NATO intel official: US intelligence community only ‘marginally relevant’ to Afghan mission

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NATO official: US spy work lacking in Afghanistan

KABUL — NATO’s top intelligence official has ordered significant changes to information-gathering in Afghanistan, saying the U.S. intelligence community is now only “marginally relevant” to the mission there.

U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn’s stinging assessment and plan to focus less on the enemy and more on civilian life was published Monday by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington. Flynn acknowledges that releasing the 26-page report through a think tank is unconventional but the report was aimed at reaching not only officers in his command but also other intelligence officials and instructors in the field, including those outside of Afghanistan.

The report was compiled before the CIA suffered a deadly blow to its operations on Dec. 30 when a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer inside Camp Chapman, a highly secured forward base in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. The CIA is not mentioned in Flynn’s report, which focuses on the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country.

The report said field agents are not providing intelligence analysts with the information needed to answer questions asked by President Barack Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

U.S. intelligence officials and analysts are “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects … and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers,” Flynn wrote.

The officials “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,” said the report, which was co-authored by Flynn’s adviser, Capt. Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“These analysts are starved for information from the field — so starved, in fact, that many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work,” said the report. “It is little wonder then that many decision makers rely more on newspapers than military intelligence to obtain ‘ground truth.’”

Field intelligence officers should not limit their reports to diagraming insurgent networks, Flynn said. They must also provide information about meetings with villagers and tribal leaders, translated summaries of local radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and field observations of Afghan soldiers and aid workers.

In the report, Flynn orders teams of analysts be assembled to collect information on a myriad of subjects at the grassroots level to replace the current practice of having one analyst study governance, a second look into narcotics trafficking and a third insurgent networks. Unclassified portions of the material will then be made available to the military, donor nations and aid workers.

“The authors of this document outline changes that must occur throughout the intelligence hierarchy,” the report said. “Its contents should be considered a directive by the senior author. … We chose to embody it in this unconventional report, and are taking the steps to have it published by a respected think tank, in order to broaden its reach.”

The Center for a New American Security was co-founded by Michele Flournoy, who has since become the undersecretary of defense, the Pentagon’s policy chief. The think tank provides analysis and proposes defense and national security policy changes and its reports are widely read by the military community.

In conventional warfare, troops depend on big picture intelligence to figure out their ground strategies, but in a counterinsurgency, troops, aid workers and others on the ground are usually the best informed about the enemy, the report said. Brigade and regional command intelligence summaries that rehash the previous days fighting are of little use compared with periodic reports that also address changes in the local economy, corruption and governance.

“I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are,” according to an operations officer quoted in the report. “We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.”

“The U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” the report concluded.

When he took command in Afghanistan in June 2009, McChrystal made similar calls for collecting more “white” information about local goings-on along with “red” analysis about enemy activities. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, second-in-command to McChrystal, subsequently ordered regional commands to begin answering wide-ranging questions about the Afghan government and local populations. Little, however, has changed in the collection of mostly enemy-related intelligence, the report said.

The report quotes McChrystal as saying 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. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Kunduz provincial governor said 14 Taliban were killed when their explosives-laden minibus blew up. Sami Yawar said the blast occurred Monday night on the outskirts or Kunduz city and said the militants apparently were aiming to place the vehicle inside the city and detonate it.