Former CIA officer blames Pakistan for swift collapse of Afghanistan by Taliban

Kabul [Afghanistan], August 20 (ANI): Former CIA Clandestine Service member John Sipher blamed Pakistan for the swift collapse of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Responding to an article of The Washington Post which held American miscalculation responsible for Afghanistan's debacle, Sipher condemned Pakistan's enduring support to the Taliban for the fiasco.
"If the Pakistanis had withdrawn their enduring support to the Taliban and denied them sanctuary within their borders at any point during this 20-year war, it would have been the Taliban, not our Afghan allies, who collapsed swiftly," tweeted Sipher.
The Washington Post article written by Elliot Ackerman lauded Afghans for fighting two decades against the Taliban in spite of the support of Pakistan.
"Despite these challenges, they have fought for two decades beside us (America) against a stubborn Taliban supported by nations such as Pakistan," the author added.
He also criticised US President Joe Biden's administration as well as his team for giving falsified ground situation of Afghanistan.
"I have never witnessed a more shameful US failure than that of this week. President Biden's address to the nation Wednesday featured two statements that were, at best, self-serving interpretations of events, but I would categorize them as falsehoods. First, the president said he and his national security team "have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency -- and contingency -- including the rapid collapse we're seeing now," said Ackerman.
Not only did the administration not have plans in place for every contingency, it did not have plans in place for what any casual observer of the withdrawal might consider all but certain to occur contingencies such as an emergency evacuation of our Afghan partners trapped in the country and under grave threat from the Taliban.
Beginning in April, a bipartisan group of more than 30 members of Congress, led by Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.), both veterans, petitioned the president for meetings at the White House and a plan for how to evacuate key Afghan personnel. Their requests were met with silence, reported The Washington Post.
And then the president said this: "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."
"The Afghan military has consistently, in any one year, sustained more casualties in its fight against the Taliban than we have sustained in all 20 years of our war there. I fought alongside the Afghans. I watched them save American lives," said Ackerman.
"To say they are unwilling to fight because their forces collapsed after we turned our backs on them is a slap in the face not only to our Afghan allies but to Americans -- such as me -- who mixed our spilled blood with theirs," added the author of the article.
He also held the US strategy of not recruiting forces regionally and tribally for the sweep down in Afghanistan.
"It is a military we decided to build in our image as opposed to theirs. We made it a nationally recruited force as opposed to a regionally or tribally recruited force. The result was that Afghans typically didn't fight in their native provinces. The backbone of accountability in Afghanistan -- the disciplinary structures that have given them their reputation as fierce fighters -- did not translate neatly into the structure we imposed on them," said Ackerman.
"This was a strategic mistake made by us, one that has at times undermined our partnership with them in a counterinsurgency," added Ackerman. (ANI)