In Afghanistan, Biden didn't know what he didn't know — and everyone paid the price

National Post, 20 August 2021

Biden and his advisers simply didn’t know what they should have known, namely that the Taliban was hours, not weeks, away from capturing Kabul.

There is a lot we don’t know, and now we know that those who should know don’t really know, and don’t even know what they don’t know.

Such is evident from the spectacular catastrophe of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. For an eventuality that was first proposed when he was vice-president more than 10 years ago, Biden and his advisers simply didn’t know what they should have known, namely that the Taliban was hours, not weeks, away from capturing Kabul.

It all brought to mind the most (in)famous press briefing issued by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as both the youngest (in the 1970s) and oldest (2000s) American secretary of defence. Rumsfeld, who died six weeks ago, would have had a comment or two on Biden’s bungling pullout, but would have been sympathetic.

In February 2002, after the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and with the Bush administration turning its attention toward Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about weapons of mass destruction controlled by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His response gave succinct expression to accumulated wisdom in the intelligence community about knowing what you don’t know.

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” Rumsfeld said. “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”

Indeed. Rumsfeld would go on to entitle his autobiography, “Known and Unknown.”

The Biden White House did not know that it did not know what the prevailing military situation was on the ground. Either that, or it did know, and chose to ignore it, which would attribute a level of incompetence and cruel disregard that is not justified based on what we know that we know. But there are things that we don’t know, too.

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