On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) said that the withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t have gone the way it has, and “our intelligence community has been appropriately pessimistic about what was going on in Afghanistan.” Himes noted that while we can’t say if the intelligence community did enough to sound the alarm, their pessimism was enough for him to voice concerns about the situation deteriorating when he did town hall meetings.
Himes said that while he agrees with the withdrawal, “it should never have gone down like this.” And “So, naturally, a narrative develops. Was it a military failure? Was it a White House failure? Was it an intelligence community failure? You’re right, I can’t get into the specifics of intelligence, but I will tell you this, which is that I’ve been watching this intelligence for a very long time and our intelligence community has been appropriately pessimistic about what was going on in Afghanistan. I probably can’t go a lot further than that, but they were pessimistic enough for me, when I did town hall meetings with my constituents three or four weeks ago, to say, hey, we’ve got to talk about this. Because this could be ugly. Now, what we don’t know is if they sounded the alarm loudly enough.”
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