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    Afghanistan is in the hands of the Taliban: "We have changed, no revenge"

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August 17, 2021 Classified assessments by US intelligence agencies over the summer painted a bleak picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of a rapid collapse of the Afghan army, even as Joe Biden and his advisers they publicly said it was unlikely to happen. The New York Times writes it citing executives and former executives of the American government.



In July, according to the newspaper, many intelligence reports turned pessimistic, questioning whether the Afghan security forces would put up serious resistance and whether the government could resist in Kabul. On July 8, Biden said that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would not be a chaotic evacuation of Americans similar to that of Saigon. The 007 summer warnings, the NYT writes, raise the question as to why Biden administration executives and military planners in Afghanistan seemed ill-prepared to handle the Taliban's final push in Kabul, including the failure to ensure security in the main. airport and hastily sending back thousands of soldiers to protect the final exit from the country.   



A July report highlighted the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a source close to intelligence. US 007 agencies predicted that if the Taliban captured a number of cities, there could be a rapid cascade collapse and that Afghan forces were at high risk of collapsing. But the key decisions, the paper recalls, were made well before July, when the consensus in the intelligence community was that the Afghan government could hold out for two years.   


A senior administration official replied that even in July, when the situation was increasingly volatile, intelligence agencies never offered a clear prediction of an imminent Taliban victory and that their assessments did not have a "high degree of trust ", ie the highest level of certainty.