August 18, 2021–The game of secrecy is so very odd. The CIA is still sitting on half-century old documents on its secret war against Castro–which law required be declassified no later than 2018–when Afghanistan collapses and people start talking about an intelligence failure bound up in the fall of Kabul. The next day there is a leak to the New York Times of CIA and other intelligence reports purporting to show that the spooks were increasingly doubtful of the stability of the U.S. ally. Time to pick apart that claim, and add a little to it.

First, what is the function of intelligence? To inform foreign and defense policy. Not to tell you today that your favorite ally will fall tomorrow. What is in the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) is important of course, but it is supremely ephemeral. Tell you today so you can get your ambassador to London to say x and your representative in Kabul to offer a safe passage to Ashraf Ghani. The PDBs have nothing to do with intelligence that permits you to choose either to plan an orderly withdrawal or to ramp up your military intervention to the degree necessary to afford the Afghan state a new lease on life. The proper measure of merit is the longer-term analyses.

Now a bit of confusion sets in. Both the PDBs and the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are the province of the Director of National Intelligence, America’s intelligence czar. Beyond that long-range reporting is mainly the product of the Central Intelligence Agency, in fact Gina Haspel’s CIA. Haspel, who came out of the operations side of the agency, even out of the depths of the black prisons program, took over the agency at Donald Trump’s behest, at a time when CIA’s largest field project was backing a militia movement in Afghanistan. Continuing that project required an ongoing Afghan war. The Times leak indicates that when Haspel left, replaced by William J. Burns, the intelligence prediction was that the Kabul government had at least 18 months left to it. So far as we know this was a CIA report, not from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), although even if it were the latter, the DNI would have been reliant upon CIA input.

The CIA had unique intel sources–the opposite side of the coin from the complaints heard now that it is going to lose its channels in Afghanistan. Militia members represent Afghan ethnic groups that were the foundation of the CIA secret war in Afghanistan against Russia–they were its “Afghantsy,” as the word was then. To take just one example, the Haqqani network, now held to be a secret ally of the Taliban, was then one of the CIA resistance groups. There had to be rumblings in the ground, to say nothing of CIA’s radio intelligence, phone monitors, or aerial photography, of the increasing unreliability of local allies. The same phenomenon had to be evident in the reporting from U.S. military channels, since the military were supporting the Afghan national security forces. The press, of course, was right out there reporting how national police or troop units melted away when fighting for villages, or even when merely tasked to hold local districts. CIA analysts had all that to ponder. They warned of Kabul’s weakening grip but, in deference to CIA’s operational interests, put no timeframe on the moment of maximum danger.

Gina Haspel made all the usual genuflections at her nomination hearings. She promised to get the CIA back to its traditional functions of esp[ionage and analysis, and out of the politically-charged places it had been. Afghanistan was the CIA’s make-or-break challenge on Haspel’s watch. She seems to have produced the same policy-tainted intel as ever. Donald Trump’s “acting” DNIs (they play ones on TV?) Joseph McGuire, Richard Grennell, and John Ratcliffe reserved their attention for impeachment matters and favorite sons. They had no time for Afghanistan. Professional analysts apparently punted, it is reported, and offered different forecasts depending upon the size of the U.S. deployment, with an optimum timeframe that hinged on a deployment larger than the Trump administration was then planning for. The NIE record on Afghanistan, when we see it, is going to be interesting. In 2019, the last year in which Dan Coats was the (not acting) DNI, overlapping with Haspel’s first as CIA director, the Afghan assessment was that neither the Taliban nor the Kabul government would be able to gain the upper hand.

Director Burns succeeded Haspel. He was confirmed in March 2021. In July, the Times leak tells us, the CIA view had changed to one of more immediate peril for Kabul. By then Afghan district seats were falling regularly to the Taliban and province capitals were increasingly exposed, soon to begin falling. Kabul’s general reserves, the commando units, were shuttling from place to place so quickly they were not only exhausted but were perfectly able to see the disintegration among the regulars and police. By July the CIA’s darkening views of the intelligence were too late to give the White House fair warning of impending events. And here we are.