CIA Director William Burns said he is “very proud” of the agency’s analysis in Afghanistan in 2021 despite being blindsided by the swift collapse of the Afghan government and failing to predict how quickly the Taliban would take Kabul.
The Taliban rapidly took over Afghanistan in mid-August amid a chaotic U.S. military withdrawal, and a suicide bombing by ISIS-K late that month killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians as the United States led evacuation operations at the airport, with the Taliban providing security outside.
Hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan allies and interpreters were still in the country when the U.S. left before the end of August.
Burns said Wednesday during an Aspen Security Forum discussion that he was “very proud … of the analysis, with all of its imperfections, that we tried to provide to policymakers over the six months leading up to the withdrawal.”
The CIA director prefaced this by admitting the agency had not predicted the Taliban would take over the country as fast as they did and that “all of us have lessons to learn from experiences like that.” He suggested that the CIA had at least gotten it less wrong than other parts of the U.S. government.
“As the president has said publicly, none of us anticipated that the Afghan government was going to flee as quickly as it did, that the Afghan military was going to collapse as fast as it did,” Burns said. “Having said that, I think CIA at least was always on the more pessimistic end of the spectrum in terms of highlighting, you know, over the course of the spring and the summer, the obvious ways in which the Taliban were advancing rapidly and how this was hollowing out in many ways, not just the political leadership but also the military.”
BOTCHED ASSESSMENT OF UKRAINE’S WILL TO FIGHT MIRRORS AFGHAN INTEL FAILURES
Burns shared the CIA’s assessment in July 2021, when he did not say he believed the country would fall in half a year, let alone in less than a month.
President Joe Biden and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley both misled about the size of the Afghan army in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul last August.
Biden had dismissed the chances of a Saigon-like situation in July 2021. He added that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was similarly dismissive when pressed in June 2021 about the failure to evacuate Afghan interpreters properly.
“We are not withdrawing — we are staying. The embassy is staying,” Blinken wrongly claimed. “If there is a significant deterioration in security, that could well happen — we have discussed this before — I do not think it is going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. So I would not necessarily equate the departure of forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation.”
Fresh off of the Pentagon overstating the strength of the Afghan military ahead of the Taliban’s rapid takeover last year, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier admitted in March they had then underestimated Ukraine’s will to fight in the lead-up to Russia’s February invasion.
The invasion of Ukraine came after weeks of warnings by the Biden administration that Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely to invade. Biden said in January he believed a Russian victory in Ukraine would essentially be certain.
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Milley also reportedly told Congress behind closed doors in early February that Kyiv could be conquered by Russia within 72 hours of a full-scale invasion.
Haines has convened a working group underneath the National Intelligence Council to try to assess how spy agencies can more accurately measure a foreign country’s “will to fight.”
