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.