Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has struck back at Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab's assertion that intelligence was to blame for the UK being caught out by the speed of the Taliban takeover.
Under vast pressure over his handling of the crisis, Raab said the advice from the intelligence community and the military was that Kabul was unlikely to fall this year.
But Wallace, in an interview published on Thursday, countered the claims by saying that history shows "it's not about failure of intelligence, it's about the limits of intelligence".
The Foreign Secretary came under sustained questioning at the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday over how the UK failed to predict the speed in which the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban, which seized Kabul on August 15.
Raab partly blamed an "optimism bias" surrounding the UK's assumptions when asked why Britain got it "so badly wrong".
And he said that the position from the Joint Intelligence Committee "and the military" was that the "most likely" outcome after the withdrawal of foreign troops at the end of August was "a steady deterioration from that point and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year".
In an interview with the Spectator magazine, Wallace said: "I've already seen some lines about the failure of intelligence.
"History shows us that it's not about failure of intelligence, it's about the limits of intelligence.
"When the Soviet Union crumbled, when Libya collapsed, when the actual moment came in Afghanistan, intelligence hadn't failed. It was just limited, as it always is at the very end."
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