Biden ignored advice on how quickly Kabul would fall to Taliban

President Biden, with Vice-President Kamala Harris, responds to questions about the military evacuations of US citizens and vulnerable Afghans from Afghanistan. Picture: AFP

There are many reasons for the collapse of Afghanistan after 20 years of fruitless bloodletting and wasted treasure. But as with most debacles the primary cause is a failure of strategy and policy, not intelligence.

President Joe Biden is certainly complicit. But he is not the main architect of the Ghani government’s demise, a title that rightly belongs to Donald Trump the self-styled “master of the deal”. The businessman turned president committed the cardinal negotiating sin of gratuitously committing to withdrawing US forces – the main Taliban objective – thereby forfeiting all leverage in the farcical, drawn-out peace talks that continued right up to Kabul’s fall.

Biden’s decision to confirm Trump’s supine deal undermined the morale of the Afghan government and, critically, the army. John Howard, among others, makes the valid point that Biden could have left a residual force in Afghanistan to send a strong signal of continued support for the beleaguered government. This could have been maintained almost indefinitely with little pain for considerable geopolitical gain.

Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani are also culpable. Both presided over corrupt governments, stymieing attempts to establish a sense of national unity among Afghanistan’s disparate mix of ethnic groups, alienating the very people they purported to represent. “Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban,” says Sarah Chayes, a former senior US official and Afghanistan expert. Karzai was compromised by his personal connections to the Taliban, underlined by his sudden re-emergence as a negotiator between the Taliban and the coalescing groups opposed to the Islamist group’s new hegemony.

Pakistan’s Machiavellian support for the Taliban can’t be ignored, either. Chayes asks: “Where else did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from?” The Taliban was a strategic project of Pakistani military intelligence agency the ISI. Beginning in the 1990s, the ISI assiduously trained, armed and financed its creation providing sanctuary, strategic advice and vital intelligence. The US knew this but tolerated ISI duplicity in the interest of maintaining a working relationship with a key regional state. Without Pakistan’s support the Taliban would never have been able to seriously challenge a national government supported by a superpower, let alone inflict a comprehensive defeat on the more numerous and better armed Afghan national army in a walkover.

By the time the Taliban embarked on its march to the capital, the morale of the army was shot, undermined by neglect, corruption, political self-interest and an effective propaganda campaign conducted by a Taliban leadership skilled in its use. When confronted with a choice of a pointless death, or survival, the army opted for the latter en-masse. And who could blame Ghani’s soldiers? No army fights without a cause.

Did poor intelligence contribute to this monumental policy failure? Those who think so point to the overly optimistic administration assessments of the strength and staying power of the Afghan army, the assumption being that they were based on the flawed judgments of the US intelligence community. But the emerging evidence suggests otherwise. Far from being clueless about the real situation on the ground, both the US State Department and CIA anticipated the possibility of a precipitate collapse of the Afghan government and army. These assessments were made available to senior officials in the Biden administration well before the final Taliban offensive.

Doug London, the former CIA counter-terrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia, which includes Afghanistan, says that in its scenario planning, the US intelligence community assessed that “Afghan forces might capitulate within days under the circumstances we witnessed, in projections highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike”. Responding to Biden’s defence of his withdrawal decision that the situation in Afghanistan unfolded “more quickly than we anticipated”, London says: “That’s misleading at best. The CIA anticipated it as a possible scenario.”

This isn’t the first time – and it certainly won’t be the last – that policymakers have ignored or misused intelligence for political purposes to the detriment of policy. By 2018, it was clear Trump wanted out of Afghanistan and was not going to be dissuaded by evidence-based arguments to the contrary, no matter how compelling.

Biden’s “it is time to end the forever war” refrain betrayed a similarly closed mindset. This left little room for serious consideration of the much smarter policy of maintaining a small, but stabilising US military presence in Afghanistan while refocusing US strategy on the main game – China’s mounting challenge to US power in Asia. Without a hint of irony, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, put the fall of the Afghan army down to “a failure of will and leadership”, a summation that applies equally to Trump and Biden.

As a committed ally and intelligence partner, it’s important we make clear-headed judgments about US will and capacity. Afghanistan is a tragedy and undoubted setback to the US that will reverberate for years to come. But the Ghani government’s collapse means neither the end of US global leadership nor its decline as a great power. A chastened US recovered from an even greater failure in Vietnam to successfully outcompete the Soviet Union.

Given the criticism he is receiving at home and abroad for abandoning Afghanistan, Biden is unlikely to commit the same mistake twice, especially with a dependable and increasingly important ally like Australia. This provides an opportunity to leverage the alliance relationship to shape US policy in our region. A good start would be to remind Biden that it’s foolish to ignore the views of intelligence professionals and country experts no matter how unpalatable. Contestability of advice and open-mindedness are the keys to good intelligence and good policy.

Alan Dupont is chief executive officer of geopolitical risk consultancy the Cognoscenti Group, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute and a former defence intelligence analyst.