Top U.S. General Mark Milley stated Wednesday “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this [Afghan] army and this government in 11 days.”
Milley, who has been very concerned about a lack of wokeness in the military as of late, said in a prepared statement that intelligence assessments revealed the quickly approaching collapse of the Afghan U.S.-backed government was only a possibility, but those assessments ranged from weeks to months to even years following America’s absence.
“Right now, we have to focus on this mission because we have soldiers at risk,” Milley said, adding that American citizens are stranded behind enemy lines. “This is personal,” he said.
Milley’s comments about the lack of accurate intelligence comes as the Washington Post, NBC News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal reported President Joe Biden’s intelligence apparatus believed Afghan stability was unsure.
The failure of U.S. intelligence comes as Biden on July 8 acknowledged an intelligence report that indicated Afghanistan would probably collapse but claimed the intelligence reports were not “true.”
“That is not true,” Biden claimed. “They did not … reach that conclusion.”
But national security advisor Jake Sullivan on Tuesday denied he was “familiar” with any “intelligence assessment” that would indicate Afghanistan would fall so quickly:
I’m not actually familiar with the intelligence assessments you’re describing. But I also don’t want to get into specific intelligence products. And one thing I will not do from this podium or anywhere else is talk about what a different component of the inner agency did or didn’t do because from my perspective.
With the conflicting messages coming from the White House, it is unknown what Biden knew or when he knew about the impending collapse of the United State’s 20 year investment in Afghanistan. Those questions will likely only be answered by a congressional investigation, which underscores the importance of the 2022 midterms.
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