I'ts all too late to learn the lessons from the Afghanistan fiasco

It still staggers me that the mighty United States with all of its huge panoply of intelligence-gathering systems, human and technical, was totally caught out by the Taliban's final 11-day rush to Kabul. Ok, so the vast majority of the surveillance apparatus had been removed from Afghanistan as part of the US retrograde programme. That would have made the job of monitoring the Taliban's progress towards the capital a helluva lot of easier. But among the 4,000-strong US embassy in Kabul there was a very large contingent of CIA intelligence officers and Defense Intelligence Agency staff who presumably had their ways of keeping tabs on what was going on in the country. Would they not have realised that after seizing Kandahar, Helmand and Mazar e-Sharif the Taliban would soon be on the outskirts of the capital because the fightback by the Afghan national security forces had been minimal. But no such warning came because General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, told reporters the Pentagon was still working on the assumption, based on intelligence, that a Taliban takeover of the whole country could take weeks or months or up to two years. Blinding naivity!! The Taliban had worked out what the whole of the US and military community had failed to predict which was that the Afghan security forces without the Americans holding their hands would give up. They knew that, so all they had to do was keep up the momentum and go all the way to Kabul as fast as possible. Just like the US military did in Iraq in 2003 when they swept into Baghdad in days. Two different types of shock and awe! The Pentagon talks about the need to learn lessons. But the lessons should have been learned years and years ago. It's all too late now.