The leader of the anti-Taliban resistance speaks out, CNN.com

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Many headlines over the past day have trumpeted the notion that the Afghan War is over. Yes, it’s true the American troops are gone, but the country’s decadeslong civil war continues. In fact, the war is entering a new phase in which the Taliban control almost all the country, but resistance to them is beginning to form.

That resistance is led by Ahmad Massoud, 32, a graduate of Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, who is the son of the legendary Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. The elder Massoud was instrumental in forcing the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and he led the resistance to the Taliban the last time that they controlled much of Afghanistan, before the 9/11 attacks.

Massoud was killed in Afghanistan by assassins dispatched by Osama bin Laden two days before 9/11, which was effectively al Qaeda’s curtain-raiser for the attacks on New York and Washington that followed.

In an interview, the younger Massoud said his forces are fighting “intolerance and oppression brought by one political force over the majority of the population that do not support them” and that Afghanistan needs a government that represents the nation’s many ethnic groups. Massoud is gathering anti-Taliban forces in the Panjshir Valley, a mountainous, inaccessible region north of Kabul where his father is buried. On Monday the Taliban fought Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir; seven Taliban were reported killed, according to Reuters.

We conducted this interview over email, through an intermediary.

Bergen: Why are you resisting the Taliban?

Massoud: Unfortunately, the Taliban have not changed, and they still are after dominance throughout the country. We are resisting dominance, intolerance, and oppression brought by one political force over the majority of the population that do not support them. The Taliban will only be accepted if they form an inclusive government with all ethnic groups in the country. Afghanistan is a country made up of ethnic minorities and no one constitutes a majority. It is a multicultural state instead of a nation-state. For this reason, they cannot be allowed to rule the country, and if they have this position, we will resist them. Only in a decentralized state where power is equally distributed between the different ethnic and sectarian groups, can we coexist peacefully. In addition, we believe that democracy, the rights, and freedom of all citizens regardless of race and gender should be preserved.
Bergen: Who is in your force? How many men? What kind of weapons?

Massoud: Our forces are made up of local resistance forces from the Panjshir, local resistance forces from other provinces and the remnants of the former Afghan Army. We have a sufficient amount of equipment at the moment, but we will need assistance to sustain our resistance in the long term.

Bergen: Your father held off nine Soviet offensives and also the Taliban: Are you continuing his legacy?

Massoud: We are trying our best to follow my father’s path and to continue his legacy. We are determined to defend our people and region until our last breath, and just as my father fought bravely against the Soviet aggressors and international terrorism, I am resolved to emulate him as much as possible and fight for independence, freedom, democracy, and other values he cherished.

Bergen: What are the Taliban weaknesses, militarily?

Massoud: The Taliban are not as strong as many believe they are. The reason why they took the country was the weakness of the government and the leadership of the Afghan military. Unfortunately, former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani purged the army of generals and officers who knew how to fight the Taliban and who had the will and motivation to fight the enemy. The leadership of the country was another problem. Ashraf Ghani lacked legitimacy, and the masses grew apart from his government in the recent years. Ghani and his national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib’s interference in the decision-making process of the Afghan military also weakened the armed forces. They are two individuals who lacked any military training or experience, yet it was they that made the final decisions on war plans.

Bergen: Are you still trying to negotiate with the Taliban?

Massoud: We are always in favor of negotiations, and my father also tried negotiations and peace before resistance. However, just as my father’s attempts were not met with sincerity and seriousness, my dialogue with the Taliban so far hasn’t resulted in anything tangible. I am not negotiating to be part of the government or to secure a few positions. I am negotiating to see if a political settlement can be achieved that can establish social justice, guarantee equality, rights, and freedom for all and preserve democracy. If the Taliban do not make concessions and continue to believe they can dominate the country, then we will also resist. The last time they pursued dominance, they were faced with five years of resistance.
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Bergen: You studied war studies at King’s College London, and attended Sandhurst. Did this prepare you for fighting the Taliban?

Massoud: Yes, my time at Sandhurst trained me to fight and plan battles. However, my time at King’s College learning War Studies taught me how to avoid war and how to pursue peace as best as I can to avoid bloodshed. But negotiations have their limits and as Clausewitz points out, War is the continuation of politics, and if we face aggression we will be forced to fight and launch resistance to defend our land, people, and values.

Why Biden’s views on the Afghan terror attack make no sense, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)President Joe Biden has instigated a crisis in Afghanistan that could leave American citizens, as well as many Afghans who helped the United States, trapped there — tarnishing the Biden administration and potentially recalling the Iranian hostage stand-off that dramatically weakened the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

On one side are the hundreds of American citizens who remain in Afghanistan. The International Rescue Committee estimated earlier this month that 300,000 Afghans have worked with the US in some capacity, while the New York Times reported on Wednesday that an estimated 250,000 Afghans who worked with the US remain in Afghanistan.

On the other side are the terrorists who launched the attack Thursday at Kabul airport, killing 13 US service members and at least 170 others.

The Biden administration’s self-imposed August 31 deadline has now become a “red line” for the Taliban. At the same time Kabul airport is clearly very unsafe.

That means that some Americans and a far larger number of Afghans will be left in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
After August 31, some of those Americans and Afghans who have helped the US may try to evacuate via land to neighboring countries such as Pakistan. They would have to travel through considerable swaths of Taliban-controlled territory, or through Afghan provinces such as Nangarhar on the Afghan-Pakistan border where ISIS has maintained a presence for many years.

After the airport attack Biden spoke at the White House and continued to defend his withdrawal decision with a remix of specious arguments that he has made before.

First, that al Qaeda is gone from Afghanistan, while a recent UN report says the group has a presence in some 15 of 34 Afghan provinces.

Second, that Afghanistan has never been a united country, despite the fact that Afghanistan united as a country in 1747, before the US existed.

Third, Biden again hung his withdrawal decision on the agreement that former President Donald Trump had struck with the Taliban, even though the group didn’t reject al-Qaeda, a key point in that agreement. Indeed, the UN issued a report in June that al-Qaeda and the Taliban “remain close, based on ideological alignment, relationships forged through common struggle and intermarriage.”

Note that Biden has had no compunction in jettisoning other Trump-legacy policies, such as re-entering the Paris Climate Agreement and rejoining the World Health Organization.

And Biden again claimed Thursday that if he hadn’t gone through with the withdrawal he would have had to authorize a large US war-fighting force, when in fact the relatively small number of 3,500 US soldiers and 7,000 allied, mostly NATO, troops in the country were helping to maintain a fragile status quo in which the elected Afghan government remained in power.

Biden also pointed to other purportedly pressing terror threats in other countries as a rationale for the withdrawal. This was just after ISIS-K carried out what the Pentagon described as a “complex” attack at Kabul airport that left many dozens dead.

On Friday a US drone strike killed an ISIS-K planner and another ISIS-K member, who, a US defense official told CNN, were believed to be “associated with potential future attacks at the airport.” Biden was briefed on Friday that another terrorist attack at the airport was “likely.”

Is there a greater terrorist threat today than Afghanistan? The UN says thousands of “foreign fighters” have poured into Afghanistan in the past months, energized by the Taliban’s victories, to join jihadist groups such as al Qaeda.
Just when you think that Biden’s unforced error of unilaterally and incompetently withdrawing from Afghanistan couldn’t get any worse, it does.

Thousands of American University of Afghanistan students and graduates were left behind, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 12:37 PM ET, Tue August 31, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)For the past 15 years, Leslie Schweitzer has helped support the American University of Afghanistan, from literally the ground up. As a board member of the university and chair of the Friends of American University of Afghanistan, she spent much of the past week with the president of the university, Ian Bickford, and other members of the board in Doha, Qatar, assisting with the effort to evacuate around 4,000 students, faculty, Afghan national staff and their families, as well as alumni — namely, all of those who had been involved with the American University of Afghanistan over the past decade and a half.

Now Schweitzer is watching as the university’s campus is taken over by the Taliban, and she fears for the many students left behind. And she has good reason to fear: In August 2016, Taliban gunmen assaulted the university killing at least a dozen students and staff.

During the past two weeks Schweitzer says both the Taliban and the US government in different ways hindered the evacuation effort. (Disclosure: In May, I took part in a planning meeting with Schweitzer and other leaders of the American University of Afghanistan in which they discussed what to do if the Taliban did take over).

The following discussion took place on Monday and has been edited for clarity and length.\

SCHWEITZER: Our evacuation efforts have not been as successful as we wanted, primarily because of several logistical and policy constraints, not to mention the volume of people we needed to evacuate in the middle of one of the largest airlifts in history. We did the best we could under the circumstances. We had a total of 4,000 people that we needed to get out of Afghanistan. We started by prioritizing our students and, obviously, our expats, which we were able to get out. But we’ve only been able to get about 50 students out and then we have another, 50 to 75 students who were able to escape on their own.

BERGEN: On Sunday, a large group of your students tried to leave from Kabul airport but couldn’t. What happened?

SCHWEITZER: We had a sophisticated method of communicating with the whole American University of Afghanistan community. We knew how to reach them via email or phone, and we were prepared at any moment if we received any positive indication that we could move them in large numbers.

On Sunday we contacted our students. There were 200-and-some-odd people on buses going to the Kabul airport. They were picked up at various locations around Kabul. They were not in a safe house. But we found out at about the same time that the American University of Afghanistan was not considered a priority by the US government, and we didn’t fit the qualifications, evidently, of being at risk.

I understand totally that American citizens, green card holders, and those who helped the US military should be prioritized. However, our university people are very much at risk, yet we failed to be in that category according to the US government. We have had to depend on private assistance and on the Qatar government over the past two weeks to get our students out. Now I don’t know what we do next.

BERGEN: Why were your students not considered to be at-risk?

SCHWEITZER: That’s the question I’ve been asking now because the US government has been our major funder over the last 15 years, along with private donations. We have instilled in these students all the basic tenets of an American education: critical thinking, transparency, freedom of speech, tolerance. Our students love America because they knew that the United States was giving them this opportunity to get a world-class education.

Our university has the highest percentage of Fulbright Scholars of any university in the world — 11% of our graduates. There are many recent Fulbright awardees who are now in hiding in Afghanistan and can’t get to their university destinations throughout the US, which is a tragedy.

What happens when you have an extraordinary world-class university in a country such as Afghanistan is that students and families are extremely proud. So, the students are well known in their neighborhoods and villages. Now they are in a serious risk category. I had one student in Kabul tell me that fully armed Taliban fighters banged on her door, saying they would kill her if they could find her. Many of our students have burned their IDs and destroyed any association with the university — the university that they were very, very proud of.

Even though the US government has funded 70% of the university, very little assistance has been received since the Taliban takeover. USAID has helped us put all 4,000 of our AUAF family on the P1 Visa list, but we have not been prioritized on the “high risk” list. The lack of any system to get people through the gates at the Kabul airport and the fact that the Taliban have been in control has been a major deterrent.

Our difficulty wasn’t finding planes; there were plenty of planes. Our difficulty was getting through the Taliban checkpoints. Gates at the airport would close intermittently, and there were masses of people surrounding the airport. We had to evaluate the situation always with balancing the safety of our people against the possibility of success; success defined always as getting everyone safely through the gates into the military section of the airport.

When it came to our Afghan students, the Taliban manning the gates at the airport would make the decisions as to who would be allowed in. Often our students would be forced to wait, with no explanation, knowing full well that their future depended upon the decision of the Taliban. Can you imagine being so close and then depending on a Taliban operative to make the decision — a decision of possibly life or death.

BERGEN: You have roughly 3,900 students, alumni and Afghan staff who are still stuck. What does the future look like for them? Some have P1 or P2 visas for the United States?
SCHWEITZER: They are listed as being qualified for those visas.

BERGEN: What does that mean in practice?

SCHWEITZER: That means that they need to be in another country where the visa process will start to take place, and they might be there for a year to two years until they’re granted these visas. Our goal is to get them to one of our focal points, such as Qatar, and other locations where we can keep our students together so that they can maintain a sense of community. They need each other. They have lost everything but their determination to get an education.

BERGEN: But how do they get out now the airport effectively closed?

SCHWEITZER: That’s a good question. Now that the US military are officially out of the country, our hope is that humanitarian efforts will increase. It is extremely hard to tell our university family to just sit tight and wait. Their lives are at risk, as are their families. This is a disaster.

BERGEN: Have the Taliban taken over your campus?

SCHWEITZER: Yes. We have pictures of the Taliban in front of the faculty housing where they had spray-painted messages that we are the enemy — that we were the infidels. We had to burn hard drives and anything that would divulge any information about our students.

BERGEN: How are you feeling about it?
SCHWEITZER: There have been several dark moments through the past two weeks. To see this glorious campus, truly one that looked like any small college campus in the US — full of green space, a soccer field, a basketball court (built for the girls’ basketball team) –now occupied by the Taliban, that was the moment I truly lost my optimism. But all I had to do was think of the courage of our young men and women and my determination once again took over.

People often don’t talk about what America has accomplished in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. Education is at the top of the list. We have an entire generation of young people who have never lived under the Taliban. Our university has empowered both men and women. We’ve given them voices. Now it could be their death because of it. It is imperative that we stand by this incredible investment. This investment in dollars is relatively insignificant — but the investment in empowering Afghan young women and men is priceless.

I visited in Doha a few days ago with seven female students who we were able to evacuate with the help of the Qatar Foundation. It’s amazing, their courage — their courage from Day 1 just to come to the American University of Afghanistan, a co-ed institution with an American-style education. These seven are typical of all students who have left Afghanistan, left their families with little else than a backpack a passport, and some dust from the soil of Afghanistan. But their families said, “You need to pursue your education. It’s not safe for you here, and we support you leaving. Come back and save us.”

Each of these students was anxious to get back to their studies, and they found great camaraderie in being together. It really was just an amazing experience to be with them and see their courage. They left everything behind. And Americans must not leave the others behind.

The woman who was the first to warn about Osama bin Laden, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. This is adapted from his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” published by Simon & Schuster on August 3. The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)Just one week out of the University of Virginia, with a degree in economics and foreign policy, Gina Bennett started working at the State Department as a clerk-typist in June 1988. After a couple of months, Bennett’s boss told her, “Gina, you don’t belong here. I’m going to promote you so you can get a job as an intelligence analyst.”
Today, 33 years later, as the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Bennett is a member of the CIA’s Senior Analytic Service working as senior counterterrorism adviser at the National Counterterrorism Center. No one in the US government has tracked al Qaeda and all its many branches and offshoots for as long and with as much distinction as Bennett has.

This didn’t seem predictable when Bennett started at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, one of the smallest US intelligence agencies.

Bennett’s first job was as a “terrorism watch officer,” working eight-hour shifts during which she monitored intelligence and news media to analyze terrorism trends and to respond to attacks when they occurred.

On December 21, 1988, a bomb blew up on Pan Am 103 as it flew over Scotland. The jet crashed, killing a total of 270 people on the plane and on the ground, 35 of whom were students at Syracuse University. Bennett worked with Consular Affairs helping the bereaved families and preparing the State Department’s daily updates about the bombing.

Bennett recalled, “I was really, really changed by Pan Am 103 because so many of the passengers were students who were just a bit younger than me.” Stopping the next terrorist attack became a mission for Bennett. “It’s like being a cop who is chasing a serial killer on a cold case. You just can’t give it up.”
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The Berlin Wall fell at the end of 1989 and then the Soviet Union collapsed, but Bennett sensed that there was a menacing legacy of the Cold War — the “Afghan Arabs,” who were Arab veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad during the 1980s in Afghanistan. Bennett realized that the Afghan Arabs were returning to their home countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia and she noticed that some were joining armed groups.

Bennett was particularly struck by an attack in November 1991 by a group of militants on Algerian border guards, six of whom were slaughtered like animals, hacked to death with knives and swords. The Algerian terrorists were dressed in Afghan garb and their leader was named Tayeb el Afghani, “Tayeb the Afghan.”

Bennett investigated further and found that thousands of Afghan Arabs had left their home countries to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s, relying on a support network that had funneled men, money and supplies to the Afghan War. By the early 1990s, that network was sending veterans of the Afghan conflict to join militant Islamist groups around the world.

Bennett started writing classified papers about what she was learning. She began hearing about an “Abu Abdullah” guy who was financing some of these Afghan Arabs. Bennett had no idea that she would spend much of the rest of her career focused on this mysterious Abu Abdullah, the nom de guerre of Osama bin Laden.

Bennett researched the bombings of two hotels in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992. They were housing US soldiers on their way to Somalia to participate in a humanitarian mission to feed starving Somalis. Yemeni officials said the attack was financed by an “Osama bin Laden,” who was then living in Sudan.

As Bennett was investigating bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs, she became pregnant with her first child, delivering her son on February 23, 1993. Three days later, a team assembled by one of the Afghan Arabs, Ramzi Yousef, drove a van into the basement of the World Trade Center and detonated a bomb, killing six people. As investigators began looking into Yousef’s group, they found that several of them had traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan to aid in the war against the communists.

Bennett was holding her new baby boy in the hospital when she received a frantic call about the Trade Center bombing from her boss who was almost shouting, “Your people did this! Your people did this!” Her boss was referring to the Afghan Arabs that Bennett had been tracking for the past couple of years.

At first, Bennett had no idea what her boss was talking about as she was in a great deal of pain from her C-section three days earlier and her painkillers had worn off.

She quickly realized that the Afghan Arabs had spread their holy war, this time to New York City. Sitting on Bennett’s desk at the State Department was a draft of a paper that she had been writing that described a movement of mujahideen, holy warriors, from more than 50 countries who had gained battlefield experience in Afghanistan and were now joining militant organizations in countries such as Algeria, Bosnia, Egypt, Tajikistan, the Philippines and Yemen, and even in unexpected locations like Burma.

The first warning about bin Laden

When Bennett returned from maternity leave to the State Department, she resumed drafting her paper, which she circulated on August 21, 1993.

The classified report, “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,” identified “Usama bin Ladin” as a donor who was supporting Islamic militants in “places as diverse as Yemen and the United States.” Bin Laden’s fortune had derived from his family’s construction company, which was one of the largest in the Middle East. According to Bennett’s 1993 analysis, bin Laden’s funding had also enabled hundreds of Afghan Arabs to resettle in Sudan and Yemen.

Bennett’s report was the first time that the US government had produced a warning about the dangers of a global jihadist movement led by the mysterious multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden. And the warning was not issued by the CIA or the FBI, but by a junior intelligence analyst at the State Department.

A week later, Bennett published another classified analysis titled, “Saudi Patron to Islamic Extremists,” in which she observed that bin Laden had founded a group called “al-Qa’ida in the 1980s.” This was the first time that anyone in the U.S. government had identified al Qaeda as a threat, the existence of which was then a well-kept secret.
Bennett had spent time liaising with her intelligence counterparts in countries such as Egypt and Yemen to learn as much as she could about bin Laden and his organization.

Bennett named bin Laden as the financier of the bombings of the two hotels in Yemen. She also described how bin Laden had gathered a group of Afghan war veterans in his base in Sudan who were training to fight in new holy wars and he was “financing jihads” around the world from Pakistan to Thailand.

Bennett wanted policymakers and the intelligence community to pay attention to this phenomenon, but she knew it would be difficult.

Bennett knew that what she was describing wasn’t considered “normal” in the world of counterterrorism because this was a case of militants from different countries in a loose alliance operating without the support of any state. Bennett wanted policymakers and the intelligence community to pay attention to this phenomenon, but she knew it would be difficult.

In classified papers, Bennett described bin Laden as a “financier,” as that was the best evidence about him that was then available, but privately she saw him as something more. Bennett was an observant Catholic who understood the power of religious beliefs in someone’s life.

She believed that bin Laden was a visionary who believed God was on his side. He had a model for political change that was based on his experience in Afghanistan where men from dozens of countries had put their different interpretations of Islam aside and had fought in Allah’s name. They had stayed focused on that fight and look at what they had helped achieve: The Soviet Union fell, two years after the Soviet’s disastrous war in Afghanistan had ended in 1989.

Bennett believed that bin Laden mythologized this whole movement, not just his own role in it, and he thought it was a repeatable model, not only in Afghanistan, but around the world.

Under pressure from the Saudi and US governments in mid-May 1996, bin Laden was pushed out of Sudan and relocated to Afghanistan. Two months later, Bennett published another prescient top secret analysis titled, “Usama bin Ladin: Who’s Chasing Whom?” Bennett predicted that bin Laden “would feel comfortable returning to Afghanistan, where he got his start as a patron and mujahid during the war with the former Soviet Union.”

Bennett went on to forecast that bin Laden’s “prolonged stay in Afghanistan where hundreds of Arab mujahidin receive terrorist training and extremist leaders often congregate — could prove more dangerous to US interests in the long run than during his three-year liaison with Khartoum [the capital of Sudan].”

Bennett believed that bin Laden would be a bigger threat now that he was reunited with the birthplace of his own mythology: the battlefields of Afghanistan where he had personally fought the Soviets in the late 1980s.

He had a network of contacts in Pakistan and Afghanistan that he could easily utilize. And he was angry about being forced out of Sudan where he had invested many millions of dollars, an expulsion that he blamed on the Americans.
9/11

During the spring and summer of 2001, the American intelligence community received a series of credible intelligence reports about bin Laden’s plans for attacks on American targets.

On April 20, a report titled “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations” was circulated by the CIA, followed by another report on May 3, “Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack.” And on August 3, the CIA issued a warning titled, “Threat of Impending al-Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely.”

According to Bennett, who was by now working at the CIA and contributing to the warnings about bin Laden’s plans, the fact that some of al Qaeda’s plots had previously failed contributed to a sense among senior American national security officials that the CIA was overplaying the threat. Bennett asked herself, “Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we’re wrong?” It was wearing on Bennett and her colleagues. It was a hard summer.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the oppressive heat of the Washington summer was finally beginning to dissipate; the sky was a cloudless, azure blue and the air crystalline. Gina Bennett and her friend Cindy Storer, both of whom had been on the bin Laden “account” for as long as anyone at the CIA, were carpooling to the agency’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, which is tucked away behind a screen of trees in a leafy neighborhood of well-appointed mansions.

The whole ride Bennett and Storer were discussing the assassination two days earlier of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan. They debated whether this was a gift from bin Laden to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, and they kept probing the question: Why go to the trouble of assassinating Massoud, if not for some larger reason?

Bennett, who was three months pregnant with her fourth child and was occasionally suffering morning sickness, was at her desk at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, when she heard a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. She and her colleagues turned on a television and watched the coverage. They saw the second plane fly into the other tower at 9:03 a.m. The attacks from bin Laden they had warned about were upon them.

CIA managers told everyone to evacuate the agency’s headquarters building, but those in the Counterterrorist Center were told they had to remain at their desks; after all, they knew more about al Qaeda than anyone else in the government.

The Counterterrorist Center team split up, with some officials trying to find the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes. Bennett and her team members tried to work out what the next target of the terrorists could be. They were keenly aware that militants linked to al Qaeda had developed a plan six years earlier to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. And there was a hijacked passenger jet hurtling toward Washington, D.C. That plane would crash into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

Within weeks of 9/11, Bennett was pulled from her job to dig into Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s purported involvement in 9/11. Senior Bush administration officials were convinced that Saddam was involved. However, when Bennett investigated whether there were any substantive links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, she concluded that Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda were “mutually hostile,” an analysis she communicated to Bush administration officials.

Yet, President George W. Bush was determined to go to war and the following month US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke at the UN Security Council, claiming that Saddam concealed a weapons of mass destruction program and was in league with al Qaeda.

The Iraq War began in March 2003. Seven months later, on November 11, 2003, Bennett and several other intelligence officials briefed President Bush and his war cabinet at a meeting in the White House Situation Room, telling them, “Iraq came along at exactly the right time for al Qaeda,” as it had allowed the group to stage a comeback. Religious extremists from around the Muslim world were now pouring into Iraq.
The Iraq War had saved al Qaeda.

The death of bin Laden

Eight years after the beginning of the Iraq War, bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. A CIA analyst in her mid-20s sent Bennett a message saying, “Hey, it was a really bad day for al Qaeda?”
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Bennett replied, “Well, yeah. It’s a pretty bad day, but it’s definitely not their worst.”
Bennett’s colleague asked, “What are you talking about? Bin Laden is dead.”

Bennet asked her younger colleague about a once infamous terrorist group that had terrorized Germany during the 1970s: “Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang?”

The colleague said, “No.”

Bennett replied, “Well, someday when one officer in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center says to another officer, ‘Have you ever heard of Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda?’ and they say ‘No’: That’s the worst day.”

General Petraeus: On the Taliban Takeover, CNN.com

General Petraeus: The ‘disheartening and sad’ endgame

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 9:18 AM ET, Wed August 25, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)General David Petraeus called the Taliban takeover “hugely disheartening and sad” and said that the stage was set for the chaos now unfolding in Afghanistan by the US peace negotiations with the Taliban by the Trump administration in 2018 that excluded the elected Afghan government. Those talks, combined with the total withdrawal of US troops, fatally undermined both the Afghan government and its military.

Petraeus was deeply immersed in the war in Afghanistan, first as the commander of Central Command (CENTCOM) that oversaw the war in Afghanistan until 2010; then as the ground commander leading the war in Afghanistan, and subsequently as the Director of the CIA in 2011, overseeing all of the agency’s operation and intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan until 2012.

The general made his comments in an email exchange with Peter Bergen about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

BERGEN: Did the peace negotiations with the Taliban over the past three years set the stage for what happened?

PETRAEUS: Yes, at least in part. First, the negotiations announced to the Afghan people and the Taliban that the US really did intend to leave (which also made the job of our negotiators even more difficult than it already was, as we were going to give them what they most wanted, regardless of what they committed to us). Second, we undermined the elected Afghan government, however flawed it may have been, by not insisting on a seat for it at the negotiations we were conducting about the country they actually governed. Third, as part of the eventual agreement, we forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters, many of whom quickly returned to the fight as reinforcements for the Taliban. Fourth, the commitment gave President Biden an additional justification/excuse to do what he wanted to do — leave.

BERGEN: Did Biden need to be bound by the Trump agreement with the Taliban?

PETRAEUS: No, and the Administration clearly has not felt itself bound by many of the other Trump Administration actions with which it has disagreed. In fact, the Biden administration has reversed the Trump withdrawals from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord, among many other policy decisions and approaches with which it disagreed. Beyond that, the Administration has also sought to sustain commitments in most other locations where there are Islamist extremists; in fact, President Biden and other members of his Administration know from the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq in late 2011 that one must keep pressure on extremist groups or they will reconstitute and cause new problems as was the case with ISIS in Iraq after our departure, which subsequently caused enormous problems in Iraq and Syria and, to a degree, Europe.

BERGEN: Did the Afghan army fight?

PETRAEUS: Yes, at the outset; however, once it was clear to commanders on the ground that the Afghan Air Force could no longer respond to simultaneous attacks all around the vast country and provide reinforcements, resupply, air medevac, and close air support, local military and political leaders decided it was best to cut a deal rather than fight to the finish. This should not have been a surprise. Afghans have demonstrated over many centuries that they will do what is necessary to survive, and they are very skilled at recognizing which way the wind is blowing and when it is shifting.

BERGEN: What could have been done differently than a unilateral pullout? What US/NATO presence was militarily sustainable? Politically sustainable in the US?

PETRAEUS: Keeping in mind that no US soldier has been killed in combat in Afghanistan in some 18 months, it seemed to me that maintaining approximately 3,500 American men and women in uniform, with a lot of drones, close air support capability, and intelligence fusion assets, was more than sustainable — just as we have chosen to do in recent months in Iraq, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa, and other locations around the world. That would have been particularly true if our senior leaders had sought to explain why such a commitment was advisable.

BERGEN: The contractors were also pulled out: What effect did that have?

PETRAEUS: The contractors who were withdrawn constituted a critical, irreplaceable capability for maintaining the sophisticated US-provided helicopters and fixed wing aircraft of the Afghan Air Force. When the 18,000 or so contractors pulled out, along with the withdrawal of US forces, the readiness of the Afghan Air Force began to erode, especially as the operational tempo was exceedingly high and unsustainable, with many aircraft returning from missions with battle damage. Yet the Afghan Air Force was the critical element in ensuring that Afghan soldiers on the ground knew that someone had their backs in a tough fight. Without the Afghan Air Force doing what only they could do in the wake of the withdrawal of US air assets, Afghan soldiers knew that no one was coming to their rescue.

BERGEN: Was the Taliban takeover predictable?

PETRAEUS: Yes, once we pulled out our 2500-3500 troops, which necessitated the other NATO countries pulling out 7,000 troops and also the withdrawal of many thousands of contractors, Afghan soldiers realized early on that no one was going to help them.

BERGEN: Some have suggested this was an intelligence failure: Was it?

PETRAEUS: It is impossible to say without knowing what the intel community assessments were that were provided to the national security team along the way. Beyond that, as you noted on CNN last week, there is a longstanding practice of administrations in Washington recasting a failed policy as an intelligence failure. I tend to think that the latter was not the case here.

BERGEN: Ahmad Shah Massoud and Amrullah Saleh are leading the resistance to the Taliban. Any thoughts on how that might go?

PETRAEUS: They are both committed, charismatic, and determined leaders, and Amrullah Saleh is very experienced as well (he was my Afghan counterpart when I was Director of the CIA); they have attracted a number of forces who oppose the Taliban and refused to be part of the deals that were cut at local levels. But the major positive feature of the Panjshir Valley where they are leading the resistance — its inaccessibility and natural defensive terrain — can also be a significant shortcoming, given its lack of connectivity with the outside world, from which it needs to get many goods, commodities, and services, not the least of which is refined fuel products. Without a corridor to the border or some other arrangement to the north, they will be quite vulnerable to just being isolated, especially as the Taliban quite impressively seized many of the provinces in the northeastern part of Afghanistan near the beginning of the campaign, and that makes it difficult for those in the Panjshir to establish a corridor for resupply.

BERGEN: Are the Taliban reformed?

PETRAEUS: No one truly knows. And only time will tell. But we should recognize that the US potentially has considerable influence, given the size of the fiscal hole in which the Taliban will soon find themselves. The Taliban has to be short over $5 billion for their annual budget, and with their reserves around the world and their IMF special drawing rights frozen, they are going to struggle to fund their government, maintain basic services, pay their fighters and government salaries, and import products desperately needed in Afghanistan. It is not inconceivable that the Taliban may find the lights going out in Kabul.

BERGEN: What does this mean for al Qaeda and other jihadist groups? Threats to the US homeland? Or American targets overseas?

PETRAEUS: We have to assume that the Taliban victory will make it easier for al Qaeda and the Islamic State and other extremist groups to establish sanctuaries on Afghan soil — though I know that our intelligence agencies and military forces will do all that is humanly possible to identify, disrupt, degrade, and destroy any such sanctuaries (including virtual sanctuaries in cyberspace, too) well before they can establish a capability that could threaten our homeland or the homelands of our NATO allies.

BERGEN: How does this Taliban victory make you feel?

PETRAEUS: Hearing of the Taliban takeover was hugely disheartening and sad. That was especially so for those of us who worked with Afghans and who had such high hopes. I am sure that also has to be the case for families in the US and coalition countries who had a son or daughter or spouse in uniform give the “last full measure of devotion” serving in Afghanistan. Few individuals were as privileged as I was to observe — and lead — our men and women in uniform in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the greater Middle East. In my experience, with rare exceptions, those who volunteered to serve in the military in the wake of the 9/11 attacks performed with very enormous professionalism, determination, innovativeness, and courage. They earned recognition as America’s New Greatest Generation, and we should all be grateful to them for answering our Nation’s call at a time of war, regardless of views about the policies that we executed. Moreover, all who served there should take considerable pride in having provided Afghanistan and the Afghan people some 20 years of relative freedom and opportunity compared to the situation under the Taliban before we ousted that regime in late 2001.

The big hole in Biden’s Afghan speech, CNN.com

Updated 6:11 AM ET, Tue August 17, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)President Joe Biden claimed in his speech to the nation on Monday that he was bound by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. However, there are multiple flaws with this argument.

First, the Taliban never observed the terms of that agreement, including that they would break ties with al-Qaeda. According to a UN report released earlier this year, they didn’t.

Second, the agreement said that the Taliban would enter genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government. That didn’t happen either.
Third, the US-Taliban agreement was negotiated without any input from the Afghan government — which, after all, was the elected government of the country. Conveniently for the Taliban, they don’t believe in elections.

So, the Biden administration felt bound to an agreement made by the previous administration with an insurgent group that had excluded the actual government of Afghanistan.
But not long prior, the Trump administration jettisoned the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, which was negotiated by the Obama administration with a sovereign state and with some of the United States’ closest allies, the British, French, and Germans. That agreement was actually being adhered to by the Iranians, according to the American intelligence community.

That didn’t stop Trump from abandoning the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2018, which he often described as a terrible deal, even though it was actually working.
Now, the Biden administration is saying it had to adhere to Trump’s genuinely terrible deal with the Taliban, even though it wasn’t working at all.

What the administration has done in Afghanistan doesn’t make much sense. Biden could have easily said the Taliban had reneged on their agreement with the United States so he could continue to keep a relatively small US military force in Afghanistan to advise and assist the Afghan Army and to support the Afghan Air Force to thwart Taliban advances.

But Biden also believes in the merits of leaving Afghanistan regardless of Trump’s agreement with the Taliban. He argues that the US can’t be mired in endless wars, even though the American presence in Afghanistan had shrunk to only 2,500 troops — particularly few for a force of 1.3 million active-duty US service personnel. That small force helped to sustain the Afghan military physically and psychologically, not least with close air support

Now, the Biden administration unilaterally has pulled the plug on the US troop presence in Afghanistan, which cratered morale among the Afghan military and population. It also precipitated thousands of Western-allied soldiers to head for the exits, as well as the many thousands of contractors in Afghanistan that were, among other things, keeping the Afghan Air Force aloft.

And now the white flags of the Taliban flutter all over Afghanistan. It did not need to be this way.

Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the US: ‘It was avoidable’, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 11:14 AM ET, Mon August 16, 2021

Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Roya Rahmani is the first woman to serve as Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, a position she held from 2018 until last month. Bergen spoke to her over the weekend about the fall of much of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Rahmani who is in the United States, says she worries that with the Taliban taking over, the civil wars that have wracked Afghanistan will continue. She is also concerned that the rights of Afghan women will disappear under their rule.

Rahmani was born in Kabul in 1978, a year before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, thrusting the country into a cycle of wars that has continued for more than four decades. Her family fled to neighboring Pakistan where she grew up as a refugee. Rahmani obtained a bachelor’s degree in software engineering at McGill University in Canada, and later a master’s in public administration from Columbia University. Before taking up her post as Afghan ambassador in Washington, DC, Rahmani was Afghanistan’s ambassador to Indonesia.
Bergen’s discussion with Rahmani was edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: How do you feel right now?

RAHMANI: Distressed, worried. I am extremely concerned about what is to come, and I’m extremely worried for my family and my people back at home.

BERGEN: Do you think this was all avoidable, the situation we’re in today?

RAHMANI: Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely! Absolutely, it was avoidable. I don’t think at this point it matters who we should point our fingers to and who we should blame. It’s unfortunate that we are here, but we are here.
This is pointing to an immense failure of Afghan democracy. It points to the failure of diplomacy. It points to the failure of the international aid and assistance.

I think it puts into question all the sacrifices being made by Americans, by our allies, and multiplied by all the Afghans with so much blood, tears, and sweat that we all put into the past 20 years.

BERGEN: Were you surprised by how quickly the Taliban took over much of the country?

RAHMANI: No. I think many people in international community were taken by surprise, but I was aware of the deterioration of morale among our security forces, of the divisiveness of the politics back in Afghanistan. In many places, the Afghan security forces were not supported by Kabul.

BERGEN: Does this remind you of the summer of Iraq in 2014 when ISIS took over and the Iraqi Army didn’t fight?

RAHMANI: Yes, there are certain similarities. Number one, it was the same thing about how the Iraqi leadership ignored the reality of Iraq. They were not an inclusive government. And there was a lack of maturity about the way they conduced politics and military strategy.

BERGEN: There’s a message coming from the White House that President Joe Biden was right, that recent events demonstrate that the Afghan government and the Afghan Army are weak, and the fact that it’s all collapsed so quickly proves that he was correct.

RAHMANI: I do understand President Biden’s position because when he says that if he did this in six months or one year instead of now, there wouldn’t be much of a difference, unfortunately, I agree with that. It wouldn’t be much different. Why? Because, unfortunately, the international community did not broker and enforce a settlement leading to the establishment of a new inclusive government in time, which could have been held together with the help of a peace-keeping mission.

BERGEN: But was it necessary to go to zero US troops in Afghanistan? Because, also, there’s 7,000 other NATO troops that have also left and 16,000 contractors. Was that necessary?

RAHMANI: Of course, that expedited the process of the Taliban takeover at the speed of light. There is no question about that.

BERGEN: You’re the first Ambassador from Afghanistan to the United States who is a woman. Do you think a Taliban-controlled government will be sending women ambassadors in the future?

RAHMANI: No. Based on what I know of them and their actions on the ground, I am afraid that the very basic rights of women are in line to be sacrificed.

BERGEN: Which rights are in danger?

RAHMANI: Access to education, employment, even physical presence of women in the public sphere is not tolerated. I heard that one of the Taliban representatives in Herat was questioned about women working in the administration and in the judiciary, and he said “Oh, that would be a very difficult thing. Women could work only in education and the health care sector.”

So, this is the mentality. What the Taliban are going to offer to women is way below equal citizenship. There’s little reason to think anyone would have citizenship rights under the Taliban, based on previous experience. But even so, women will be treated as a “lower class,” deemed fit only for specific roles and nothing else.

A kinder, gentler Taliban? CNN.com

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)The fall of Kabul to the Taliban is being compared, ad nauseam, to the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese in 1975. Both retreats certainly share some common features — the botched, chaotic evacuation, the abandonment of many US allies on the ground, and the humiliation of the American superpower. But a closer analogue to what is likely to happen in Afghanistan during the coming weeks is to look at what the Taliban did the last time they swept into power in Kabul in September 1996.

Then, the Taliban imposed their “Islamic Emirate” on the population. While this was not the “caliphate” that was declared by ISIS in Iraq almost two decades later, it was similar enough, not least because the leader of the Taliban, anointed himself “the Commander of the Faithful,” which immodestly claimed not only the leadership of the Taliban, but of all Muslims everywhere.

The Taliban imposed their ultra-purist vision of Islam on much of the country. Women had to wear the burqa and stay at home unless accompanied by a male relative.

Music, television and even kite flying were banned. There was no independent Afghan media; only Radio Shariat that blared Taliban propaganda.

In an unsettling echo of how the Nazis treated the Jews, the Taliban forced the country’s miniscule Hindu population to wear distinctive clothing.

These edicts were enforced by the religious police of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

I witnessed black-turbaned vigilantes roaming Kabul’s streets like wraiths dispensing their ferocious brand of “Islamic” justice. Curfew started at 9 p.m., and by 8 p.m. the streets were deserted except for the young Taliban soldiers who stood at every traffic circle, carefully checking passing vehicles. Some of the Talibs wore kohl, a black eyeliner, which was particularly noteworthy since women were banned from using cosmetics.

In Kabul, one of the few diversions available were the well-attended public executions in the former soccer stadium. The victims, including women, were stoned to death or shot in the head.
Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban official, noted in his memoir that,

In interviews I conducted with Taliban leaders before 9/11, they defended keeping women at home and shrouded in the burqa by saying these were simply the cultural norms of Afghan culture. But what the Taliban didn’t acknowledge was that these were really the social norms of the Pashtun ethnic group, which made up pretty much the entire leadership of their movement.

For the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan, such as Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, and the inhabitants of the larger cities, particularly Kabul, Taliban policies were imports from another culture.

The Taliban called it the rule of sharia, Islamic law. In their view, once sharia ruled, Afghans would become virtuous and thus the perfect society would be created. But the Taliban had no real policy to govern. They presided over the total collapse of what remained of the Afghan economy following two decades of war. A doctor I spoke to in Kabul in 1999 said he earned only six dollars a month.

When they were in power before 9/11, the Taliban were pariahs on the world stage. Only three countries recognized the movement of religious warriors, because of their treatment of women, dismal human rights record and their provision of safe haven to al Qaeda.

When Osama bin Laden was forced out of his refuge in Sudan in 1996, he flew to what he hoped to be a new haven, Afghanistan. Once he was in Afghanistan, a Taliban cabinet minister told bin Laden, “We serve the ground upon which you walk.” Another senior Taliban minister told al Qaeda’s leader, “God will never be ashamed of you because you are the champion of the oppressed and you have waged holy war alongside the downtrodden.”

But even the Taliban’s harshest critics before 9/11 could not deny their one achievement: They restored order to much of the country. During the early 1990s, Afghanistan had become a patchwork of fiefdoms held by competing warlords enmeshing Afghans in a brutal civil war. The Taliban defeated most of those warlords and brought law and order at the cost of also imposing a draconian theocracy.

A “new” Taliban?

The Taliban are claiming today that they have changed during the past two decades; that they are a kinder, gentler Taliban.

On Tuesday Taliban officials gave their first press conference since their victory. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid asserted, “The Islamic Emirate is committed to the rights of women within the framework of Sharia.”
“Within the framework of sharia” is the important modifier in this assertion, since the Taliban’s understanding of sharia means that women cannot work outside their homes, except perhaps in some very limited roles, such as working as doctors who treat only female patients.

Also, Taliban officials have sometimes asserted that they favor education for females, yet in areas of Afghanistan that they have seized control of within the past couple of years, this dispensation only extends to girls under the age of 12.

At Tuesday’s press conference, the Taliban spokesman declared a general “amnesty” for enemies of the Taliban. The crowds of thousands of Afghans that are besieging the Kabul airport to flee their country suggest that there is a high degree of skepticism about these claims of amnesty. Indeed, in May the Taliban beheaded Sohail Pardis who was an interpreter for the US military.

On Tuesday a photographer for the Los Angeles Times documented brutal beatings that the Taliban inflicted on women and children outside Kabul airport.

Meanwhile, women have almost completely disappeared from the streets of Kabul, according to CNN’s Clarissa Ward.
Further grounds for skepticism about a reformed Taliban came in a UN report issued in June that described relations between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “closely aligned.”

In the years before 9/11, many millions of Afghans lived under the yoke of the Taliban’s incompetent, brutal rule. They have good reason today to be skeptical of the “kinder, gentler” Taliban.
Already the armed resistance to the Taliban is forming, led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of the legendary Afghan military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by bin Laden’s men just two days before the 9/11 attacks.
Joining that resistance is Amrullah Saleh, who on Tuesday said he is the leader of Afghans; a legitimate claim since he was elected to the post of vice president, while former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.

Former CIA Counterterrorism Chief, US set itself up for failure in Afghanistan, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is being widely characterized as a fiasco. One of the oldest tricks in the Washington, DC, playbook is to dress up a policy debacle as an intelligence failure, and we are hearing plenty of that from senior officials in the Biden administration. On this and other questions, it’s worth hearing the views of Douglas London, who oversaw operations and intelligence in Afghanistan as the CIA’s chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia from 2016 to 2018. London, who served in the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa during his 34-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, retired in 2019.

London says the Afghan debacle wasn’t strictly an intelligence failure, but a policy failure that started with the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 and the subsequent closing of every US base in the country except in Kabul. Those base closures, which began in earnest in May and ended at the beginning of July, effectively shut down the US’ ability to collect intelligence on the ground during a rapidly changing situation.

London says the collapse of the Afghan government could have been prevented if a relatively small US military contingent remained in place in Afghanistan. Now, the Taliban are likely to hunt down those suspected of collaborating with the US and its NATO allies, despite the official line from Taliban officials that they are granting “amnesty.” And al Qaeda is likely to grow stronger, especially after the Taliban released a number of jailed terrorists from a prison outside Kabul.

London is publishing a memoir of his time at the CIA next month, “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.” My discussion with London has been edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs and the top military adviser to President Joe Biden, strongly implied at a press conference on Wednesday that there was an intelligence failure that didn’t predict how quickly the Taliban would take over Afghanistan. Milley said: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

LONDON: Gen. Milley receives pretty much the same intelligence as the President. I think it’s a bit disingenuous for the general to say, “Well, I never was told Afghanistan was going to collapse in 11 days.” I’m sure he was right in a very narrow sense. But this wasn’t 11 days in the making.

President Biden clearly said he was going to keep to the agreement that former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban in February 2020, which established a May 2021 deadline for withdrawal. Biden did change the timeline but he said that there would a total withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack, which the administration later amended to August 31.

The first major US base closings began back in May. The base in Kandahar, which was really the wedge against the Taliban in the south and the southwest, was, at its height, home to more than 26,000 US and international troops. By mid-May, however, the last US troops and whatever remaining intelligence presence had left and the airfield was turned over to the Afghan military.

At the same time the US had any number of smaller intelligence platforms in places that I can’t mention, which are known as “lily pads” — temporary staging areas that we or our partners control that give us the ability to pivot throughout the country — those places closed down as well. By the time the last troops left Bagram Air Base in early July, which was well over 11 days ago, every single base with a US military or an intelligence presence was gone. We were down only to Kabul.

So, it was a lot more than 11 days for the country to dissolve, and I certainly understand where the general is coming from, but unfortunately, it’s a bit of the blame game. It is really convenient to blame the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, because it’s not like the agency is going to run out and show you their classified assessments saying, “But no, here’s what we shared with the general on such and such date.”

BERGEN: In fact, CNN’s Barbara Starr, was reporting on August 12 that there was a window of 30 to 90 days that the intelligence community was positing for the possible fall of Kabul. The difference between 30 days and 11 days is not exactly huge.

When I saw that Ghazni had fallen on August 12, I said on CNN that those intelligence assessments needed to be revised as the fall of Kabul could happen in just days because Ghazni, of course, controls the crucial Kabul to Kandahar highway. To me, it seemed like the game was up.

LONDON: That’s a fair point. I left the service in 2019, but I guarantee you, as events were unfolding, there were daily updates and changes to those assessments. That would be the natural course of events. What intelligence assessments do is they try to avoid crystal-balling. They try to avoid saying, well, “If A happens, in so many days and hours, this will happen.” They give more of a range and a likelihood of how quickly things could collapse, which is why I know even back in my day, we talked about a potential dissolution of the Afghan government and how it could fall in a matter of days if all the circumstances that we faced over the last two weeks occurred.

BERGEN: Of course, even the Taliban themselves probably had no idea that they were going to have this success so quickly.

LONDON: That’s very true. But I think we were particularly vulnerable due to the fact that pretty much from May on, our intelligence collection capability was cut to almost nil in terms of our ability to collect against the broader Taliban presence throughout the country. So we were really flying blind.

BERGEN: If you constantly say publicly, “We’re leaving. We’ve leaving. We’re leaving,” and then you start closing all the bases — the Taliban are not dumb. And the forces opposing the Taliban also then made the calculation; better to live another day.

LONDON: There was no depth of loyalty to President Ashraf Ghani or any government in Kabul, and as the various Afghan warlords saw what was happening, clearly, they weren’t thinking, “Well, we’re going to stand and fight for Ghani until the last man.”

BERGEN: How would you assess Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son, Ahmad Massoud, and Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh? They’re regrouping in the Panjshir valley in the north of Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. As you know, the older Massoud was a legendary commander who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban and was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before 9/11. Will this be another episode in the civil war that has gone on in various forms for more than four decades in Afghanistan? How intense will it be?

LONDON: Ahmad is not his dad. His dad was just an amazing man, and what the older Massoud’s men had in the Panjshir when they were fighting the Taliban before 9/11 was a bigger force than what they have now and a lot more capable. And they had pretty dependable lines of communications across the borders of Afghanistan to neighboring countries such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

None of those things really exist now, But Amrullah Saleh is a smart and capable guy who can mentor the younger Ahmad Massoud.

BERGEN: What about al Qaeda?

LONDON: When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked that question in June, he referred to an assessment that said a US pullout could allow al Qaeda to reconstitute within two years. In light of the Taliban takeover, Austin said that assessment needed to be updated. The earlier assessment was based on several conditions which no longer apply; it presumed an existing government in Kabul would be friendly to us, and that despite an ongoing war between the Taliban and a government in Kabul, there would still be a functioning partner for us on the ground with an ability to project force and collect intelligence.

Now with all bets off — having the Taliban in control — it’s a lot scarier. Clearly, the detainees who were released by the Taliban at Bagram Air Base included a number of al Qaeda personalities, with whom I am very familiar. Many of them were caught in joint military or CIA-supported operations and immediately transferred to Afghan custody upon which they were charged, convicted, and put away. Those folks are force multipliers for the Taliban, and they are likely to regroup what is left of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

BERGEN: Releasing prisoners was very much what al Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS did in Iraq, right?

LONDON: Oh, absolutely, and they had a lot of talent in those prisons. Just from what I’ve seen in the press, some of the Taliban commanders themselves are among the thousands that were released as part of the February 2020 agreement the Trump administration negotiated. I don’t think anybody in the West, at least in the CIA, had any doubt or question those people would not be back into action, as will the al Qaeda folks.

BERGEN: Could this have been done differently?

LONDON: Well, you got to define the “this” for me.

BERGEN: There are people who say, “This was badly executed,” and then there are others, myself included, who think that there was no real reason to get out at all. So everybody can agree that the execution has been terrible, but was there a better policy prescription that could have been followed by either the Trump administration or the Biden administration or both?

LONDON: I believe that the United States could have maintained a relatively small military and intelligence presence. When I say small, I would have preferred something in the 5,000 range as far as military troops. When Trump came into office, there were around 9,000 US armed forces in Afghanistan. So a force between 5,000 and 9,000, would have ideally kept the status quo because it would have instilled confidence. It would have shored up the willingness of the Afghans to fight, and it would have allowed the US military program to continue training Afghans.

Because the Afghans did fight. An estimated 66,000 members of the Afghan military and security forces were killed over two decades. It’s not like they sat on the sidelines, but they didn’t fight effectively, and they certainly weren’t going to stand up when it was just them against the Taliban and nobody backing them and the US military gone. And this idea that they were going to fight and die for Ghani? That just wasn’t going to happen.

'If the Taliban find me, they will kill me and my family,' says abandoned Afghan interpreter
‘If the Taliban find me, they will kill me and my family,’ says abandoned Afghan interpreter
So could we have done it differently? Obviously, the answer is yes.

BERGEN: How do you feel about all this?

LONDON: Well, as egotistical as I am as a spy, because you kind of have to be for the business, I try not to make this about myself. My sons both served in conflict zones; one son was a Marine who served in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, twice, and another son remains in uniform. I have a daughter who’s taking care of vets with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But I am thinking about, first and foremost, the threat to our nation, because that’s in the blood from 34 years in the CIA. And when I can get beyond that and I start thinking in my heart and soul, it’s about the folks that we’ve left behind, those who are already dead, surely, and their families, those who are on the run and what it means for those people. It’s hard for folks who I worked with and supported and were in dangerous places.
BERGEN: It seems that there are going to be a lot of Afghans who helped the United States who are just going to be left behind.

LONDON: And the Taliban is going to very much focus on finding those people. They’ve always been very effective at maintaining a counterintelligence operation. So, I see reflections of this in the press, about their first order of business for the Taliban will be identifying who was supporting the US, the Brits, and NATO. I really have no faith in their claims of amnesty and this idea that all is forgiven. I think they’re going to very effectively go after these folks.

Now, whether or not they’re going to summarily execute, detain, or “rehabilitate” people remains to be seen. I think because they have become so attentive to media and PR, they might take an approach similar to what the Chinese government is doing by putting Uyghurs in reeducation camps.

Also, not being really a cohesively led military organization either, a lot of these local Taliban commanders are going to do things on their own. They’re going to settle old scores. They’re going to seek revenge against units and intel personnel that targeted them, their leaders, their family members. So that’s not going to end without a fair deal of blood.

Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan, CNN.com

Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. ”

(CNN)A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight.
Sound familiar?

That’s what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.

It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration’s drawdown from Iraq.

In 2014, after ISIS began ethnic cleansing in Iraq and murdering American journalists and aid workers, then-President Barack Obama reversed that decision and sent additional military support — upping the troop presence to 2,900.

Now Biden is presiding over a debacle entirely of his own making in Afghanistan — and one that has unfolded more swiftly than even the most dire prognostications.

Since Biden announced a total US withdrawal in April, the Taliban have taken over more than one-third of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, and they now control more than half of the country’s some 400 districts.

The Taliban have also seized control of much of northern Afghanistan, far from their traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country, demonstrating a well-thought-out military strategy. In fact, the Taliban now control the key cities of Herat and Ghanzi, the latter of which is less than 100 miles from Kabul and is located on the most important road in the country — the Kabul to Kandahar highway.

The US State Department is urging all US citizens to leave the country “immediately,” and the Pentagon announced it will send an additional 3,000 troops to assist in US diplomats’ departures and evacuations. Meanwhile, the US government is also considering moving its embassy to Kabul airport. Apparently, the Biden administration doesn’t want a replay of the iconic images of the hasty evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

Just as ISIS had done in Iraq, the Taliban is also attacking prisons across Afghanistan and releasing fighters who are joining the insurgency. The Afghan government has said most of these inmates, however, are criminals — sentenced for offenses ranging from drug smuggling to armed robbery.

The Taliban ‘peace’ fantasy

For Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the key US negotiator with the Taliban, and academics like Professor Barnett Rubin at New York University, both of whom promoted the fantasy that the Taliban would seek a genuine negotiated peace deal with the Afghan government, a harsh reality is setting in. The chances of such a deal are next to none.

Khalilzad traveled to Doha this week where he has led “peace” negotiations with the Taliban for the past three years “to help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.”

Good luck with that. During the last rounds of negotiations that started under the Trump administration, Khalilzad entered into agreements with the Taliban that stated in exchange for a total US withdrawal, they would break with al Qaeda and enter into genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban have reneged on those agreements, according to the United Nations and the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, Khalilzad agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It’s hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?

The withdrawal date of US troops from Afghanistan was initially supposed to be September 11, 2021, but the Biden administration seems to have realized that removing all troops on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which was masterminded by al Qaeda from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, would not be a PR triumph, and so the new date for the completion of the US withdrawal is August 31.

Nonetheless, when the 20th anniversary is memorialized at the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the US, the Taliban will surely be celebrating their great victory in Afghanistan.

According to reporting by CNN, one US intelligence assessment estimates that the Afghan capital Kabul may be fully surrounded by the Taliban come September 11 — and that it could fall shortly after that.

A global jihadist victory

For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq and Syria. Just as they did after those ISIS victories, many thousands of foreign fighters are likely to pour into Afghanistan to join the victorious “holy warriors” and receive military training.

There they will join the 10,000 foreign fighters that are already based in Afghanistan from 20 foreign jihadist groups, including al Qaeda and ISIS, according to Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UN, Ghulam M. Isacza.

Was the complete American withdrawal necessary? Of course not. In Iraq, around 2,500 US troops remain in the country — the same number that were in Afghanistan at the beginning of this year. In July, Biden announced an agreement with the Iraqi government that effectively relabeled the American troops in Iraq as “non-combat” service personnel, while still leaving them in place. Biden could have taken a similar approach in Afghanistan. He didn’t.

Why Biden chose one path in Iraq and another in Afghanistan isn’t clear. But what is clear is that a predictable debacle is now unfolding under Biden’s watch in Afghanistan.