A regulation entitled ISAF Standard Operating Procedure 362 contained strict guidelines on how captured Taliban fighters were to be handled, including a requirement that U.S. and NATO forces transfer all detainees to the Afghan government within ninety-six hours of being captured or release them. Time and time again, SOP 362 proved to be unworkable on the battlefield because frontline American and NATO troops were not trained cops. They had no training in how to secure and mark evidence, and in the heat of battle, there was no time to complete the reams of paperwork required by the regulation for each prisoner. As a result, according to a restricted-access Marine Corps report, “over 90% [of all detainees were] released due to insufficient evidence” or because the ISAF authorities deemed that the evidence was “contaminated or improperly handled/documented.”
Those few Taliban detainees who were turned over to the Afghan authorities often paid a small bribe and were back on the streets in less than seventy-two hours. Some frustrated American field commanders went to extraordinary lengths to avoid turning prisoners over to the Afghan authorities, even going so far as doctoring detention reports and hiding prisoners.
There was no shortage of intelligence reporting for the analysts to read. Every American and NATO intelligence unit in Afghanistan was producing its own daily, weekly, and monthly intelligence summaries, assessments, estimates, and studies. According to several former ISAF intelligence analysts, they had to read on average about three hundred intelligence reports every day.
Another problem was that they had to wade through over a dozen computer databases in order to find the material they needed to do their job because very few of the databases were compatible with one another. The ISAF officer responsible for trying to knit together all of the intelligence databases admitted that “all the information we need is available in ISAF. We just don’t know where it is or how to access it.”
* According to intelligence sources, much of the best realtime intelligence reporting on the events leading up to the downfall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 came from intercepts emanating from Menwith Hill. The station is currently heavily engaged in monitoring efforts by the Syrian military to suppress popular demonstrations in the northwestern part of the country, as well as the ongoing fighting between Libyan military forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi and rebel forces.
* DHS also controlled the intelligence offices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
CHAPTER 3
The Sword of Damocles
The Continuing Travails in Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a place where the land fashions the people, rather than the people fashioning the land.
—SIR OLAF KIRKPATRICK CAROE (1892–1981)
In an interview conducted several months before his death in December 2010, Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special adviser for Afghanistan and Pakistan, opined that “we should have done things differently in Afghanistan.”
According to Holbrooke, “We made the same mistake the Russians made in the 1980s. We walked into a situation which we were not prepared for.” He was referring to the Soviet military’s disastrous ten-year war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, where despite committing 620,000 soldiers to the war, the Russians were soundly defeated, in the process suffering almost 15,000 dead and 55,000 wounded.
In Holbrooke’s opinion, the Pentagon had failed to candidly tell President Obama just how bad the situation was in Afghanistan and how poor the short-term prospects were for turning the situation around: “We did not know how bad the situation on the ground had become … We couldn’t hold the ground we took because of a lack of troops.”
What Ambassador Holbrooke was describing was remarkably similar to a decision made by President Lyndon Johnson more than forty years earlier in the summer of 1965: Against the advice of some of his advisers, including CIA director John McCone, he committed U.S. ground troops to the war in Vietnam when, if due consideration had been given to all the facts on hand, it might have been more statesmanlike to go back on the promises he made on the campaign trail and just walk away from the problem, as President Bill Clinton did in 1993 in Somalia.
If he had had a better understanding of the situation in Afghanistan, Obama could have told the American people after he was inaugurated that the Bush administration had ignored the problems in Afghanistan for seven years and had prosecuted the war with a flawed military strategy, allowing what had been a fixable problem in 2002 to metastasize into a full-blown and perhaps inoperable cancer by the time he took office in January 2009. But he didn’t. For better or for worse, Obama decided to stick by the promises that he had made on the campaign trail and stay the course with the Bush administration’s flawed Afghan military strategy, all because he was not given the information that he needed to make a more informed judgement.
But Holbrooke reserved his harshest criticism for the U.S. intelligence community, whose knowledge of the political, economic, and social dynamics of Afghanistan was grossly inadequate despite the fact that the U.S. had been at war in the country for more than seven years. President Obama’s 2009 decision to double the size of American forces in Afghanistan, according to Holbrooke, was made in an information vacuum. He recalled attending an intelligence briefing on the Taliban held in the White House Situation Room in early 2009, where a senior Obama National Security Council staffer, frustrated by the lack of specifics contained in the presentation, pointedly asked the CIA briefer, “What the hell have you guys been doing for the past seven years?”
Holbrooke was particularly shocked by how poor the intelligence was on the Taliban. “We did not know who we were up against. We did not know how many [Taliban] we were fighting, where they came from, or why they were against us … We knew nothing about the men leading them. Intel did not even have a good bio for Mullah Omar … and we did not even know who was on our side and who was on theirs.”
What Ambassador Holbrooke was describing was eerily similar to the Russian experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Compare Holbrooke’s views with a secret May 1988 report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which admitted that “the decision [to invade Afghanistan] was made where there was a lot of uncertainty as to the balance of forces in Afghan society. Our picture of the real social and economic situation in the country was also insufficiently clear … We did not even have a correct assessment of the unique geographical features of the country.”
In other words, the Soviets got themselves bogged down in a quagmire because, in large part, they did not have a good understanding of the country they were trying to tame. In Richard Holbrooke’s opinion, the Obama administration made the same mistake in 2009 when it decided to expand the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
If anyone at the Pentagon had bothered to read any of the well-researched books written about the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, they would have quickly discerned that one of the principal reasons the Soviets lost the war was that they did not use their vast intelligence resources to drive their military operations until it literally was too late.
Sadly, the U.S. military made exactly the same mistake as the Soviets, and it was not until recently that American commanders finally came to the sober realization that the strategy and tactics employed by the U.S. military since the U.S. invasion in 2001 were not working. For five years, counterinsurgency experts in the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have argued in vain that the Vietnam-era big-battalion search-and-destroy tactics used against the resilient and elusive Taliban guerrillas have been an utter failure. The problem has been that for the past five years, the White House and the Pentagon have not listened to what the experts were saying.
In June 2006, the top Pentagon official responsible for special operations, Michael G. Vickers, wrote a memorandum to Pres
ident Bush harshly critical of the way the U.S. military was handling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vickers, who is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, told Bush that the U.S. military had to stop using the failed Vietnam-era search-and-destroy tactics and shift the military’s focus to getting away from the protection of their firebases and attacking the enemy using intelligence information to drive the operations.
Unfortunately, neither President Bush nor Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld heeded Vickers’s advice. Only in the past year or two has the realization sunk in at the Pentagon that the strategy employed in Afghanistan was wrong, and that the only way the war can be won is by harnessing the power of our nation’s intelligence collectors and analysts so that they can give our soldiers the information they need to fight the Taliban. The change in strategy is a risky one. If the intelligence operators fail to do their job, then the chances for success on the Afghan battlefield dim to a very low order of probability.
Winning the intelligence war against the Taliban will not be an easy task. According to American military intelligence officials who have served there, Afghanistan is probably the most complex environment that they have ever worked in. Everyone agrees that Afghanistan is not really a country in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, it is an impoverished eighteenth-century landlocked feudal state roughly the size of the state of Texas, a loosely knit patchwork of seven major ethnic groups, 400 major tribal networks, and 32 million people, 80 percent of whom live in 40,000 poor rural villages. When you probe down to the village or rural farming community level, Afghanistan becomes even more complex; there loyalties are dictated not by who is in power in Kabul but rather by local tribal and clan politics and family ties. How previous rulers of the country managed to keep even a modicum of order in this chaos flummoxes many longtime Afghan observers, most of whom believe that the country is essentially ungovernable in its present form.
According to intelligence analysts who have served in Afghanistan, the problem has always been trying to get the succession of American and NATO generals who have held command positions in Kabul to understand that Afghanistan is much more than just a name on a map and a bunch of statistics on powerpoint slides. Without understanding the country and what makes it tick, victory is impossible.
Perhaps the first senior commander to fully appreciate how complex the Afghan battlefield really was, and how critically important it was to understand every facet and nuance of the country, was Major General Michael T. Flynn, who arrived in Kabul on June 15, 2009, as the new ISAF director of intelligence. Flynn was a protégé of General Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who had been brought in to replace General David D. McKiernan, who had been fired by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on May 11, 2009.
Flynn was no stranger to Afghanistan. He had served as the chief of intelligence for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, departing in July of that year when the country was still relatively peaceful. But much had changed in the intervening seven years. Flynn and his aides did a whirlwind tour of Afghanistan and quickly learned that the military situation was worse than he expected. His grim findings were incorporated into General McChrystal’s August 2009 classified report to Secretary Gates, which bluntly concluded that “many indicators suggest the overall situation [in Afghanistan] is deteriorating despite considerable effort by ISAF. The threat has grown steadily but subtly, and unchecked by commensurate counter-action, its severity now surpasses the capabilities of the current strategy.”
According to one of Flynn’s aides, the general was profoundly disturbed by the discombobulated state of the organization that he inherited. Not only was U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan poorly organized and desperately short of resources, it was not producing the kind of information that American field commanders urgently needed. According to the aide, “Our intelligence system was failing us.”
Flynn wasted no time demanding more intelligence manpower and equipment for Afghanistan, and he quickly got them. In a matter of only six months the size of the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul doubled from 125 to 300 American and NATO officers, including a contingent of top-flight civilian and military intelligence officers plucked from domestic assignments. By the end of 2009, there were almost 10,000 intelligence collectors, sensor operators, linguists, analysts, communicators, and the like in Afghanistan, about 5,000 of whom were Afghan nationals performing intelligence-related duties on the U.S. payroll. Dozens of new intelligence collection systems had arrived in Afghanistan, including more unmanned drones, reconnaissance aircraft, and a new family of ground-based SIGINT collection systems that were far better suited for the harsh and unforgiving Afghan environment than the systems they replaced.
Flynn also changed the way that intelligence worked in Afghanistan. The separate American and NATO intelligence infrastructures were merged together into a single coherent unit under the command of Rear Admiral Paul Becker. The old classification stovepipes that had prevented the sharing of intelligence between U.S. and NATO forces were dismantled; and all intelligence reports coming out of the ISAF intelligence staff were now written at a classification level low enough so that everyone down to platoon commanders could read them. Previous restrictions on how money could be spent on intelligence projects, like rentals of safe houses and cash payments to informants, were relaxed; and the bureaucratic red tape and prohibitive rules of engagement that had been inhibiting the use of drones and commando raids were done away with almost completely, with the number of intelligence-driven commando raids shooting up from about a hundred a month during General McKiernan’s tenure to more than five hundred a month by the end of 2009.
Serious problems remained, however. So many secret American intelligence organizations were running around Afghanistan with little or no supervision from Kabul that they sometimes tripped over one another. Matthew P. Hoh, then the State Department’s political adviser in Zabul Province and now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, recalled an incident in August 2009 when he was informed that Joint Special Operations Command commandos belonging to the special counternarcotics task force at Bagram Air Base were about to conduct a raid on the bazaar in downtown Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul Province, based on a single unverified piece of human intelligence that some of the sellers in the bazaar were dealing in illegal narcotics. But according to Hoh, nobody at Bagram had bothered to verify the intelligence, much less consult with U.S. government officials in Zabul to see if the planned raid was feasible, or if the intelligence was deemed credible by independent sources on the ground. The commando raid was canceled because of insufficient credible intelligence to warrant going ahead with the operation, but according to Hoh, “The damage to our standing in Qalat that the raid could have done was massive.”
Flynn ordered his analysts to start paying attention to the Afghan towns and villages coalition troops were fighting to hold on to and the people who lived in them. During his initial orientation tour, one field commander after another had told him that they knew very little about the environment they were fighting in or the people they were trying to defend. One battalion operations officer told Flynn, “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 problem was not an academic one. At the tactical level, army field commanders knew very little about the battlefield they were operating on. One battalion commander with the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division recalled in a recent interview that when his troops arrived in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009, he had only the vaguest notion of which villages in his sector were friendly, unfriendly, or sitting on the fence. The intelligence staff of the battalion he had replaced did not seem to have thought such information important. There was no database with the names and backgrounds of the local major landowners or village chiefs, what their tribal affiliation was, or even how many peop
le lived in each village and what their politics were. “How was I expected to win their hearts and minds,” the commander wondered, “if I knew nothing about them?”
If there is a nerve center for the Afghan intelligence war, it is Bagram Air Base, a sprawling 5,000-acre military complex thirty miles north of Kabul that is populated by almost 18,000 U.S. and NATO troops and civilian contractors.
The flightline and hangars at Bagram are jammed with a host of publicity-shy intelligence-gathering aircraft and unmanned drones. There is a U.S. Army unit called Task Force ODIN-A (Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize–Afghanistan), which flies both unmanned drones and some very secretive C-12 King Air aircraft that are equipped with reconnaissance cameras and sensitive SIGINT collection gear. This unit’s planes hunt for Taliban IED teams. Next to them on the flightline is a U.S. Air Force squadron that flies a dozen or so MC-12W aircraft that are equipped with high-resolution video cameras and SIGINT collection equipment to track the movements of Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan.
Keeping these mission-critical drones and aircraft flying in Afghanistan has always been a major challenge. Depending on the time of the year, these drones and reconnaissance aircraft spend more time idling on the tarmac than flying missions because of bad weather. During the summer months, winds aloft of fifty knots or more are not uncommon, and massive dust storms can cause brownouts that last days at a time. Army and air force drone maintenance crews at Bagram and Kandahar complain that they have had difficulty keeping their systems flying because of the massive amount of windblown sand and dust that gets ingested into the engines of their aircraft.
The west side of the Bagram base is honeycombed with over a dozen barbed-wire-enclosed compounds housing a plethora of secretive intelligence units. On one corner of the base is a heavily guarded building with a sign posted out front that identifies it as the home of the Remote Operations Cryptologic Center, where Taliban and al Qaeda cell phone calls are intercepted and translated. Just down the road is another compound, which houses the Joint Document Exploitation Center, where all captured Taliban documents go to be translated and analyzed.
Intel Wars Page 10
