The chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan shows that U.S. intelligence drastically underestimated how quickly Afghan forces would fold to the Taliban. But is this intelligence failure really that unexpected? The Afghanistan blunder represents the baseline performance of American intelligence, and this baseline has been failing since the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. Intelligence Model Is Dangerously Behind the Times
Our secrecy-based tradition ignores that technology has made it so that invaluable intelligence can be uncovered relatively quickly through public information.
