Intelligence Failures Crippling Fight Against Insurgents in Afghanistan, says Report/President Obama Has Things Backward in Afghanistan

Published on Friday, March 6, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

Intelligence Failures Crippling Fight Against Insurgents in Afghanistan, says Report

Leaked analysis condemns US for lack of co-operation • Senior officers' criticisms also cover Iraq campaign

by Peter Beaumont

A highly critical analysis of the US-led coalition's counterinsurgency in Iraq [1] and Afghanistan [2] has raised serious questions about combat operations in both countries - and the intelligence underpinning them.

A US radio operator near the Afghan-Pakistan border. US forces are accused of failing to share counterinsurgency intelligence with their international military allies. (Photograph/Reuters)

The confidential document presents a bleak picture of a counterinsurgency effort undermined by intelligence failures that at times border on the absurd.

Based on scores of interviews with British, US, Canadian and Dutch military, intelligence and diplomatic officials - and marked for "official use only" - the book-length report is damning of a US military often unwilling to share intelligence among its military allies. It depicts commanders in the field being overwhelmed by information on hundreds of contradictory databases, and sometimes resistant to intelligence generated by its own agents in the CIA.

Counterinsurgency efforts are also shown as being at the mercy of local contacts peddling identical "junk" tips around various intelligence officials, with the effectiveness of the intelligence effort being quantified by some senior officers solely in terms of the amount of "tip money" disbursed to sources.

The report describes a rigid reliance on economic, military and political progress indicators regarded by the authors and interviewees as too often lacking in real meaning.

Its sources complain of commanders who have slipped into relying on "the fallacy of body counts", discredited after the war in Vietnam as a measure of success.

The report, prepared by the RAND national defence research institute for US Joint Forces Command in November and leaked to the Wikileaks website, reveals the case of Dutch F-16 pilots in Afghanistan who were ordered by the US to bomb targets, only to be refused access to American "battle damage assessments" showing what they had hit, on the grounds that the Dutch were not "security cleared" to view them.

Another interviewee describes how coalition forces at Camp Holland near Tarin Kowt in southern Afghanistan maintained 13 different intelligence sections, including US, Dutch, UAE, and Australian, all operating with minimal co-operation.

"It would have been helpful [for us to have] combined them; then we would have known everything," complained Lt Neils Verhoef, one of those interviewed for the report. "One section knew the location of an IED [improvised explosive device] factory, and we drove by it for three months."

The unflattering document will make grim reading for President Barack Obama as he grapples with the worsening crisis in Afghanistan, confronted by an increasingly emboldened Taliban and its allies. With counterinsurgency tactics now placed at the centre of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the RAND report suggests that many of the national armed forces involved lack skills to operate effectively.

[3]

It calls for a substantial overhaul of how military intelligence is gathered, organized and acted on. Quoting senior officers, it questions many everyday operations - from weapons searches to the killing or arrest of wanted individuals - suggesting that they "alienate" the local population for little measurable gain.

Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, former the senior British military representative in Iraq, said: "There were some operations taking place in Iraq where the success of the operation ... was judged solely against whether tactical success had been achieved; tactical success in terms of attrition of enemy forces, numbers killed or captured, numbers of weapons seized, amounts of explosives captured, extent of area controlled. By these criteria ... a given operation would be judged a success, regardless of the fact that it had seriously alienated the local population, and the fact that, within a few months, other insurgents had re-infiltrated and regained control."

An anonymous source quoted in the report stated that "operational commanders" continued to "indulge in the fallacy of body counts, and a month in which more Taliban are killed than in the previous month" was seen as progress. He added: "This is actually more likely to reflect the fact that there are more enemy on the battlefield than there were before."

Despite the huge emphasis on counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last two years, the report's authors, Russell Glenn and Jamie Gayton, find it necessary to remind military readers of the importance of the civilian population in their efforts, not least in protecting civilians "against attack by both the enemy and your own forces".

"Those interviewed in support of this research," they wrote, "noted with no little frustration that coalition forces themselves too frequently neglect to treat local community members properly."

Perhaps most damning of all, however, is the suggestion from several of those interviewed that often they felt that an overall strategy for what they were supposed to be doing was entirely lacking.

One of those interviewed was Brigadier General Theo Vleugels, who described his 2006 command experience in southern Afghanistan in terms worthy of a passage from Joseph Heller's Catch 22. "We didn't have a campaign plan when we started, but we later got one from my higher headquarters that was close to ours, which is not surprising as they told us to do what we told them we would do."

RAND declined a request for an an interview with the authors.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

 

Published on Friday, March 6, 2009 by The Progressive

President Obama Has Things Backward in Afghanistan

by Phyllis Bennis
 and Farrah Hassen

He is putting the escalation cart way out in front of the strategy horse.

Obama has already announced plans to escalate the war by sending 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. But in his address to Congress, he acknowledged he was still working to "forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan."

It would have been much more sensible to devise the strategy before deploying the troops.

As Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said, "If we just put troops, plunk them down, another 20-30,000 in Afghanistan ... we're on the wrong track."

Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires." The British, Russians and Soviets learned the hard way during the 19th and 20th centuries - they were each driven out long before they could claim "mission accomplished." Why do we think the American attempt will be any different?

Developments in Afghanistan certainly don't make a case for escalation. Eight years after U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban from Kabul, the group is on the rise again, not least because of local outrage over the killing of more Afghans by U.S. forces. The United States and its allies directly killed 828 people - ordinary people, children, women and old men, according to a new U.N. survey. Last July, just one U.S. air strike killed at least 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were traveling to a wedding in eastern Nuristan province.

Afghan anger toward the foreign troops is rising. A recent BBC/ABC News survey found that notwithstanding 90 percent opposition to the Taliban, less than half of Afghans hold a favorable view of the United States.

There are 56,000 NATO troops (including 18,000 Americans), and 19,000 other U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They were supposed to stabilize Afghanistan. But their presence has led to more Afghans being killed, not fewer. It's unlikely that another 17,000 pairs of boots escalating the war, still without a strategy, will somehow succeed.

Instead of more troops, what's needed is a negotiated, diplomatic settlement bringing together all parties in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the region - yes, including the Taliban.

As Ibrahim Khan, a cargo driver, told the Washington Post on Feb. 22, "Bringing in another foreign army is not going to help. They always come here for their own interests, and they always lose. Better to let everyone sit down with the elders and find a way for peace."

Khan knows his country's history. The Obama administration should listen.

© 2009 The Progressive

 

Phyllis Bennis is a fellow and Farrah Hassen is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. They can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org [1].

 

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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs