Afghanistan debacle a massive failure for U.S. intelligence apparatus

National Post, 3 October 2021

Not a single intel assessment available to America’s top general predicted that Afghanistan would fall.

The congressional testimony of top Pentagon officials this past week in Washington was remarkable in its candour. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said plainly that his view, for over a year, was that the United States should maintain a residual force in Afghanistan.

That’s hardly surprising advice, even without the hindsight of the botched American withdrawal in August. The Americans have some 28,000 troops in South Korea and 34,000 troops in Germany, a continuing presence far larger and for much longer than the 20 years of the “endless” war in Afghanistan.

Milley’s testimony raised questions about whether President Joe Biden lied when he said he did not “recall” anyone advising him to maintain a continuing presence. Is it possible that Biden simply didn’t remember?

The more remarkable testimony was not about what the president knew, or remembers, but about how widespread and chronic were the failures of the enormous American intelligence apparatus. The information-gathering resources of the American state are fearsome — the FBI, CIA, NSA and the various military agencies have tens of thousands of agents. Indeed, so vast is the surveillance apparatus of the American state that there is a senior officer, the Director of National Intelligence, to co-ordinate the alphabet soup of agencies. That was a post-9/11 initiative, given the failures of intelligence co-ordination 20 years ago.

Yet this week there was Lloyd Austin, U.S. defense secretary, saying that despite two decades on the ground in Afghanistan, the bloated intel bureaucracy had no idea of what was going on.

“We certainly did not plan against a collapse of the government in 11 days,” Austin said.

“There’s no intel assessment that says the government is going to collapse and the military is going to collapse in 11 days that I’m aware of. And I’ve read I think all of them,” echoed Milley.

Which points to the need for robust skepticism about what we actually know, and what those who are supposed to know tell us.

Consider another example from two weeks ago. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted lawyer Michael Sussman for lying to the FBI. The charge stemmed from a Department Of Justice investigation into how the FBI managed to set off a multi-year Russia-Trump investigation on evidence that more or less evaporated upon examination.

Sussman met with the FBI in September 2016, and provided them with information alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. When asked why he was coming forward, Sussman told the FBI he had discovered the “evidence” while working with an American “internet company” and was coming forward as a good citizen.

Quite pointedly, he did not tell the FBI that he was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So off the FBI went, convinced it was hot on the trail of a major criminal investigation, oblivious that it had been set up by a Clinton partisan.

Leave aside the question of Sussman’s guilt or innocence, which has yet to be tested in court. The DOJ filings make it clear that had the FBI known that Sussman was a Clinton flack, they would have considered his information with a more judicious eye.

Consider that. The mighty FBI, by its own admission, did not check up on who was feeding it explosive accusations about a presidential candidate. The FBI didn’t do a little internet searching to see if the informant might have had a partisan interest. The “I” stands for “investigation” but in the middle of a presidential election campaign, the FBI was unable or unwilling to investigate if damaging claims might have a political agenda behind them.

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