Published in National Security Journal, 03 November 2024
Download full PDF version – The Fall of Afghanistan and the Taliban Victory of 2021: Was it really an Intelligence Failure? (1429 KB)
Abstract
On 15 August 2021, the Taliban captured Kabul and the Western supported Afghan Government collapsed. The fall of the Afghan Government and the Tali-ban victory was quickly represented as an intelligence failure in the media and by various political figures. This article aims to examine whether it is accurate to to describe the collapse of the Afghan State in 2021 as an intelligence failure by conducting a thematic analysis of open-source material related to the conflict in Afghanistan. The results of this analysis demonstrate that policymakers were forewarned about the collapse of the Afghan state by a multitude of different stakeholders for several years prior to August 2021. Labelling the collapse of the Afghan Government an ‘intelligence failure’ is significantly at odds with the information that was available and illustrates an example of policy makers attributing policy failures to failures of intelligence.
Keywords: Intelligence failure, Afghanistan, Taliban, Afghan Government
Introduction
The term ‘intelligence failure’ has been used as an explanatory term to describe events that have surprised policy makers such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Despite the use of the term, there is no agreed definition within the literature of what constitutes an intelligence failure, and Hedley argues this provides a convenient scapegoat for policy makers when they suffer a strategic setback or surprise. Within days of the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in August 2021, policy makers and politicians such as the British Foreign Secretary and Republican and Democrat members of the US Congress suggested that the collapse of Afghanistan was an ‘intelligence failure’. An examination of the available open-source material demonstrates that the collapse of the Afghan Government, its security forces and the Taliban victory was widely predicted in the months and years before August 2021. The claim that the collapse of the Afghan Government and the Taliban’s victory was an intelligence failure does not stand up to scrutiny when the available evidence is examined.
The study of intelligence failure has become increasingly prominent since the events of 9/11. A search of the academic literature regarding intelligence failure yields approximately 3,160,000 results, and approximately 2 million of these results were added in the period from 2001 onwards. Most of the literature regarding intelligence failures ema-nates from the US, with smaller amounts coming from the United Kingdom and Israel. Eiran argues that the scholarly literature regarding intelligence failure is largely divided into two categories. The first category consists of works that look at intelligence failure through the prism of case studies which examine a specific event, such as the 9/11 terror attacks or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The second category which Eiran identifies in the literature are theories. This category consists of works that explain the underlying causes of intelligence failures as a failure of systems or organisations, rather than through the historic retrospective lens of a specific case study.