The US military’s intelligence chief in Afghanistan on Monday sharply criticized the work of US spy agencies there, calling them ignorant and out of touch with the Afghan people.
In a report issued by the Center for New American Security think tank, Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the US military and its NATO allies, offered a bleak assessment of the intelligence community’s role in the eight-year-old war.
He described US intelligence officials there 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.”
An operations officer was quoted in the report as calling the US “clueless” because of a lack of needed intelligence about the country.
The report, which highlighted tensions between military and intelligence agencies, urged changes such as a focus on gathering more information on a wider range of issues at a grassroots level.
Release of the report came less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at a US base in eastern Afghanistan, the second-most deadly attack in agency history. NBC News reported on Monday that the bomber was an al-Qaeda double agent from Jordan, citing unnamed Western intelligence officials.
The security breach was a major blow to the CIA, 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 fueled public anger and have been sharply criticized by human rights groups.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” Flynn wrote in the report with his chief adviser, Captain Matt Pottinger.
The report said US intelligence had focused too much on gathering information on insurgent groups and was “unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade,” the report said.
A revised war strategy unveiled last month by US President Barack Obama calls for sending 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan and for expanding a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at garnering Afghan public support and sidelining a resurgent Taliban.
Instead of mounting a counterinsurgency, Flynn asserted 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.
An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended the focus of US 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 the US intelligence community had “a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.”
An operations officer at 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.
“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.
North Korea tested nuclear-capable rocket launchers, state media reported yesterday, a day after Seoul detected the launch of about 10 ballistic missiles. The test comes after South Korean and US forces launched their springtime military drills, due to run until Thursday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Saturday oversaw the testing of the multiple rocket launcher system (MRLS), the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. The test involved 12 600mm-caliber ultra-precision multiple rocket launchers and two artillery companies, it said. Kim said the drill gave Pyongyang’s enemies, within the 420km striking range, a sense of “uneasiness” and “a deep understanding
RECOGNITION: Former Fijian prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry said that Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy serves as a stabilizing force in the Indo-Pacific region Taiwan can lead the unification of the Chinese people, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Polish president Lech Walesa said in Taipei yesterday, adding that as the world order is changing, peaceful discussion would find good solutions, and that the use of force and coercion would always fail. Walesa made the remarks during his keynote address at a luncheon of the Yushan Forum in Taipei, titled “Indo-Pacific Partnership Prospects: Taiwan’s Values, Technology and Resilience,” organized by the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Walesa said that he had been at the forefront of a big peaceful revolution and “if
North Korea yesterday fired about 10 ballistic missiles to the sea toward Japan, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, days after Pyongyang warned of “terrible consequences” over ongoing South Korea-US military drills. Pyongyang recently dashed hopes of a diplomatic thaw with Seoul, Washington’s security ally, describing its latest peace efforts as a “clumsy, deceptive farce.” Seoul’s military detected “around 10 ballistic missiles launched from the Sunan area in North Korea toward the East Sea [Sea of Japan] at around 1:20pm,” JCS said in a statement, referring to South Korea’s name for the body of water. The missiles
‘UNWAVERING FRIENDSHIP’: A representative of a Japanese group that co-organized a memorial, said he hopes Japanese never forget Taiwan’s kindness President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday marked the 15th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, urging continued cooperation between Taiwan and Japan on disaster prevention and humanitarian assistance. Lai wrote on social media that Taiwan and Japan have always helped each other in the aftermath of major disasters. The magnitude 9 earthquake struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, triggering a massive tsunami that claimed more than 19,000 lives, according to data from Japanese authorities. Following the disaster, Taiwan donated more than US$240 million in aid, making it one of the largest contributors of financial assistance to Japan. In addition to cash donations and
RSS