LONDON: Britain expected Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban from the moment the US signed its withdrawal deal with the group 18 months ago, a senior official has admitted.
Stephen Lovegrove, the UK’s national security adviser, told a parliamentary committee that the government only miscalculated how long it would take for the group to retake Afghanistan.
“There was a central assessment that ultimately what would happen would be that there would be a government which is either entirely Taliban or dominated by the Taliban,” Lovegrove told a joint committee convened to examine claims that the government failed to heed warnings by the British ambassador about the group’s advances.
“We thought that there was a considerably lower likelihood — though not negligible likelihood — of civil war,” said Lovegrove.
“But when we were thinking about the Taliban-dominated government and how quickly that would come to pass, we certainly did not have the speed of the collapse as the central scenario, in fact nobody did. The Taliban didn’t, the Afghan government didn’t, the Americans didn’t.”
The rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban this year appeared to catch world powers off guard.
But Lovegrove’s admission is the first time a British official has acknowledged that the UK acted in expectation of a Taliban takeover, rather than their entry into a democratic or power-sharing government.
World powers are still coming to terms with Afghanistan’s new government, and most have not yet recognized the Taliban as the official rulers of the country.