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America's deputy chief of military intelligence in Afghanistan has issued a damning indictment of the work of US spy agencies, calling them clueless and out of touch with the Afghan people.
Major General Michael Flynn described US spies as “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers”. The bleak assessment of the intelligence community’s role in the eight-year-old war came in a report issued by the Center for New American Security, a US think tank. It comes less than a week after the CIA suffered one of the most damaging blows in its history, when a suicide bomber killed seven of its operatives at Camp Chapman, a high security CIA base near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. Major General Flynn's report blames what he calls America's "vast intelligence apparatus" for focusing too much on gathering information on insurgent groups, while remaining “unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade”. It quotes one operations officer saying that the US was unable to make informed decisions about what to do in Afghanistan because of a lack of much-needed intelligence about the country. “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,” the officer said. President Obama's revised strategy, issued last month, will see 30,000 more American troops sent to Afghanistan and an expansion of a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan public and sidelining a resurgent Taleban. But, writes Major General Flynn, the intelligence community had not been interested in counter-insurgency. Instead it had “fallen into the trap” of waging an “anti-insurgency campaign” aimed at capturing or killing mid-to-high level militants, while remaining oblivious to the people it was supposed to be helping. 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 describes the main problems as “attitudinal, cultural, and human,” saying US intelligence community had “a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders”. It highlights tensions between military and intelligence agencies and calls for changes such as a focus on gathering more information on a wider range of issues at a grassroots level. An operations officer in one US task force was quoted in the report as questioning why the intelligence community was unable to produce more information about the Afghan population. “Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” Major General Flynn wrote in the report with his chief adviser, Captain Matt Pottinger. “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 counterinsurgency.” Al Jazeera and the New York Times reported this morning that the bomber who blew up the CIA agents last week was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old doctor from Zarqa in Jordan. He had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence and brought to Afghanistan in an attempt to infiltrate al-Qaeda there and track down Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to Western intelligence sources. The CIA has declined to comment on the reports. The bombing killed four CIA officers and three contracted security guards working for the spy agency, along with a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, who had been the double agent's handler. The security breach was a major blow to the CIA, which has been pursuing a policy of hunting down and killing Taleban and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and tribal areas in neighbouring Pakistan, partly through the use of unmanned drone aircraft. The drone strikes - many of which have killed significant numbers of civilians - have fuelled public anger in Afghanistan and have been criticised by the Afghan government and by human rights groups. CIA officials have yet to reply to requests for comment on Major General Flynn’s report. An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended the focus on insurgents, saying: “You can’t be successful at counterinsurgency without a profound understanding of the enemy.”
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