Massive intelligence failures leading up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan not only led to a chaotic withdrawal, the deaths of 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans, and a complete Taliban takeover, but also created a security vacuum that has been exploited by America’s adversaries.
Anti-Western sentiment is on the rise in the United States and its allies, primarily led by China and Russia, which have strengthened ties following Washington’s opposition to Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Beijing’s aggressive posture in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
But even as the United States seeks to distance itself from the decades-long war on terror, adversaries such as China and Russia are increasingly expanding their influence in South Asia and the Middle East.
Afghanistan’s Acting First Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar (left) and China’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu attend a press conference announcing oil drilling contracts with Chinese companies in the Afghan capital Kabul on January 5, 2023. (Photo: AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
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“We fail to understand that turning our backs on Afghanistan and just closing the door and moving on is going to leave a vacuum,” Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on Middle Eastern and South Asian security issues, told Fox News Digital. “Someone else is going to fill it.”
No country officially recognises the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, but several countries, including some of America’s biggest enemies, are pursuing diplomatic ties with the militant group.
Last year, Beijing said the Taliban “should not be excluded from the international community” and reports earlier this year suggested Moscow was considering removing the group from its terrorist list, further indicating that both China and Russia are seeking to use the region for their own strategic ends.
Not only does the Taliban’s opposition to Western ideology lend itself to Russia’s aims in spreading anti-American sentiment, but Moscow is also seeking to expand trade with Afghanistan and other countries in the region to further ease the economic pressure caused by Western sanctions.
But sanctions are not the only motivating factor for increased trade across South Asia.
A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flies during a military parade marking the third anniversary of the U.S.-led withdrawal from Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base, Parwan province, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Sidiqullah Alizai)
The Taliban announced their intention to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative last year and Beijing has reportedly been supplying the Taliban with drones, which could disrupt the US’s “over the horizon” strategy for Afghanistan.
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The U.S. failure to foresee the Taliban’s takeover was not just an intelligence failure, Rubin explained, but a sign of a larger lack of understanding of the threat posed by its adversaries. “The other problem, and I wouldn’t call it an intelligence failure, but a diplomatic failure, was our refusal to deal with Pakistan pragmatically,” Rubin said.
Rubin cited research that found 10 years into the Afghanistan war, 90 percent of the ammonium nitrate used in the Taliban’s roadside bombs was supplied by two fertilizer plants in neighboring Pakistan.
Pakistani officials had maintained that they were working with Washington to thwart smuggling at a time when the U.S. was desperate to thwart al-Qaida and Taliban attacks in 2011, just months after the U.S.’s deadliest year in Afghanistan, in which some 500 U.S. troops and more than 700 coalition troops were killed.
But the discovery and subsequent assassination of al-Qaida leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in May 2011 led many to question the reliability of Washington’s relationship with Islamabad, and those questions remain to this day.
U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade walk toward a helicopter transport as part of Operation Khanjar, Camp Dwyer, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 2, 2009. (Manpreet Romana/AFP via Getty Images)
Pakistan is fighting a shadow war with insurgents on its border with Afghanistan, but Islamabad Supported the Taliban through covert operations.
Despite its ambiguous security stance, the United States maintains close ties with Pakistan. Largest export market It is also a major investor in the country, a relationship that has not escaped the attention of China and Russia.
Beijing has also urged Islamabad to expand bilateral economic partnerships through the Belt and Road Initiative, particularly the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Approximately $62 billion was invested.
Moreover, despite international pressure to strike a delicate balance when it comes to Russia, Pakistan Ready to help Moscow circumvent Western sanctions The aim is to undermine the US war effort through a “barter” trade system, and it could be an expansion of an alliance that could put further strain on the US in a region where it needs to maintain good relations.
“It’s simply wrong to look at Afghanistan in isolation,” Rubin said, nodding to a root cause of the U.S.’s failure to assess the overall security situation in the region. “We tend to miss the forest for the trees.”
A multiyear investigation published in 2023 found that a breakdown in U.S. intelligence across the Trump and Biden administrations was due to Washington’s failure to properly interpret the Afghan government’s ability to function without U.S. support.
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Taliban fighters celebrate the third anniversary of the U.S.-led withdrawal of Afghan troops, in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Wednesday, August 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Sidiqullah Alizai)
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“The Taliban ran us over and our intelligence picked up nothing,” Rubin said. “We were looking at Afghanistan through the lens of idealism and ideology. We were building a democracy here. From the Afghan perspective, they were looking through the lens of survival.”
Experts explained that Kabul fell so quickly because the Taliban had made advances across the country, including with local governors and district chiefs, a year or two before their withdrawal, and that Afghanistan’s fall was due to momentum and defections.
“We actually had a number of families who sent one son to the Afghan National Security Forces (the army we were training) and the other to the Taliban,” Rubin explained, “not to favor one side over the other, but that way if one of their family members was kidnapped at a checkpoint, they had someone to call for help.”
After all, the US’s failure to understand that the Afghan people have been constantly threatened with war for half a century following the 1973 coup, the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s, Taliban rule in the 1990s, and two decades of the US war on terror meant that the US failed to recognise that ordinary Afghans would never fully believe they could rely on the Afghan government without US support.
“Osama bin Laden said,” Rubin continued, “that when you have to choose between a strong horse and a weak pony, it’s natural to attach yourself to the strong horse. That’s what Afghans do.”
Taliban supporters march through the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2023. The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan two years ago after the collapse of the Western-backed government and the rapid withdrawal of foreign troops, organizations, and many Afghans who collaborated with them. Since then, no country has formally recognized the Taliban’s rule. (Naba Jamshidi/Getty Images)
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Open-source intelligence also shows that the Taliban had gained ground across Afghanistan in the year leading up to the withdrawal, raising questions about why neither the Trump nor Biden administrations adjusted their withdrawal plans accordingly.
“Unfortunately, when it comes to policy making in Washington, ego always trumps common sense,” Rubin said. “The second problem was simply fatigue and the idea that this was a 20-year war, the longest war in American history, and that by supporting the resistance we would be renewing the war.”
“That was a compelling argument,” he added.
