AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL HEARING-4/19/23-REP ANDY BIGGS

REP ANDY BIGGS: How did the, how did the intelligence community get it so wrong?

MR SOPKO: I don't really know who would actually have thought the Afghan government was gonna survive. And, and, and in January, I believe I issued a report and talked to this committee the January that year that the Air Force itself was saying that the Afghan Air Force, once the contractor left, would collapse within a matter of months. So everybody, this was the worst kept secret in Washington about the capability of the Afghan government to survive. Uh, again, I'm just shocked.
It's like the number 300,000 Afghan soldiers and polices. I don't know who is telling the administration. There were 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police toward the end. Nobody we talked to ever said that that number was near there. We had reports that half of those people were probably ghosts. We were paying their salaries, but they didn't exist.