials.
So if there was all this information from observers and journalists, how come the intelligence agencies didn’t take all this information into account? Were they ignorant of it? Did they think it didn’t matter – didn’t affect the fighting capability of the army? Was it not used because of some institutional pride – our information is better? Did they really know the truth but fed the politicians what they thought they wanted to hear?
2. If the intelligence community and the politicians misread the Afghanistan situation so badly, how much can we trust their assessment of the China threat, the North Korean threat, the Iranian threat, or the Russian threat?
It seems to me that this calls for a pretty deep review of the intelligence community. Has it simply gotten too big and too bureaucratic and too politicized to be of any use? These are questions that should have been asked after 9/11, but apparently were not – we just quadrupled the size of the intelligence community, threw money at it and hoped it would get better. It clearly didn’t.
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