INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Were recent events in Afghanistan really an ‘intelligence failure’?
The Taliban’s rapid retaking of Afghanistan highlighted failures, but it was no intelligence failure, writes Dr John Battersby and Dr Rhys Ball of Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies.
Dr John Battersby is a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Defence and Security Studies (CDSS), Massey University, specialising in terrorism and counter terrorism. He is also Managing Editor of the CDSS-published National Security Journal.
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Dr Rhys Ball is a Lecturer in Security Studies at the School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University. A former intelligence officer, his research interests include intelligence studies and intelligence and military history.
‘Intelligence failure’ has no agreed definition. Intelligence practitioners and academics who have attempted a definition have found it far more elusive than it looks at first glance. The term ‘intelligence failure’ is too freely used by people with little experience of intelligence. It is often used by those looking for scapegoats for a poor decision or an unexpected outcome, or by the media for its utility as a headline, and by politicians as a timely and convenient way to reduce further criticism of some act or omission to act. Here we present a discussion that explores what intelligence failure is and what it is not for future clarification. The recent events in Afghanistan will be discussed with a view to examining if what has occurred there should be labelled, as former Prime Minister Helen Clark has so described, a ‘massive intelligence failure’ in terms of New Zealand’s understanding of, and response to, the situation. “We don’t have any independent intelligence, so we only go on what we can gather and analyse, and it was not good ...” (Helen Clark, August 2021).1 Here Clark criticises New Zealand’s lack of an intelligence capacity, and therefore we have accepted the assessments of others, including the deficiencies of those. But is this really ‘a massive intelligence failure’ on New Zealand’s part, or a much broader New Zealand failure to maintain an independent intelligence capability. Intelligence failure is when intelligence officers who are responsible
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