Vets see many US failures in Kabul. Military intelligence is just one.

While the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces this week produced image after image of heartbreak as Afghans clung to cargo planes and women tried to lift babies over airport barriers in an effort to save them, it was also a baffling theater of the absurd: How could a bunch of guys in flip-flops, with no body armor and nary a fighter jet in sight, have defeated an Afghan army that the United States gave billions upon billions of dollars and thousands of lives to help build?

If the war’s end was a choice between throwing good money after bad and risking more lives lost, or staying longer before the inevitable happened – as the Biden administration and many before it have argued – the speed with which the collapse came seemed, even so, to take everyone’s breath away.

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