State's 'rosy' Afghanistan outlook at odds with grim intelligence before Taliban takeover

The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee pointed to the “rosy picture” the State Department had painted about Afghanistan as opposed to the increasingly “grim” intelligence community assessments in explaining why he believed the Biden administration miscalculated the Taliban takeover so badly.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration ignored the bleak assessments from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and he critiqued the U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the February 2020 deal in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban and had continued to insist wrongly the extremist group was open to a peaceful settlement rather than taking the country by force.