Maybe It’s Time to Fire People for Incompetence

To be fair, the reason that all four major US intelligence agencies f%$#ed up the collapse of Afghanistan might have been corruption, rather than incompetence, their agencies and the former members of their agencies, were getting not-inconsiderable remuneration as a result.

In either case, these blokes should be fired ………out of a cannon and into the sun:

Leading U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prior to the final withdrawal of American troops and instead offered scattershot assessments of the staying power of the Afghan military and government, a review of wide-ranging summaries of classified material by The Wall Street Journal shows.

The nearly two dozen intelligence assessments from four different agencies haven’t been previously reported. The assessments charted Taliban advances from spring 2020 through this July, forecasting that the group would continue to gain ground and that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul was unlikely to survive absent U.S. support.

The analyses, however, differed over how long the Afghan government and military could hold on, the summaries show, with none foreseeing the group’s lightning sweep into the Afghan capital by Aug. 15 while U.S. forces remained on the ground.

………

Representatives of the CIA, the DIA, the State Department and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates all U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to comment.

………

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow who follows Afghanistan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank in Washington, said intelligence agencies and policy makers bear responsibility for being blindsided by the Taliban’s swift battlefield success.

Mr. Roggio said individual analysts at several agencies he was in touch with foresaw a rapid Taliban takeover, “and for whatever reason that didn’t make it to the top.”

This is why we need to fire or sideline people at the most senior levels with responsibility in this area.

It's either incompetence through groupthink, or corruption through groupthink, and the only way to fix that is to break up the whole dysfunctional group, and make sure that they don't go onto lucrative consulting gigs in the private sector.