Author: Withheld1
Published in National Security Journal, 03 November 2024
Download the full PDF version – The Fall of Afghanistan and the Taliban Victory of 2021: Was it really an Intelligence Failure? (1,462KB)
Abstract
On 15 August 2021, the Taliban captured Kabul and the Western supported Afghan Government collapsed. The fall of the Afghan Government and the Taliban 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 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.1 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.2 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’.3 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.4 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.5 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.6
Within the literature, there is no accepted definition of intelligence failure amongst scholars and many researchers acknowledge that the lack of an accepted definition poses an ongoing problem.7Dahl proposes a concise definition of intelligence failure as being “either a failure of the intelligence community to produce the intelligence needed by decision makers, or a failure on the part of decision makers to act on that intelligence appropriately”.8 Dahl also divides the scholarly literature on the causes of intelligence failure into three types of theories, the traditionalist, reformist and contrarian schools.9 Dahl describes the traditionalist view as being made up of those scholars such as Betts and Handel who believe intelligence failure is inevitable. Hedley argues that any event that occurs in international affairs that is a surprise and is perceived as negative by US policymakers, is inevitably portrayed as an intelligence failure because politicians and public servants detest being caught by surprise.10 Many intelligence scholars such as Hedley and Betts agree that intelligence failure is an inevitable part of the function of intelligence agencies and therefore intelligence agencies should not be held responsible. Dahl argues that traditionalists such as Betts and Handel believe that policy makers are frequently the key factor in intelligence failures due to their failure to take heed of the warnings that are provided by intelligence agencies.11
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1 The author’s name has been withheld by request. The author is employed in Countering Violent Extremism in Australia and has served in various Commonwealth military forces in reserve and full-time capacities. The author would like to acknowledge the support and guidance provided by Dr John Battersby who supervised the original research project this article is based on. Correspondence with the author can be addressed to the Managing Editor NSJ, CDSS@massey.ac.nz