ANALYSIS | How did the United States get back to where it started in Afghanistan?

(CNN) – Many Americans are still shocked by the violent and abrupt end of America’s longest war. The messy end of two decades of the US mission in Afghanistan raises many questions. Why didn’t the US intelligence community foresee the Taliban’s ability to take control of the country so quickly? How could the Biden administration know that there might be terrorist attacks against the US military at the Kabul airport, but could not stop them?

I consulted Tim Weiner, the author of the book Legacy of the Ashes: The CIA Story, what did he think of this. His work has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Prize. Our conversation, conducted via email, is below.

CNN: The United States clearly misinterpreted the speed and utter speed with which the Afghan government would fall. Do you have the feeling that we should see this as an intelligence failure?

Tim Weiner: Intelligence is not a crystal ball. You can describe the patterns of the past and the current situation, but you can rarely predict the future. So you can’t blame the CIA for this disaster. It is the work of four presidents and a parade of military commanders who deceived them.

Afghanistan was doomed to fall when former President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo surrendered to the Taliban in March 2020. For the past 18 months, it was not a question of whether the United States would lose but when. The unforeseen abdication of Afghanistan’s corrupt president on August 15, allegedly with a helicopter full of cash, answered that question. It would be a matter of hours.

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CNN: I read something interesting in an interview with retired general (and former CIA director) David Petraeus, who was asked if it was an intelligence failure. He said: “… there is a long-standing practice of governments in Washington that reformulate a failed policy as an intelligence failure …”, and suggested that this is not the case here. What do you think of that?

Tim Weiner: Three long-standing failures made the collapse of the US-backed government in Kabul inevitable many years ago.

One was the deliberate ignorance of US military and intelligence officials – a lack of understanding of the history and culture of Afghanistan. Anyone who has read a book about the country knew, or should have known, that no occupying army has dominated Afghanistan. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamurlane, the British and the Soviets tried and failed; the defeat of the Red Army in 1989 accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. They don’t call it the graveyard of empires for nothing. The second lasting failure was the counterinsurgency strategy promoted by Petraeus and others. US military and intelligence officers killed many thousands of Afghan civilians in their quest for victory. This does not win the hearts and minds of the population. The third was the deliberate outsourcing of “nation building” to military contractors. The war was profitable for them. To keep the money flowing, they tended to present their failures as successes. That pernicious practice also infected reports from military and intelligence officials to the White House and Congress. There was always light at the end of the tunnel, until suddenly there was darkness. 1 of 5 | An Afghan Air Force A-29 attack plane is seen inside a hangar at Kabul airport. Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images 2 of 5 | A member of the Taliban exits an Afghan Air Force plane at Kabul airport on Tuesday, August 31. Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images 3 of 5 | Taliban fighters sit in the cockpit of an Afghan Air Force plane at Kabul airport on Tuesday. Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images 4 of 5 | Members of the Taliban are seen inside an Afghan Air Force plane at the airport. Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images 5 of 5 | A Taliban fighter takes a photo of a damaged Afghan Air Force MD 530 helicopter at Kabul airport. Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images

CNN: The US Army is leaving Afghanistan very publicly. Will the CIA also reduce its presence there now?

Tim Weiner: Last week, amid the evacuation chaos at the Kabul airport, the CIA blew up Eagle Base, its last outpost in Afghanistan. With that explosion, twenty years of intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations were wiped out.

Without a base of operations or an embassy, ​​American spies will have an extraordinarily difficult time working in Afghanistan.

Over a decade, from 1979 to 1989, the CIA smuggled billions of dollars in weapons and war materiel to Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of their country. In those years, CIA agents rarely set foot in Afghanistan. When the Red Army left, so did the United States. The defeat of the Soviets, then one of the world’s two superpowers, made Afghanistan a magnet for jihadists around the world in the 1990s. I reported this threat during a long trip to Afghanistan in 1994.

The violent struggle for power between the Afghan guerrillas we support, who destroyed much of Kabul with US weapons, gave rise to the Taliban in 1996. They, in turn, gave refuge and support to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

We went back to where we were 25 years ago. Afghan guerrillas have defeated a superpower and turned their country into a cozy haven for a new generation of would-be terrorists. And the CIA will have very few American spies on the ground to assess that threat, perhaps none for the foreseeable future.

‘No one has money’: under Taliban rule, Afghanistan’s banking system collapses Taliban, one of the most armed in the world 0:48

CNN: There are reports, like this one, that the CIA had been shifting its focus from counterterrorism and paramilitary operations to espionage and intelligence gathering in countries like China and Russia. How could the situation in Afghanistan change those plans?

Tim Weiner: The CIA’s 9/11 generation of counterterrorism agents and analysts have been on the job for 20 years. They are tired and, I suspect, discouraged by the American defeat in Afghanistan. As in the Army, 20s and older is often the rule. The CIA will need to train a new generation to replace them. And that will take years.

Counterintelligence – preventing espionage and political sabotage operations against the United States by the Chinese and Russians – is an even greater challenge. Putin’s spies continue to attack the American body politic with disinformation. China is clearing America’s clock in cyberspace. The Chinese have collected the personal data of almost every American citizen, with a particular focus on spies, soldiers, and diplomats. This represents an intelligence threat that we have only just begun to understand.

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CNN: There is a long list of events that the CIA missed or did not adequately prepare the country for. It would put the fall of the Steel Curtain; the threat of al Qaeda, before 9/11; the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, after 9/11; the rise of ISIS, when the United States withdrew from Iraq; meddling in foreign elections. The list goes on. Would you say there are a host of unknown and still classified intelligence success stories that outweigh these failures?

Tim Weiner: Certainly some successes will remain a secret for years. That they overcome the failures he describes is doubtful. Intelligence is a human endeavor and therefore prone to failure. And the United States is a newcomer in the field, when you think about it. The CIA has been in business for 75 years. The Russians have done it for 300 years, since the days of Peter the Great, and the Chinese have been perfecting the practice since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, 26 centuries ago.

Even when intelligence is successful, for example in predicting an attack, that does not mean that presidents and military commanders will pay attention to it. Foreknowledge doesn’t always prevent disaster. President George W. Bush essentially ignored the CIA warning that bin Laden was determined to attack America 20 years ago. Knowing that ISIS-K would strike in Kabul in recent days, and the warnings were surprisingly accurate, did not stop them from killing Americans and Afghans.

Intelligence is a difficult, dirty, and often dangerous business. When it is successful, it can save lives. But when it fails, people die.