The collapse of the Afghanistan government and chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August shed light on the capabilities of the American intelligence services. Security and terrorism experts are now trying to figure out what went wrong and why the CIA and its sister agencies failed to see what the Taliban had been building and planning for the past two decades.
We all remember when US President Joe Biden refused, during a press conference on July 8, to compare the evacuation from Afghanistan with America’s exit from Vietnam in 1975. “The Taliban is not… the North Vietnamese army,” he said. “They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in… Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” However, photos of helicopters evacuating diplomats from the roof of the American embassy in Kabul were widely circulated the following month.
These images reflected the terribly inaccurate assessments that profoundly impacted the 46th US commander’s decisions and policy in Central Asia.
Fast forward a couple of months and the US is struggling with the most significant international embarrassment. It lost 13 servicemen and women at the hands of Daesh-Khorasan at Kabul airport and has been left with doubts about the capabilities of one of the most assertive global intelligence agencies.
Is the US any safer today? Apparently not, according to Colin Kahl, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, who last week told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Daesh-Khorasan and Al-Qaeda could attack the US in as little as six months — and have the intention to do so.
“The intelligence community currently assesses that both (Daesh-Khorasan and Al-Qaeda) have the intent to conduct external operations, including against the United States, but neither currently has the capability to do so. We could see (Daesh-Khorasan) generate that capability in somewhere between six or 12 months,” Kahl told lawmakers, adding that it could take Al-Qaeda “a year or two.”
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“The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.”
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