General Keane on Possible Taliban Resurgence in Afghanistan: We Saw This Coming

HEMMER: “You saw all this coming, didn’t you?”
KEANE: “Yeah, pretty much most of us who have done assessments on Afghanistan — I know I did a bunch of them for General Petraeus. I did one for  General Allen who succeeded him. We predicted that we’re going to have major problems around Kabul and to the east to Kabul to the PAC border with the Haqqani network because we were never able to apply the surge forces against the Haqqani network. The president did not give us the full number of surge forces and then over General Petraeus’ objections, he pulled them out early. We were able to secure and stabilize the South but not the East. We knew we will leave in a major problem here for the Afghan National Security Forces because we were never able to root this Haqqani network out the way we wanted to.”
HEMMER: "You have civilian deaths up to 17 percent by one measure in 2014 alone and now that capital city has become the front line yet again, and the president just two weeks ago said the American combat forces will stay there yet another year. What happens then?"
KEANE: "Well, the the issue we have here is much more pregnant than what it was in Iraq in the sense that this is an arbitrary decision to pull out forces having nothing to do with conditions on the ground, which is not what our commanders want to do. But  any other -- the civilian deaths are going up because they're focusing solely on the city and other major towns in and villagers. One of the things that we strongly recommended and we did have some agreement inside the Pentagon on this is that the way the Haqqani network has built is that they have a sanctuary in Pakistan in a town called Miram Shah, not too far across the border from the Afghan pack border, and out of that, they plan, they oversee, they train and they receive intelligence from the Pakistani military. We have believed for a long time the Haqqani network should be targeted much like the al Qaeda and disrupt these activities which would push this organization back. It would destroy it, but it would be very disruptive to them put them on the defensive. That has never been approved by the White House despite --" [crosstalk]
HEMMER: "Will that change, general?"
KEANE: "No, it's not it's not going to change. I mean, what what I see happening here, Bill, is this presidency is going to end in 2016 and he's going to  turn over to his success a major challenge in Iraq and Syria and a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan. And I hate to see it happening but I think that's exactly what is going to be."