Adam Ciralsky writes:

America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan was not unforeseeable. Nor was it an intelligence failure—that old chestnut often used to absolve leaders of culpability. Instead, the Biden administration’s tumultuous exit from the war-torn country seems to have been the result of incremental and baffling bureaucratic decisions.

Throughout the summer, I had been fielding Cassandra-like calls from U.S. officials. They warned of impending doom in Afghanistan. They spoke of scenarios in which the Taliban, on the eve of President Joseph Biden’s mandated pullout, might crater the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport and create humanitarian and security disasters. It sounded far-fetched. Then again, maybe I was biased. After working in the intelligence community as a young attorney and reporting on national security issues for 20 years, I still believed the U.S. government had the wits and wherewithal to ensure that its decades-long Afghan misadventure would end with a whimper, not a bang. So while I discussed the conversations with my editors, I did not write about them, not wanting to sound alarmist.

Yet what was most striking to me about these summer exchanges was where the blame seemed to land: at the foot of State Department leaders, whom the callers insisted were undermining contingency planning and shirking their legal responsibility—as enumerated by statute and executive order—to protect, and evacuate as necessary, U.S. posts and personnel as well as American citizens abroad. Instead, said one senior official, State was “pressing the DOD easy button”—shorthand for shoveling State’s problems onto the plate of the Department of Defense. This individual described the decision-making process at Foggy Bottom as being plagued by “pathologic optimism.” But as the days and weeks wore on, several other State Department sources would explain that the problem came down to hubris. Eliminating CCR [the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response] and degrading OpMed [Operational Medicine], without clearly defined alternatives, was evidence, they said, of meta-ignorance (known in psychology circles as the Dunning-Kruger effect); America’s diplomats, in the view of these insiders, were ignorant of their own ignorance. [Continue reading…]