Compounding earlier mistakes

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Is it possible for the bumbling administration to compound it's earlier mistakes and make the fall of Afghanistan even worse?

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A Dishonest Afghanistan Accounting

Biden spins a tragedy for U.S. interests into an antiwar victory.

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The Biden administration apparently wants to make a scapegoat out of the intelligence community.

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Intelligence is difficult to collect and sometimes hard to analyze, especially when considering factors like how a foreign fighting force will react to battlefield pressure. Intelligence isn’t perfect—if it were, it would be called information. It is best used to warn against surprises and to understand developments well enough to avoid adverse consequences. Based on the information made public so far, intelligence failure doesn’t appear to be a critical factor in President Biden’s policy decisions leading to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

The U.S. intelligence agencies filed public testimony before Congress in April, five days before Mr. Biden’s withdrawal speech, saying that the collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces was possible. “Kabul continues to face setbacks on the battlefield” and remains “tied down in defensive missions,” according to that assessment. The testimony even said that “the Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.” This should have warned the Biden administration not to make rash policy decisions.

Mr. Biden was hell-bent on withdrawal. Intelligence gives policy makers an advantage, but it isn’t the fault of the intelligence community if policy makers ignore their reports. Many media reports indicate that Mr. Biden rejected options to keep troops in Afghanistan longer because he believed policy makers were being gamed by generals who supported a greater military presence. He dismissed questions about whether the Afghan government would fall. On July 2 he said, “Look, we were in that war for 20 years. Twenty years. . . . I want to talk about happy things, man.” His public remarks since the Kabul collapse revealed his firmly rooted desire to withdraw on his timeline without regrets.