US AGENCIES HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF AFGHANISTAN – says Major-General Flynn
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US AGENCIES HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF AFGHANISTAN – says Major-General
Flynn
AMERICAN spy agencies need to make ‘sweeping’ changes to their work in
Afghanistan, a report by Major-General Michael T Flynn and two other
senior US military men has warned.
The publication of their report, in association with the Center for a
New American Security (CNAS), comes in the wake of the recent killing
of seven CIA officers at their base in Afghanistan, by a man who was
working as a double agent for Al-Qaeda.
The report is titled: ‘Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making
Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’.
Introducing its authors, the report describes Major General Flynn as
America’s ‘senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan’, who has been
the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence (CJ2), for the International
Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan since June 2009.
Captain Matt Pottinger ‘is serving in Kabul as an advisor to Major
General Flynn’, and Paul D Batchelor, of the Defense Intelligence
Agency’s Senior Executive Service, is ‘currently serving at ISAF
headquarters as Senior Advisor for Civilian/Military Integration’.
Their report is based on discussions ‘with hundreds of people inside
and outside the intelligence community’.
Discussing the ‘counter-insurgency’ in Afghanistan, it suggests that
the US spy agencies lack an understanding of Afghanistan and its
people, eight years after US forces invaded the country.
It says: ‘because the United States has focused the overwhelming
majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent
groups, our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer
fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate’.
It continues: ‘This problem or its consequences exist at every level
of the US intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not
making it to those who need it.
‘To quote General Stanley McChrystal in a recent meeting, “Our senior
leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of
Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not
getting the right information to make decisions with ...
‘ “The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from
the sensor all the way to the political decision makers.” ’
There are, says the US report, 44 states involved in some way with the
ISAF force in Afghanistan.
The paper details the changes that it says US imperialism needs to
make in Afghanistan, whilst giving ‘examples of units that are
“getting it right”.’
It is aimed ‘at commanders as well as intelligence professionals, in
Afghanistan and in the United States and Europe.’
Among the initiatives Major General Flynn proposes are to have:
• ‘Select teams of analysts’ empowered to ‘move between field
elements, much like journalists, to visit collectors of information at
the grassroots level and carry that information back with them to the
regional command level.’
• Information collected from a whole range of sources, will be
‘integrated’.
These sources are to include ‘civil affairs officers’, ‘atmospherics
teams’, ‘Afghan liaison officers’, ‘female engagement teams’, and
‘willing non-governmental organisations and development
organisations’, not to mention ‘United Nations officials,
psychological operations teams, human terrain teams, and infantry
battalions, to name a few’!
• The analysts will then divide their work ‘along geographic lines,
instead of along functional lines’, and ‘write comprehensive district
assessments’.
• The analysts will provide all the data they gather to teams of
‘information brokers’ at the regional command level, the report
continues.
• These special teams of analysts and information brokers will work in
what the authors call ‘Stability Operations Information Centers’.
• ‘These Information Centers will be placed under and in cooperation
with the State Department’s senior civilian representatives . . . in
Regional Commands East and South.’
The report says: ‘Leaders must put time and energy into selecting the
best, most extroverted and hungriest analysts to serve in the
Stability Operations Information Centers. . .
‘The highly complex environment in Afghanistan requires an adaptive
way of thinking and operating.
‘Just as the old rules of warfare may no longer apply, a new way of
leveraging and applying the information spectrum requires substantive
improvements.’
The report comments on ‘some recent innovative strides’ by ISAF under
the leadership of Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, with the advent
of the ‘Information Dominance Center’.
‘This type of innovation must be mirrored to the degree possible at
multiple levels of command and back in our intelligence community
structures in the United States,’ the report goes on.
‘In no way is this a perfect solution and the United States will
continue to adapt,’ it says.
‘However, the United States must constantly change our way of
operating and thinking, if we want to win.’
The report warns: ‘Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US
intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall
strategy.
‘Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts
and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence
apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the
environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they
seek to persuade.’
The report says the US is ‘Ignorant of local economics and landowners’
and only ‘hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be
influenced’.
It is ‘incurious about the correlations between various development
projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged
from people in the best position to find answers – whether aid workers
or Afghan soldiers’.
It says that ‘US intelligence officers and analysts can do little but
shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge,
analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counter
insurgency.’
For good measure, the authors add: ‘This problem and its consequences
exist at every level of the US intelligence hierarchy, from ground
operations up to headquarters in Kabul and the United States.’
The authors say: ‘At the battalion level and below, intelligence
officers . . . are generally too understaffed to gather, store,
disseminate, and digest the substantial body of crucial information
that exists outside traditional intelligence channels.’
There is a ‘vast and underappreciated body of information, almost all
of which is unclassified’ that is not being used by the United States
in its war in Afghanistan, the report’s authors argue.
At the moment, ‘Understandably galled by IED strikes that are killing
soldiers. . . intelligence shops react by devoting most of their
resources to finding the people who emplace such devices.
‘Analysts painstakingly diagram insurgent networks and recommend
individuals who should be killed or captured.
‘Aerial drones and other collection assets are tasked with scanning
the countryside around the clock in the hope of spotting insurgents
burying bombs or setting up ambushes.
‘Again, these are fundamentally worthy objectives, but relying on them
exclusively baits intelligence shops into reacting to enemy tactics at
the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the
insurgency.
‘These labour-intensive efforts, employed in isolation, fail to
advance the war strategy and, as a result, expose more troops to
danger over the long run.’
The report notes: ‘Some battalion S-2 officers say they acquire more
information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through
reviewing regional command intelligence summaries. . .
‘If brigade and regional command intelligence sections were profit-
oriented businesses, far too many would now be “belly up.” ’
The military chiefs hint at a growing frustration that after eight
years in Afghanistan the US has failed to marginalise the insurgency
against the American-led occupation.
The authors of the report warn: ‘lethal targeting alone will not help
US and allied forces win in Afghanistan.’
As the US expands its war into Pakistan, US military chiefs are
increasingly worried that they are facing another Vietnam.
The Vietnam defeat was a major setback for US imperialism and a
supreme embarrassment.
A defeat for US imperialism, in Afghanistan, and then being locked out
of the oil and gas rich location of central Asia, would have strategic
consequences, and be the beginning of the end for US imperialism.