The Fall of Afghanistan and the Taliban Victory of 2021: Was it really an Intelligence Failure?

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.