I had the good fortune to talk to General Andrew Goodpaster, former SACEUR, a former top advisor to Dwight Eisenhower for many years right after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started. There was controversy swirling around about "bad intelligence" re: Iraqi WMDs.
Goodpaster said, "Ike would have had no patience for this debate. He knew you always had to take intelligence with a grain of salt. I was with him when he got intelligence late in 1944 which said there was nothing to worry about re: German forces near the Ardennes.
"The Battle of the Bulge started a few days later. Experienced users of intelligence know it is often wrong." In the case of the intel that suggested it would take months for the Taliban to resume control of Afghanistan, that the Afghan army would put up a tougher fight...
...it's worth remembering this. And frankly, the Biden team did recognize that things might deteriorate & had gamed out the evacuations happening now. But the most important thing to realize is that few experts expected that any outcome other than a Taliban victory were possible.
The speed but not the fact of the victory was the shock. But there were always going to be pictures of the Taliban in the streets of Kabul or in the office of the president. That fact is where we need to focus our analysis of this moment.
The intel was slightly off. But the strategies of the past 20 years that got us here...were completely wrong. You won't find the lessons of this failed war in its last few days but in two decades of bad policy judgments and bad military advice and execution.
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