Intel assessment said Taliban could take over in months, Defense Secretary Austin acknowledges

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Sunday that intelligence assessments on the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan predicted the Taliban could retake the country in a matter of months, appearing to contradict President Biden's reassurances last month that a Taliban takeover was not inevitable.

"There were assessments that ranged initially from one to two years to, you know, several months," he said. "But it was a wide range of assessments. And as the Taliban began to make gains, and we saw that in a number of cases there was less fighting and more surrendering and more forces just kind of evaporating, it was very difficult to predict with accuracy.  "This all occurred in a span of about 11 days," he added. "Nobody predicted that, you know, the government would fall in 11 days."