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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.
‘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.
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 for collecting information, negligently miss what was reasonably within their grasp to obtain, or when they, in analysing all available information from all relevant sources, fail to conclude that there is a reasonable likelihood that a given eventuality could happen. That is genuine intelligence failure.
All intelligence assessments are mental exercises using imperfect and incomplete raw data to either create an impressionistic picture of what an adversary is likely to be doing, or outline a spectrum of possible future outcomes which provide decision makers with an estimate of what could happen – and therefore a range of options of how to act. Intelligence failure does not occur just because intelligence analysts are unable to predict that an outcome is a certainty - because until it happens it is not. Politicians and the media alike are prone to, at time ‘breakneck speed’, say exactly this.
Intelligence failure is not being unable to see the future – that’s clairvoyance, and it is a confidence trick, not a disciplined evidence-based analytical practice. Intelligence failure should not be made the fall-guy for poor decision-making, nor should it seemingly go hand-in-hand with policy failure, or for when things simply do not turn out how we would have liked them to.
Intelligence failure is not the inability to see an occurrence that emerges completely unheralded. If there is no evidence that something is likely to occur, then intelligence analysts cannot be expected to see it. It is, however, a reasonably rare occurrence that intelligence analysts give a categorical assurance that something will not happen. Intelligence analysis – if done correctly – is the critical, objective thinking process that produces intelligence assessments for decisionmakers. It seeks to reduce complexity, and offer clarity, in advance of events.
Intelligence failure is not the prediction that something is likely to occur, and then it doesn’t. The extent of the intelligence discipline is simply to identify that it could have. Intelligence failure does not occur when decision-makers fail to utilise intelligence.
In 1979, the US Intelligence Community was castigated for not predicting the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in that country. The inability to accurately assess the influence and popularity of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini and the intense disdain for the Pahlavi regime was attributed to the CIA not asking the right people the right questions. It was an intelligence collection failure, and for many within the community, a catalyst for changing the way in which intelligence needed to work better.
Intelligence failure is not the routine refusal of human beings to critically and dispassionately analyse the past and learn lessons from it. Historians, Rudyard Kipling’s poetry and prose, informed commentators and former Soviet military and intelligence officers all provided warnings about intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 – what major power has intervened there in the last few thousand years, and ever come out of it successfully? There is no shortage of available information on the ills that befell the British in the nineteenth century, and the Soviets in the twentieth in their attempts to do so. Was ‘success’ ever actually defined by President George W Bush, or by Helen Clark, when they sent their respective countries’ forces there in 2001?
In times of crisis, do decisionmakers actually want to hear the spectrum of possible future outcomes, or are they looking for the comfort of whatever evidence suits the decision they want to make? The 2003 decision to invade Iraq to find WMDs is regarded too readily as an anomaly – it is not. More importantly we need to question if 2003 was actually an intelligence failure (there certainly were intelligence failings) - or was it a situation set up to fail by decisionmakers creating a culture in which they only wanted to hear one option? Did our decision makers in 2001 ask for the implications of our deployment in Afghanistan 20 years hence or indicate a preparedness to deal with the aftereffects of a sustained presence there?
There has been much press recently about the rapid resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, of the ‘intelligence failure’ that it was not predicted, and that no one warned that such an eventuality could occur so unexpectedly quickly. But was it really unexpected? Was it really that quick? Or were we wrapped-up in ourselves – as New Zealanders often are – and simply content to take no notice of what was, in fact, a reasonably likely outcome of foreign forces indicating that their mission now was to withdraw from Afghanistan.
The British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told his critics at the beginning of September that his government’s decisions had relied on the combined assessments of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the same bureaucratic organisation that took responsibility for the Iraqi WMD failure in 2003. Raab was said to have blamed “optimism bias” for the intelligence assessments that he was seeing and basing government action on. This could be a case of genuine intelligence mis-assessment, and a failure. Or it could be the effect of the same politicised cultural conditions prevailing as had been the case in 2003.
We need to be wary of the ease with which blame for poor or unexpected policy outcomes can be apportioned to intelligence organisations that cannot publicly speak up for themselves nor present their analysis to a wider public for scrutiny. Judgement of any decisionmaking and the intelligence it was based on should be reserved until those intelligence assessments can be seen.
That there were potentially hundreds of people in Afghanistan who had assisted New Zealand troops in Bamyan has been no secret. No doubt there were plenty of people in Kabul assisting with New Zealand activities there also.
That the Taliban had not been subdued, and could, and probably would, re-emerge if the US forces left, hardly required specialist intelligence skills to be understood as a distinct possibility. The declaration by US President Joe Biden in April 2021 that US troops would be pulling out of Afghanistan should have sent a clear message to New Zealanders – whose troops had already left by then, that if New Zealanders, or those who we were concerned about, remained in Afghanistan, preparations would likely need to be taken in order to get them out. Remember, the current New Zealand government formally announced that it would end all military commitments to Afghanistan in mid-February 2021.
Other coalition forces, like France, had begun evacuations much earlier than this. There was every opportunity that New Zealand could have started this process much earlier. The most likely reason why this does not appear to have been done is that New Zealand had no intention of doing it. This is a failure, but it is not an intelligence failure.
In 2012, New Zealand somewhat reluctantly agreed to resettle 23 former Afghani interpreters and their families. These people claimed their lives were at risk for the assistance they provided to New Zealand troops who had been deployed in Bamyan Province. Even then, there were claims that a considerable number of those who assisted New Zealand’s Provincial Reconstruction Team had not been included in the resettlement. These people had reported they were in hiding due to the risk the Taliban posed.
There have been a number of subsequent claims by Afghani’s who assisted New Zealand, even verified by military officers, whose appeals to be accepted into New Zealand have been declined by successive National and Labour led governments. If these people were fearing for their lives while the massive US-led multi-national force was still in the country, any prospect that it would leave should have prompted our decision makers to start asking not just for intelligence assessments of likely future outcomes, but for planning to commence if responsibility was going to be taken to evacuate those who needed to be. If there is a failure here – it is why this did not happen. This is not an intelligence failure.
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.
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.
