U.S. Retools Military Intelligence

This one caught my eye. And made me wonder, what the hell has the military been doing for the past eight and a half years?

The report contains gems. One is: Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.

U.S. Retools Military Intelligence

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and JAY SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- A top U.S. general in Afghanistan has ordered an overhaul of military intelligence-gathering efforts after concluding that commanders weren't receiving the information they needed to win the war.

In a report published this week, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, said U.S. military and civilian analysts have focused too much on Afghanistan's insurgent groups and will be redeployed to devote more attention to its complex tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.

The blunt critique comes after a Jordanian suicide bomber last week killed seven Central Intelligence Agency employees at a remote base in eastern Afghanistan. The report was written before the CIA bombing, and its authors say its conclusions were meant to apply to military intelligence personnel. But coming days after the CIA bombing, the report highlights the challenges and dangers of collecting viable intelligence in Afghanistan.

In the report, Gen. Flynn and two of his aides argue that the U.S. intelligence community is "ignorant" about key aspects of Afghan society and can often "do little but shrug" in response to questions from senior policymakers.

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," Gen. Flynn wrote. "History is replete with examples of powerful militaries that lost wars to much weaker opponents because they were inattentive to nuances in their environment."

The report was published by the Center for a New American Security, a centrist Washington think tank. It is unusual for a senior commander to release such an assessment in a nongovernmental venue, and a defense official said that the Pentagon was surprised and disappointed by the report's publication by the think tank. The report's authors wrote that they wanted to "broaden its reach" inside and outside the military by publishing it through CNAS.

U.S. officials say the CIA bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was an informant who had secretly begun working with al Qaeda as a double agent. On Tuesday, Jordanian officials said the country's General Intelligence Department detained and interrogated Mr. al-Balawi around a year ago because of concerns he was tied to al Qaeda.

The GID subsequently released Mr. al-Balawi after concluding he'd become a loyal covert asset of the agency, the officials said. Mr. al-Balawi, who was living in Pakistan, began contacting the GID by email and passing on "credible" information about al Qaeda leaders and plots against Jordan, the U.S. and other Western allies, the officials said.



* Read Maj. Gen. Flynn's report

The GID turned the information over to the CIA and other Western governments, which maintain close ties to the Jordanian intelligence agency, they said.

U.S. intelligence officials are working to verify their belief that the double-agent was working with al Qaeda. The meeting, one official said, was about "important people" in al Qaeda. "It was the most promising lead" the agency had, the official said. "If you've got promising leads brought to you by your friends, coupled with information that checked out," he added, "it was the agency's first duty to meet with this person."

The agency hasn't yet had a chance to do a full review of what happened. But questions it seeks to answer include why the bomber was allowed onto the compound without being checked and why so many officers were near the bomber at the time of the explosion.

Jordanian officials said they expected a team of CIA investigators to visit Amman in coming days to seek information about Mr. al-Balawi and the circumstances surrounding the attack.

Improving U.S. intelligence efforts in Afghanistan has long been a priority of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the senior American officer in Kabul. Gen. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000-strong International Stability Assistance Force, has warned that a failure to better understand the Afghan people threatens the success of the war.

View Full Image
A U.S. Army sergeant patrols Alo Khil village in Afghanistan's Khost province in late December. In a report this week, a top U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered that military intelligence-gathering efforts be restructured to focus more on the country's tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.
Reuters

A U.S. Army sergeant patrols Alo Khil village in Afghanistan's Khost province in late December. In a report this week, a top U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered that military intelligence-gathering efforts be restructured to focus more on the country's tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.
A U.S. Army sergeant patrols Alo Khil village in Afghanistan's Khost province in late December. In a report this week, a top U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered that military intelligence-gathering efforts be restructured to focus more on the country's tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.
A U.S. Army sergeant patrols Alo Khil village in Afghanistan's Khost province in late December. In a report this week, a top U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered that military intelligence-gathering efforts be restructured to focus more on the country's tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.

Intelligence shortfalls in Afghanistan have been a longstanding concern of top U.S. commanders, and the issue surfaced again during the Obama administration's lengthy Afghan war review last year. White House officials asked for detailed reports about local conditions in key regions of Afghanistan, but military intelligence analysts "could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments," Gen. Flynn and his co-authors wrote.

Gen. Flynn has the power to carry out the changes outlined in the report. He and his co-authors said they would overhaul intelligence gathering and analysis by creating teams of analysts who will focus on individual regions of the country, rather than on single issues such as narcotics. Gen. Flynn likened the analysts to journalists, and said they'd be directed to visit individual units throughout their regions to collect localized information.

The analysts will be assigned to new Stability Operations Information Centers, which will work to collate disparate streams of information about individual regions of Afghanistan and then make the data available to military and civilian personnel from the U.S. and its Western allies, as well as Afghan officials.

—Siobhan Gorman contributed to this article.