Let the buck passing begin.
The military people say Aghanistan was an intelligence failure. The intelligence community says it was a policy failure. They are both right.
Above all, it was a failure of U.S. “regime change” policy that arrogates to the United States the “right” to replace adversarial governments.
“There is an old gallows humor line in intelligence. There are only two conditions in life: policy success or intel failure,” said James Clapper, former director of national intelligence (DNI) under the Obama administration.“During the six-plus years I was DNI, the IC [intelligence community] consistently assessed the Afghan government and the Afghan military and security forces with a much more pessimistic outlook than did DOD generally, and [the International Security Assistance Force] specifically. Invariably, we were criticized for being too negative, uninformed or both,” he said.
“The point is here that making such judgments would not be the exclusive province of the IC. In fact, the military and the embassy would be in a far better position to make such judgments than the IC,” Clapper said.
Source: Afghanistan disaster puts intelligence under scrutiny | The Hill
