ormer Prime Minister Helen Clark, who sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, says a “massive intelligence failure” led New Zealand and allied governments to completely underestimate the Taliban’s strength.
The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan on Sunday, bringing to an end a two-decade effort by the United States and a consortium of allies, including New Zealand, to build a prosperous democratic nation.
Clark visited Afghanistan both as prime minister and as head of the United Nations Development Programme. She said watching the Taliban’s invasion was “utterly surreal and devastating for the country”.
“It's just sad now to see the situation and think of so much blood and treasure that was spent, and we're back where we were,” Clark said.
“There's so much effort gone on to investing in human development, and people's rights, and better governance. And it's just gone up in smoke.”
She said it appeared the Government in New Zealand was not alone in being “completely” caught unaware by the speed of the Taliban onslaught.
“We don’t have any independent intelligence, so we only go on what we can gather and analyse, and it was not good ... I don’t think the urgency of it had been communicated.”
Clark said the Western negotiators in Doha, Qatar, who had been trying for months to forge a deal between the Taliban and the Afghanistan government, had shown “astonishing” naivety.
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And it appeared the US, in making the decision to leave, “either they had no idea what the strength of the Taliban was, or they didn’t care”.
“Looking at a lot of the US commentary, it's suggesting that this is actually an intelligence failure of the level of the failure to see the Tet Offensive in 1968 coming in Vietnam, where they were taken by surprise.
“But why would you be surprised? They've been biding their time building their strength, getting their arsenals together.”
The Taliban could not be trusted, she said, and the treatment of civilians in parts of Afghanistan was at odds with the claims being made by the public-facing leadership.
"We know from some of the places they have been occupying in recent weeks, that women, girls have been sent away from university, told to go home, they've been told to go away from their workplace.
“There's a report of a woman being beaten because she was wearing sandals exposing the feet. There's talk of fighters snatching young girls to be forcibly married to them.
"It's like a mediaeval theocracy has just returned to power and that's what was driven out 20 years ago and here we are again.”
The 20-year effort in Afghanistan was “one of the worst failures on record of Western foreign policy, on a level with the Vietnam War and the invasion of Suez”, she said.
“It's also a failure of leadership in Afghanistan itself.”
She said former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who she met, was an “astute juggler of relationships between different tribal leaders”, whereas President Ashraf Ghani, who fled Afghanistan on Sunday, “was somewhat disconnected from facts on the ground”.
Afghanistan needed to be a “long term project”, she said, akin to the commitment to the United States made after the Korean War, deploying 50,000 soldiers in the country for decades.
“I don’t think it needed a very big international force.”
She said she had no regrets about making the call to send New Zealand troops to Afghanistan in 2001, though the Provincial Reconstruction Team deployed to the Bamyan province was a commitment that “probably stayed on longer than New Zealand could sustain”.
"We did our best. We did some good things. Some things really weren't so good as inquiries have found, but overall it's been a positive New Zealand contribution.”
