'Too Optimistic': Danish Intelligence Admits It Didn't Foresee Kabul Falling to Taliban in 2021

In a briefing to the Danish parliament as recently as 9 August, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service predicted that it was relatively unlikely that Kabul would fall in 2021. On 15 August, in less than a week, the Taliban* stormed into the Afghan capital, wreaking havoc and triggering a hasty evacuation.

In a sensational statement, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (FE) has admitted that it didn’t foresee Kabul falling to the Taliban in 2021.

In a briefing to the Danish parliament as recently as 9 August, FE stated that it was relatively unlikely that Kabul would fall in 2021. However, it didn't take long for the intelligence experts to be proven wrong: the Afghan capital was captured by the Taliban on 15 August, less than a week later.

“There have been special challenges in terms of the situation in Afghanistan because access to information has been weakened as a result of the coalition’s withdrawal. These conditions, however, do not change the fact that we must learn from the developments. It wasn’t a surprise that Kabul fell per se, but rather the speed at which it occurred is something we didn’t deem likely”, Svend Larsen, the acting head of FE, said in the statement. “We based our evaluations on the intelligence we had at our disposal from our own sources and international partners, but our estimations have been proven too optimistic,” he added.

FE pledged to use the experiences garnered from Afghanistan to improve its internal workings.

Defence and security experts called both the mistake and its admission unusual.

“It has happened before, but it is of course unusual and rare that mistakes are made in this way, and it is also rare that FE goes out and admits it,” Flemming Splidsboel Hansen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told Danish Radio.

Thomas Wegener Friis, an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, affiliated with the Centre for War Studies, said that the matter is “far from commonplace”.

“And it quite naturally begs the question: Who was it that guessed wrong? Did the politicians know what was happening and did they cynically calculate the collapse, or did the intelligence services incorrectly guess the development,” Friis mused.

According to the newspaper Berlingske, already in June, a weekly report from the commander of the Danish forces in Afghanistan described the development in the country as “worrying”, adding that the Afghan army was challenged by the Taliban. Among others, he said that the morale of the Afghan army was “declining” and “reaching a critical level”. However, both the Defence Ministry and the Foreign Ministry denied having received the report, which greatly surprised Martin Marcussen, a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, who believed this was implausible.

According to two of the government's support parties, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Liberal Party, the botched assessment may have ultimately cost lives, as it led to the belated evacuation from Kabul.

“When we get intelligence reports that are so wrong, we also get late evacuation. This means that the people we have to evacuate are in a far more dangerous situation than if they had been evacuated in good time. It can potentially cost human lives in such a dangerous situation,” the Socialist People's Party defence spokeswoman Anne Valentina Berthelsen told Danish Radio. She added that her party has been convinced that Kabul would fall very quickly and urged the government to see to it that the and the embassy is closed and the employees properly evacuated.

The same message was echoed by the Social Liberal Party foreign spokesman Martin Lidegaard.

“We take it very seriously. It may have cost human lives to get started so late,” he said.

The Danish engagement in Afghanistan started back in 2001, with Danish soldiers deployed since 2002. Overall, the Danish mission has cost millions of kronor and suffered 43 casualties and over 210 injuries.

* The Taliban is a terrorist organisation banned in Russia and other countries