By Courtney Kube, Ken Dilanian, Chantal Da Silva and Yuliya Talmazan - NBC News
The lightning-fast Taliban offensive in Afghanistan has put intense pressure on the American security mechanism to explain the defeat of the Afghan Army, which the United States allocated billions to train and equip in a war that cost thousands of American lives.
The Taliban, a force of about 75,000 fighters, overwhelmed the US-trained Army, which numbered about 300,000, sometimes without firing a single bullet.
Although US military officials had warned that the fundamentalists had momentum in this war that began 20 years ago, the pace and shape of their victory two decades after being overthrown
has shown how ill-prepared US-trained troops were. .
Taliban fighters after taking control of the Afghan presidential palace.
Zabi Karimi / AP
The hasty evacuation of US embassy staff in Kabul over the weekend has drawn comparisons to the chaotic images of Americans being evacuated by air from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975.
Clearly, the administration of President Joe Biden did not see it coming.
["Blood on their hands": Republicans criticize Biden while Kabul remains at the mercy of the Taliban]
On July 8, the president said that it was not possible to predict what would happen, but assured that the probability that the Taliban would seize everything and become owners of the entire country was "very unlikely."
When the Taliban entered Kabul on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged on the
Meet the Press program
on NBC, sister network of Noticias Telemundo, that
the advance of the extremists occurred much more quickly than the United States had. provided.
Defense officials fear that the arrival of the Taliban to power will give al Qaeda a chance to rearm and increase its strength.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban, who had sheltered al Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban enter Kabul and the president of Afghanistan leaves the country
Aug. 15, 202102: 17
"The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency plans. If everyone knew we were heading towards the exit, why didn't we have a plan in the last two years to make this work?" Asked retired General Douglas E Lute, who led Afghan strategy at Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama's National Security Council, in an interview with
The New York Times
published on Saturday.
According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the United States was unable to give Afghan forces the "will" to fight for their country.
"We could not give them the will and in
the end they decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country," he
told
NBC's
Today
show on Monday
.
US officials have long been concerned that rampant corruption undermines the motivation of underpaid, poorly fed and irregularly supplied front-line soldiers.
Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Center for the Study of Armed Groups, a London-based think tank, said the Taliban seized the opportunity to overcome an army that lacked resources, leadership and determination.
"Ultimately, you can have all the capacity building, all the supplies, all the things, but if you have a system that is broken, that is corrupt and you have a lack of political leadership, those forces are not worth much," he said.
So while the Taliban have tried to portray each of their victories as a "capture," not all of the awards were hard-won, he added.
Afghan forces and political leaders have often chosen to compromise and surrender to the radical group, rather than fight what for many was probably a losing battle.
[The war in Afghanistan "is an absolute failure", says a veteran before the new advance of the Taliban]
Capturing one strategic post after another, militants often encountered little resistance, and even Taliban fighters were surprised by the speed of their advance.
"It was not a surprise"
The Taliban had previously told NBC News that they had signed deals with local governments when they began to take control of districts in rural areas and used the help of local tribal elders to get their message across to local authorities, offering a general amnesty in exchange for no resistance.
In cases where the deals were not made, the Afghan forces appear to have merged.
"It worked very well and we captured more than 150 districts in a few days without firing a single shot," said a Taliban commander in the southeastern city of Ghazni.
Intelligence officials, for their part, have rejected the charge that they should have been able to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and the advance of the Taliban.
Accounts differ as to when, exactly, the spies expected that to happen.
Taliban supporters carry the characteristic white flags of the Taliban in the Pakistani-Afghan border town of Chaman, Pakistan, in July 2021. Tariq Achkzai / AP
Doug London, a former senior CIA officer who led counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan before retiring in 2018, told NBC News that it was being considered within the intelligence community that Kabul could fall in a matter of weeks if the United States withdrew the bulk of it. its military and intelligence assets.
A Western intelligence official who spoke anonymously added:
"There were intelligence reports that said something this fast could happen. It was not a surprise."
[Biden announces that the US will leave Afghanistan on August 31 despite the risk of civil war and the resurgence of the Taliban]
This official said that it has always been known that the Afghan Army could not resist the Taliban's bid without US air support, and that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani hastened his own disappearance by disregarding the advice of American and British officials who urged him. to make deals with possible allies.
Meanwhile, a US official revealed to NBC News: "We knew that the Taliban would take over. We knew that most Afghans would not fight. It was faster than expected, but not as fast."
This source added that
Afghans who now fear for their lives for having helped the US military "did not enter the calculation."
But a congressional official briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that while intelligence agents always warned of a possible catastrophic implosion of the Afghan Army, no US agency warned that it could occur in a matter of days.
A senior Defense intelligence official told NBC News that the worst-case scenario emerged in an intelligence assessment last month and indicated that Kabul could fall before 9/11.
"No official estimate has been pessimistic enough" for what has happened, the official said.