$86 billion and what do you get? Another war lost and deeper in debt.

Our intelligence budget didn't buy us much "intelligence" in Afghanistan

American embassy being evacuated in Kabul.

WTF happened in Afghanistan?

It’s going to be an issue in next year’s midterms, and it will certainly be an issue in 2024, especially if a certain orange-haired draft dodger with bone spurs on his heels is the Republican candidate. 

Count on it.  The man who said we should never have been in Iraq in the first place, but if we were there, we should “take the oil,” the man who promised to get us out of Afghanistan and had four years to do it but never did, will be all over Joe Biden and the Democrats for losing another “Democrat war.” Doesn’t matter that both wars were started by George Bush, a Republican.  Doesn’t matter that Trump himself ordered an American force of 1000 troops out of Syria and ceded land along the Turkish border that had been controlled by the Kurds to Turkey, Syria, and Russia, thus deserting our Kurdish allies, and then ordered another 1000 troops back into Syria to protect what the New York Times called “the region’s coveted oil fields from the Islamic State (ISIS).”

The Orange One will be excoriating the Democrats for losing both wars,  and especially Afghanistan after our abrupt and ill-managed pull-out from Kabul in August.  Joe Biden and every Democratic member of the House and Senate running next year had better be ready.  Lies will be told and blame will be laid, because the Democrats were in power when it all came crashing down.

But the crash didn’t happen in July, after the last U.S. forces pulled out of Bagram airbase near Kabul, nor did it happen back in April when Biden made his announcement that all our troops would be out of the country by September 11.  You can expect both moves to be cited in next year’s blame-game by the Orange One and Republicans running to retake the House and Senate. 

I think we lost Afghanistan when we opened a new, heavily fortified U.S. embassy in Kabul back in 2004.  The embassy cost a reported $1 billion to build and loomed like a gigantic fortress over the wide Bibi Mahru Road that ran from downtown Kabul out to the airport.  The place was protected by tall concrete blast walls, and so was the compound next door where embassy staff lived in what amounted to a small city of trailer homes, a PX, and multiple dining facilities.  A second compound across the street containing similar facilities was also protected by tall blast walls.  A staff of more than 4,000 occupied the embassy compound, and here’s the thing about the whole operation:  Not one of them had to walk outside the walls of either the embassy compound or the nearby housing facilities.  They could travel between the embassy buildings and where they lived through a system of underground tunnels.  They were, in effect, completely protected from any contact with the city where the embassy was located and the rest of Afghanistan for that matter.  Four thousand people, including a rather large contingent of agents and analysts from various intelligence agencies, all of them working and housed behind blast walls.

No wonder we didn’t know what the hell was going on in Afghanistan.  Blast walls.  Heavily fortified embassy buildings.  Tunnels, for crying out loud!

I ran into several CIA officers when I was in both Iraq and Afghanistan, usually as I flew by helicopter or on one of the ubiquitous C-130 Hercules Air Force cargo planes that carried soldiers and equipment between major American facilities.  The CIA guys – they were all guys that I ran into – didn’t identify themselves, but you could tell who they were.  They were in civilian clothes, they didn’t say much if you tried to strike up a conversation with them, and they all wore wrap-around sunglasses, some of them even at night.

I always wondered what the CIA was doing over there.  The agents I ran into in both countries were flying from one major American base to another.  There was no way for them to go out into the countryside “undercover,” as it were.  The CIA may have had some Afghans working for them, but it seems rather doubtful they had infiltrated the Taliban in any kind of serious way.  Most CIA agents, I assumed, worked in the embassy compound in Kabul.  They must have had access to intelligence gleaned from satellites and manned surveillance aircraft and drones, but what did they do with it?  I read some reports in the newspaper last summer that said “intelligence sources” reported that the Afghan army and the Kabul government could last six months after we pulled our forces out in September. Other more pessimistic reports said the Kabul government might fall in 90 days.

As we know, it took about two weeks for the entire edifice we had created over there – a fake army of puppet soldiers and a fake government with a puppet president and a puppet cabinet and a puppet parliament – to collapse.  President Ashraf Ghani fled apparently by private jet – nobody yet knows how he got out of Kabul – on August 15, the day before the Taliban marched into the city unopposed.  Out in the countryside, provincial capitals had been falling to Taliban control for days.

What the hell was the CIA doing while that was going on?  Where were their satellites?  Didn’t they show Taliban troop movements around Kunduz and Ghazni and Kandahar?  Weren’t they looking down on Afghan compounds and outposts as Afghan troops dropped their weapons and abandoned hundreds of millions in military equipment like Humvees and MRAP mine-resistant vehicles and aircraft they had been provided by U.S. forces?

We were in that country for 20 years.  You would think that our “intelligence” agencies would have picked up at least some information when it came to how the Afghan army and government were functioning.  I looked up some reports in the Wall Street Journal and blogs by writers at the American Enterprise Institute and Just Security online forums to try to get an idea of what had happened to our intelligence agencies over there.  Here’s one assessment – it’s so embarrassing, I will spare the writer and forum identification:  “Perhaps the CIA misunderstood Afghan history and culture,” this writer mused.  “Wishful thinking may also be at play. There is a long history within the US intelligence community of twisting intelligence in support of diplomatic initiatives. Indeed, the desire for diplomatic solutions rather than a desire for war explains the vast majority of intelligence failures.”

Yowza, huh?  Some hard thought went into that particular analysis!  And the writer is supposed to be one of those think-tankers with his finger on the pulse of the “intelligence community.”  Twenty years in the country and the CIA hadn’t developed a feeling for “Afghan history and culture.”  You could check out books at your local library and come up with more than these doofuses understood about the country they were supposed to be watching.

The last thing I did was look up the intelligence budget proposed for next year, because that’s the year Democrats are going to have to be answering Republican charges that they “lost” Afghanistan, and “lost” Iraq, for that matter, because as we know, Republicans feel no compunction whatsoever to stick to the facts of who started both wars or oversaw their prosecution for two decades. 

$86 billion.  That’s how much we’re going to spend on “intelligence” over the next year.  $68 billion of that, we are told, will be devoted to a national intelligence program overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, and $23 billion will be spent on a military intelligence program in support of “armed services and tactical units.”

Let’s hope they don’t take any of those billions with them as they scurry between heavily fortified embassy compounds and walled-cities of trailers where CIA and other “intelligence” agents worked and lived while they surveilled what was going on in Afghanistan as everything fell apart around them.  I mean, why put all those satellites up in space and all those CIA stations on the ground around the world if you’re not going to use them?