Afghan Collapse Was Years In the Making

Washington Post: “U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower.”

Said on unnamed U.S. official in 2016: “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane.”

“Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.”

Axios: “The Taliban’s lightning seizure of Afghanistan’s capital yesterday exposed stunning failures of American intelligence, imagination and execution that will be studied as long as people study history.”