It acknowledged that US intelligence services had failed to understand the Taliban’s strength.
Washington:
The White House on Thursday released a long-awaited review of the painful US exit from Afghanistan, acknowledging there had been a massive intelligence failure to predict a swift Taliban victory, but defending the overall US conduct.
After the classified report was sent to Congress, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters, “Clearly we didn’t get things right”.
But “ending war, any war is not an easy endeavor, certainly not after 20 years,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing — ending that war in Afghanistan.”
In an unclassified summary of the review, the White House blamed conditions created by President Joe Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump for the way the planned 2021 retreat culminated in a desperate evacuation from Kabul airport.
But it also acknowledged that US intelligence services had failed to understand the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of the forces of the Afghan government, which had been supported for years by the West.
Finally, exiting “would have changed nothing” and “after all, President Biden refuses to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended long ago for the United States of America.” was,” the report said.
The pullout, which is due to end on August 30, 2021, shocked Americans and US allies as the Taliban decimated Western-trained Afghan forces within weeks.
Thirteen American soldiers and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the crowded perimeter of the airport on 26 August, where an unprecedented military air campaign managed to evacuate more than 120,000 people from the country in a matter of days Was.
– Afghan territories fell like ‘dominoes’ –
In summary, the White House blamed an earlier deal between Trump’s administration and the Taliban for putting the incoming Biden government in an impossible position.
“The outgoing Trump administration left the Biden administration with a return date but no plan to execute it. And after four years of neglect — and in some cases deliberate degradation — of critical systems, offices, and agencies Functions that would have been essential to a safe and orderly departure were in disarray,” the document said.
“After more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion dollars, and raising an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario—a Permanent and significantly expanded U.S. military presence – that would have changed the trajectory,” it added.
Kirby acknowledged that the US government was unable to predict “how quickly the Taliban were moving across the country” or “the extent to which they were building these deals in the hinterland that kind of fell like dominoes”. not managed.
“We didn’t anticipate how quickly the Afghan National Security Forces were going to fold,” he said. “I don’t think we fully appreciate the degree of corruption that was in the officer ranks in the army.”
Kirby said, “Intelligence is a tough business and they do a lot of it right.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)