US admits massive failure in humiliating Afghan withdrawal

The Biden administration released a review of the humiliating US exit from Afghanistan, admitting there had been a massive intelligence failure in not predicting rapid Taliban victory.

"Clearly we didn't get things right" on intelligence, National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday after the still classified report was sent to Congress, according to AFP.

But "ending a war, any war, is not an easy endeavor, certainly not after 20 years," he said. "It doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing -- ending that war in Afghanistan."

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 following the suspicious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, despite the fact that no Afghan national was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the US war of aggression on the country.

American forces had occupied the country for two decades on the pretext of fighting against the Taliban. But as the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban took over the capital Kabul with lightning speed in August 2021, weakened by continued foreign occupation.

In a declassified summary of the review, the White House blamed conditions created by former US President Donald Trump for the way the planned 2021 withdrawal turned into a rout, culminating in a desperate evacuation from Kabul airport, that then-US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had called "a lot worse than Saigon in 1975.”

But the document also acknowledged that the US intelligence services had failed to understand the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of the US-installed Afghan government's forces that Western countries had spent years propping up, AFP reported.

In the end, nothing "would have changed the trajectory" of the exit and "ultimately, President Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long ago," the report said.

ME