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Afghanistan could implode before complete U.S. troop removal by the end of 2014, U.S. intelligence sources that closely monitor developments in the country told WND.
A recent Taliban attack on the presidential palace of President Hamid Karzai took place with Taliban fighters using U.S. uniforms, U.S. vehicles, “expertly forged U.S. CAC (common access) cards,” identification cards with a photo and computer chip on the front, the source said.
The presidential palace is also where the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has its headquarters in Afghanistan.
The source said some of the Taliban “talked their way in” then blew up themselves and some guards. Other Taliban then began a firefight.
“They ended up losing but the fix is in, as they say,” the source said, suggesting that Karzai will be in France “in a couple of months before the final pullout.”
The intelligence source sees Afghanistan becoming “a total disaster, much as Iraq…or Egypt for that matter.” Meanwhile, the source said all military analytical equipment including planes and satellites have been redirected from Afghanistan to Syria.
The source said the Taliban may not necessarily be the ultimate victors even if Karzi falls.
Other contenders in the Islamist militant fight are close Taliban allies Gulbudin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network, both of which have persistently targeted U.S. troops during their stay in Afghanistan.
However, they tend to be more militant than the Taliban, which initially had agreed to sit down separately with U.S. officials and discuss an orderly withdrawal and incorporation into the Karzai government. Even those talks have become stalled due to Karzi’s opposition to such discussions, since they were undertaken without Afghan government involvement.
“Hekmatyar and Haqqani could say ‘sure, you take that Taliban: We’ll just continue to make money with the opium’ – a little flippant, but those guys have been provided guns and bombs just as much as the TB (Taliban) have over the last few years.
“But yes, the Karzai government will fall,” the intelligence source said. “There is nothing that we can do to prevent it. It’s very much like Iraq falling apart now.”
The source said the only “semi-secure” places were around a small selection of “major FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) and Air Bases and the capitol – everything else was the Wild West, no matter what any public affairs person would spin up.”
The intelligence source pointed out that the Afghanistan government troops and police are “riddled with TB and other insurgent sympathizers or collaborators.”
He said that in an effort to weed out the Taliban inside the military and police, the U.S. had undertaken a counter-intelligence effort to polygraph candidates and those already in place.
That effort was undertaken to minimize “green on blue” attacks of Afghan troops and police killing their American trainers and combat soldiers. While such activities have declined, they still occur on occasion, a willful tactic of the Taliban to demoralize U.S. forces.
The source said there weren’tmany qualified U.S. personnel to operate and analyze the results of the polygraphs. Yet, they needed to polygraph tens of thousands of Afghan National Police and Army personnel.
“It doesn’t take a Sergeant in the ANA (Afghanistan National Army) to bring a bomb into a place,” he said.
However, with the U.S. departure, counter-insurgency efforts are due to fail and Islamist militants will be able to effectively infiltrate the Karzai government.
“And Karzai does what when we’re gone?” the source asked.
“We refuse to take out the leadership of the TB, HQN (Haqqani) and Gulbudin’s organization,” he said. “We know where they are – they’re hanging out in a refugee camp north of Peshawar (in Pakistan) in two cases, and in Miram Shah (also in Pakistan) in the third. So, those guys can continue to lead, recruit, fund raise and collect weaponry from PK (Pakistan).
“If you intend to say, or in the words of Killkullen, Grey, Bobbitt and all the other cheerleaders of COIN(counter-intelligence), stay 20 or more years with enough troops and money to make COIN work.”
Budget cutbacks threatening U.S. Army training and preparedness
Hundreds of billions of dollars in sequestration cuts to the Defense Department are seriously affecting U.S. Army trainers and their defense contractors who train officers in the infantry, tanks artillery and military intelligence, among other areas.
Informed U.S. intelligence sources tell WND the Army is going through its third round of major cuts in four years.
“It’s hack and slash,” a source said, as some 80 percent of the contractors will be cut, greatly affecting the quality of training.
“It’ll make the organization (Army) partially unworkable,” he said. “The Army will accept crappy, non-existent training so long as they can say that they’ve trained students. There’s less than the prescribed number of instructors per student.”
In cutting back on contractors for training, the Army will have to pick up the slack by pushing the military through classes to meet quotas – “except there were not enough of them to teach or (the Army) wouldn’t have needed contractors.”
“Of course, this affects readiness,” the source said.
In one example, a “pre-deployment checklist” course was set up for 60 personnel, but up to 180 were placed in the course at a time, requiring drastic curtailment and elimination of some essential elements in order to be completed “in the normal allotted period.”
This type of consolidation was due to the drastic cut in instructors of up to 80 percent.
“What we’ve got here at the Military Intelligence Captains Career Course is a pile of contractors and a skeleton crew of active duty military officers,” the source said. “These active duty guys don’t have the instructor training, nor the military experience (since) a lot of the cadre are Captains or Majors, so you’re talking five to 12 years of experiences, versus the contractor with 20 plus, and (because) they don’t know the lesson plans because we don’t gin them up here, they’re provided to us by the Command and General Staff College.
“I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do,” he said. “They won’t be able to teach the classes, there will be a long period where entire classes of students will be sitting around instructed to ‘teach themselves.’
The outlook, the source said, isn’t promising.
“Very likely, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Army will have to re-hire a bunch of contractors back, but nobody can sit around for months ‘hoping’ that the Army will hire them back,” he said. “They’ll have to find new jobs elsewhere — generally a disaster no matter how you slice it.”
The source say the cuts on equipment and other systems will be slower but the Army is cutting on everyday essentials.
“Stupid stuff that always happens in offices like mine is that the Army tends to cut back on toilet paper, printer paper and ink cartridges which make office life a general pain in the butt,” he said. “We’ve got a huge copier in the office we can’t use now because the Army didn’t renew the service contract.”
The source said the Army will claim none of this affects readiness, because commanders will not want a negative comment on their evaluation reports.
“It wouldn’t matter if the troops were entirely untrained,” he said. “An officer would still tell his superiors that they were trained. You’ll see something very similar to this with this latest experiment with females in the infantry and SOF (Special Operations Forces). They’ll be retrained so many times (that) they can’t help but pass or the senior leadership will flat out lie and say they passed.”
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