The significant intelligence failure leading up to the withdrawal from Afghanistan not only resulted in a chaotic evacuation, the death of 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans, and the complete Taliban takeover – it also created a security vacuum that U.S. adversaries are exploiting.

The U.S. and its allies have witnessed a rise in anti-Western sentiment, largely driven by China and Russia, who have strengthened ties following Washington’s opposition to Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Beijing’s assertive stance in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. 

As the U.S. seeks to distance itself from its decades-long War on Terror, adversaries like China and Russia have increasingly expanded their influence in South Asia and the Middle East.

“We don’t understand that when we turn our back to Afghanistan, and we just want to close the door and move on…we are leaving a vacuum there,” Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on security issues in the Middle East and South Asia, told Digital. “Someone else is going to fill it.”

While no nation has officially recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, several nations, including the U.S.’s primary adversaries, have taken steps towards establishing diplomatic relations with the extremist group. 

Last year, Beijing stated that the Taliban should not be “excluded from the international community,” and reports earlier this year indicated that Moscow was considering removing the Taliban from its terrorist list – further indicating that both China and Russia are seeking to utilize the region for their strategic goals. 

Not only does the Taliban’s opposition to Western ideology align with Russia’s efforts to spread anti-American sentiment, but Moscow is also looking to expand trade with Afghanistan and other nations in the region to further mitigate economic pressure stemming from Western sanctions. 

However, sanctions are not the sole motivation for expanding trade across South Asia.

The Taliban last year announced its intention to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and reports have suggested that Beijing is supplying the Taliban with drones, which could potentially hinder the U.S.’s efforts in Afghanistan.   

The U.S.’s inability to anticipate the Taliban takeover was not solely an intelligence failure, but rather a broader lapse in understanding adversarial threats, explained Rubin. “The other issue, which I wouldn’t call an intelligence failure, I would call it a diplomatic failure – was the refusal to address Pakistan realistically,” Rubin said.

Rubin pointed to findings a decade into the war in Afghanistan that revealed 90% of the ammonium nitrate being used in Taliban roadside bombs originated from two fertilizer factories in neighboring Pakistan. 

Pakistani authorities claimed to be collaborating with Washington in 2011 to halt smuggling efforts at a time when the U.S. was desperately trying to stop al Qaeda and Taliban attacks, just months after the U.S. experienced its deadliest year in Afghanistan, with the death of nearly 500 American soldiers and over 700 coalition forces. 

However, the subsequent discovery and assassination of al Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Usama Bin Laden in May 2011, raised questions about the reliability of the Washington-Islamabad relationship – a question that persists to this day. 

Pakistan has engaged in a covert war with insurgent groups along its border with Afghanistan, but Islamabad is also suspected of supporting the Taliban.

Despite its ambiguous security stance, the U.S. continues to maintain close ties with Pakistan, remaining a key military partner and a leading investor in the nation – a relationship that has not gone unnoticed by China and Russia.

Beijing has also sought to collaborate with Islamabad to expand bilateral economic partnerships through its Belt and Road Initiative, particularly the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, in which Beijing invests heavily.

Additionally, despite international pressure to tread carefully in its dealings with Russia, Pakistan has indicated that it may consider a proposal to provide Russia with military aid aimed at crippling its war effort through a “barter” trading system – potentially expanding an alliance that could further burden the U.S. in a region where it needs to maintain positive relations. 

“It’s wrong, simply, to look at Afghanistan in isolation,” Rubin said, acknowledging the root of the U.S.’s failure to assess the region’s overall security situation. “We have a tendency not to see the forest through the trees.”

A multi-year probe released in 2023 revealed that the collapse in U.S. intelligence across both the Trump and Biden administrations stemmed from Washington’s failure to accurately interpret the Afghan government’s capacity to function without U.S. support.

“The Taliban were running roughshod over us, and our intelligence wasn’t picking up a thing,” Rubin said. “We were looking at Afghanistan through the lens of idealism and ideology. Here we were building a democracy. From an Afghan point of view, they were looking at us as the foreigners who were interfering.”

The expert explained that Kabul fell as swiftly as it did because the Taliban had been making inroads across the nation with local governors and district chiefs for one to two years prior to the withdrawal – meaning the fall of Afghanistan was a result of momentum and defections. 

“You actually had lots of families that would send one son to the Afghan National Security Forces – the army we were training – and the other son to the Taliban,” Rubin explained. “The idea wasn’t that they were favoring one power over the other, but this way if one of their family members were kidnapped at a checkpoint, they would always have someone they could call upon.”

Ultimately, the U.S.’s inability to comprehend the Afghans, who had lived under the constant threat of war for half a century following a coup in 1973, the Soviet-Afghan war throughout the 1980s, Taliban rule in the 1990s, and then the 20-year-long U.S. War on Terror, meant they failed to recognize that ordinary Afghans would not fully trust that they could rely on the Afghan government without U.S. backing. 

“It’s what Usama Bin Laden said,” Rubin continued, “when you have a choice between a strong horse and a weak pony…it’s natural to tie yourself to the strong horse. That’s what Afghans do.”

Open source intelligence also indicated that the Taliban had been making gains across Afghanistan in the year leading up to the withdrawal, raising questions as to why neither the Trump nor the Biden administration adjusted withdrawal plans accordingly.

“Unfortunately, ego always trumps good judgment when it comes to Washington policymaking,” Rubin said. “The second issue was just exhaustion, and this notion that it was a two-decade war, the longest war in American history, and that by supporting the resistance, we would be restarting.”

“It was a persuasive argument,” he added.