My World Earth: American intelligence chief brands U.S. spy efforts in Afghanistan 'ignorant' and 'disengaged'

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

American intelligence chief brands U.S. spy efforts in Afghanistan 'ignorant' and 'disengaged'

The U.S. military's intelligence chief in Afghanistan branded the work of his own spy agencies in the war-torn country as 'ignorant' and 'out of touch with the Afghan people'.

Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the U.S. military and its Nato allies, offered a bleak assessment of the intelligence community's role in the eight-year-old war.

In a report issued by the Centre for New American Security think tank, he described U.S. intelligence officials there as 'ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced ... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers'.

An operations officer was quoted in the report as calling the U.S. 'clueless' because of a lack of needed intelligence about the country.

The report highlighted tensions between military and intelligence agencies in the country. It urged changes such as a focus on gathering more information on a wider range of issues at a grassroots level.

The report's release comes less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, the second-most deadly attack in the agency's history.

The bomber was an Al Qaeda triple-agent from Jordan, according to NBC news.

The security breach was a major blow to the spy agency, which has expanded operations hunting down and killing Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and tribal areas in neighboring Pakistan, partly through the use of unmanned drone aircraft.

The drone strikes have fuelled public anger and have been sharply criticised by human rights groups.

'Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,' Flynn wrote in the report with his chief adviser, Captain Matt Pottinger.

The study said American intelligence had focused too much on gathering information on insurgent groups and was 'unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade'.

A revised war strategy unveiled last month by Barack Obama called for sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. The President wants to expand the counter-insurgency campaign to secure Afghan public support and sideline the resurgent Taliban.

Instead of mounting a counterinsurgency, Flynn asserts that the intelligence community had 'fallen into the trap' of waging an 'anti-insurgency campaign' aimed at capturing or killing mid-to-high level militants.

In a passage that also challenges Britain's strategy in Helmand province, he says: 'Merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them.

Major General Michael Flynn, left, authored the damning report with his deputy Captain Matt Pottinger and an academic, Paul Batchelor

Failings: Maj Gen Flynn's report criticises U.S. intelligence for failing to gather enough information at a grassroots level in Afghanistan

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Voice From the Field: The think tank report comes in the same week a suicide bomber killed seven CIA agents in an attack on the Afghan border with Pakistan

U.S. troops this morning stand near a vehicle holding transfer cases containing the remains American soldiers killed in Afghanistan

'This is common in many guerrilla conflicts and is especially relevant in the revenge-prone Pashtun communities whose co-operation military forces seek to earn and maintain.

'The Soviets experienced this reality in the 1980s, when despite killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they faced a larger insurgency near the end of the war than they did at the beginning.'

An intelligence official defended the focus of U.S. spy agencies on insurgents, saying: 'You can't be successful at counterinsurgency without a profound understanding of the enemy.'

Flynn's report said the intelligence community had enough analysts in Afghanistan but 'too many are simply in the wrong places and assigned to the wrong jobs'.

The report described the main problems as 'attitudinal, cultural, and human,' saying U.S. intelligence community had 'a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders'.

A U.S. operations officer quoted in the report, wondered why spies were unable to produce more information about the Afghan population.

He said: 'I don't want to say we're clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.'

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