In the face of the unfolding debacle in Kabul, Dominic Raab, then the British foreign secretary, blithely claimed on Sky News that “no one saw this coming”. Viewers who had seen it coming for years (all called ‘no one’) will have scratched their heads in astonishment: What? You’ve spent some £40bn of UK taxpayers’ money on this (more than £2,000 per household) but you couldn’t afford binoculars?
According to some commentators, the problem was a lack of intelligence. While Raab’s claim to ignorance seems more suggestive of a somnambulistic vagueness, interventionary governments have typically wanted us to believe they could not see what was coming because their intelligence agencies had failed to predict the rapidity of the Taliban’s resurgence and inevitable takeover.
Policymakers are wont to hide poor policy behind claims of false intelligence (as national security blogger David Priess explained on Lawfare Live on 27 August). They do so to distract from their own errors of judgement and to signal to allies that it’s time to make smokescreens. According to Bill Roggio, for example, a whizz at military strategy and senior fellow at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the failure to predict the Taliban’s takeover was the “biggest intelligence failure” since the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam (CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia, 16 August).
