Intel Wars (4 page)

A secret NATO intelligence summary
confirmed the gist of Powell's assessment, stating that “the Taliban, despite not winning any clear-cut battles, has nevertheless been able to increase its influence, particularly in southern Afghanistan. Helmand province continues to be the focus of the Taliban, where they are consolidating safe areas; they also hope to cut off or capture Kandahar city. The morale and confidence of fighters remains high. Funding to the Taliban has increased significantly over the last year, including from Arab countries, while revenues from the opium trade are likely to increase in 2007.”

Other classified reporting
from Afghanistan confirmed that the Taliban's battlefield successes were further damaging the reconstruction efforts in the south, with a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Kabul to Washington confirming that “the Taliban campaign in outlying areas has convinced significant portions of the local population the GOA [government of Afghanistan] cannot deliver governance and that ISAF [International Security Assistance Force, the combined U.S.–NATO command headquarters in Kabul] and international resolve are withering.”

These stark warning signs
, none of which were ever released to the public, were ignored by the White House and other Bush administration policymakers because, according to Paul D. Miller, a senior CIA intelligence analyst who headed the National Security Council's Afghan desk from 2007 to 2009, the White House and the Pentagon were so focused on the events then taking place in Iraq that no one was paying much attention at all to what was going on in Afghanistan. “Some policymakers were not aware of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,” Miller later wrote in the CIA's internal journal. “Others were aware, but chose to give more attention and resources to Iraq because they judged it to be a higher strategic priority or in greater danger of outright failure.”

Another problem was that a powerful coterie of officials in the White House and the Pentagon, centered around Vice President Dick Cheney, firmly believed that the U.S. intelligence community was being alarmist and overstating the seriousness of the situation in Afghanistan. These officials were more inclined to believe the reporting coming from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the senior U.S. military commander in Kabul, General Dan McNeill, whose views on the war were on the whole much rosier than what the intelligence community was reporting.

The years 2007 and 2008 were a time of repeated clashes between the White House and the Pentagon on one hand and the intelligence community on the other over what was the true state of affairs in Afghanistan. For instance, at a classified 2008 briefing for a congressional oversight committee, Pentagon officials argued that the Taliban could not win the war in Afghanistan because the insurgents were split into three major factions, each with different agendas and goals.
The intelligence community agreed
that the Taliban were not a unified, monolithic force but told the lawmakers that the classified reporting they were getting showed that despite their loose organization, the fighters belonging to the various Taliban factions were closely cooperating on the battlefield inside Afghanistan, especially in the American zone in southeastern Afghanistan, and were becoming increasingly effective.

At the same time, the Pentagon was telling
Congress that large numbers of al Qaeda fighters were operating alongside Taliban guerrillas inside Afghanistan. Weary CIA officials had to go up to Capitol Hill again to refute these allegations because the classified reporting they were seeing showed that al Qaeda had become a virtually nonexistent player in Afghanistan, with no more than a hundred al Qaeda fighters operating inside Afghanistan at any one time in 2008. It was an all too typical case of the Pentagon hyping the threat in Afghanistan by fudging the facts.

In fact, the senior leadership of the Taliban and al Qaeda vehemently disagreed on the fundamental goals of their respective organizations.
These divergent goals
were spelled out in a January 2007 interview with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who stated unequivocally that his organization only wanted to drive U.S. and foreign troops out of Afghanistan, which conflicted with al Qaeda's goal of waging global jihad against the West. Resentment of al Qaeda by senior Taliban commanders ran deep.
Mullah Sabir, a senior Taliban commander
in southeastern Afghanistan, told
Newsweek
“If they [al Qaeda] want to hide and fight here with us, we won't stop them. But they have no bases here, and we will not let them use our territory as they did before their strikes on the United States … Today we are fighting because of Al Qaeda. We lost our Islamic state. Al Qaeda lost nothing.”

The propensity of the White House and the Pentagon for “emphasizing the positive” about the war in Afghanistan was a constant source of frustration within the U.S. intelligence community. In a 2010 interview, a senior U.S. intelligence official who formerly served on the National Intelligence Council, the organization that wrote all of the National Intelligence Estimates that were sent to the president and his top national security advisers, said, “We gave the White House all the news that was fit to print, good and bad, about what was going on in Afghanistan. The problem was that somewhere between the time we sent over our assessments to the White House and the time our material ended up on the president's desk, the bad news somehow disappeared … It sure looked to me like someone was washing any material that might give the president heartburn out of our reporting.”

Thirty years earlier, President Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, Walt Rostow, had done exactly the same thing, cleansing all reporting coming out of the intelligence community of any information that ran contrary to the administration's position that the war in Vietnam was going well. In early 1967, Rostow asked the CIA to prepare a list of accomplishments that had been achieved in Vietnam that President Johnson could cite in a forthcoming speech. The CIA very reluctantly complied with the request, providing Rostow with a list of both achievements and what were described as “setbacks and losses.” Rostow knew that the president did not want to hear any bad news, so he cut out the section of the CIA report on “setbacks and losses” and forwarded the rest of the document to President Johnson.

The U.S. intelligence community's reporting on Afghanistan was deficient in many important respects. While the high-level National Intelligence Estimates proved to be remarkably prescient in accurately predicting the downward trend in security conditions in Afghanistan, much of the underlying analysis and reporting often amounted to little more than educated speculation.
According to Major General Mike Flynn
, the chief of military intelligence in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, his intelligence analysts in Kabul were so starved for information that many admitted that “their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work … It is little wonder then that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain ground truth.”

The simple reason for this was that high-level intelligence about the Taliban was extremely hard to come by. There were no high-grade intercepts of Taliban leaders talking on their cell phones, nor had the CIA or any of its foreign partners ever managed to insert an agent into the Taliban's high command in Quetta, Pakistan. The CIA stations in Kabul and Islamabad had tried just about everything they could think of to penetrate the high command, but without much success to show for all the time and vast sums of money spent on these efforts.

A CIA case officer recalled that midway through the Bush administration's second term in office, the agency's Kandahar base in southern Afghanistan was running an agent network comprised of Afghan and Pakistani truck drivers who drove Russian-made 2.5-ton “Jingle” trucks loaded with cargo back and forth between Kandahar and Quetta, which is widely believed to be where Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the rest of his fellow insurgent leaders have been hiding since the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001. Upon returning to Kandahar, the truckers would report to their CIA handlers any signs of Taliban activity they observed at the police checkpoints, petrol stations, and truck stops between the border crossing point at Spin Boldak and Quetta. The truckers produced reams of material about price gouging at local gas stations and corruption among local Pakistani police, but nothing about the Taliban. After a short period of time, the CIA station in Kabul judged the operation to be unproductive and shut it down.

Over time, among the most important and productive, if unlikely, sources of intelligence information for the U.S. intelligence community about the Afghan insurgents have proven to be the Taliban's Web sites, such as the English-language
Voice of Jihad
. These Web sites are monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by CIA and ISAF intelligence analysts for any new information that might reveal the Taliban's short- or long-term plans, or insight into the thinking of the Taliban's leadership in Quetta.

For instance, every year in April, the Taliban's leadership posts a communiqué on these sites announcing the launch of their annual nationwide offensive inside Afghanistan. American commanders in Kabul initially scoffed at these pronouncements, but the laughter quickly died when the communiqués proved to be accurate. The Taliban also post on the sites detailed battlefield updates, which have also been found to be generally accurate.

The most valuable information comes from the Taliban's glossy online magazine
al-Samoud
, which depending on which dictionary you consult translates as either “Resistance” or “Resilience.” American and NATO intelligence analysts are nearly unanimous in their opinion that
al-Samoud
has proven to be a particularly rich source of information about the inner workings of the Afghan insurgents, with each issue including interviews with senior Taliban officials and commanders, giving the names, backgrounds, and even color photographs of the Taliban's “shadow governors” and senior field commanders in Afghanistan, as well as providing descriptions of Taliban combat operations and obituaries of commanders killed in action.

During the Bush administration, Pentagon officials pressed the U.S. intelligence community to jam or disrupt the Taliban's Web sites, all of which had been traced long ago by NSA to computer servers inside Pakistan. Intelligence officials absolutely refused, on the grounds that these sites were among the best sources of intelligence information on the Taliban that they had available to them. The sites have been allowed to continue to operate unmolested ever since.

In some key areas, the U.S. intelligence community knew virtually nothing about the enemy we were fighting in Afghanistan.
The quality of the intelligence
on the Taliban was so deficient that even Afghan president Hamid Karzai wondered aloud how good U.S. intelligence on the Taliban was, asking the then commander of U.S. Central Command, General David H. Petraeus, “if we really knew who we were fighting.”

For instance, the U.S. intelligence community had no clear idea how many Taliban guerrillas our soldiers were up against. In 2008 there were literally dozens of estimates floating around the U.S. intelligence community on the number of Taliban guerrillas, but not one of them was based on any hard factual information. It was all pure guesswork.
When asked about this problem
, General Dan McNeill, a former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, had to admit to Pentagon reporters, “I don't know the answer.”

The further down the chain of command you went, the more apparent it became how little we knew about our enemy.
According to Captain Daniel Helmer
, a twenty-six-year-old Rhodes Scholar who served as a U.S. Army adviser to the Afghan National Police, then helped establish the Afghan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul, “We have only the most trivial understanding at the local level of who the insurgents are and what their narratives, networks, motivations, demands, and support structures are. We have an even poorer understanding of the human terrain, such as tribes and other networks, and their dynamics … While we possess some national-level understanding of the insurgency, we know little about how various pieces of the puzzle fit from one region into another. We have not been able to predict what the enemy will do, nor have we been able to disrupt his decision cycle.”

We did not even know much about the men leading the Taliban insurgency in spite of the puff profiles the analysts were reading on the Taliban's Web sites. This was made abundantly clear in 2010, after an incident in which a man claiming to be a senior Taliban official named Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour was secretly flown to Kabul ostensibly to negotiate peace terms with the Afghan government on behalf of Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Mansour should have been well known to U.S. intelligence. He had been the commander of the Taliban's air force prior to the collapse of the Taliban regime in December 2001, and since 2003 he had been a member of the Taliban Leadership Council in Quetta as well as the Taliban's “shadow governor” of Kandahar Province.

But it turned out that the man claiming to be Mansour was an impostor. The con was only uncovered weeks later when an Afghan government official who knew Mansour alerted the Afghan intelligence service that the man on the other side of the negotiating table was not Mullah Mansour. The impostor immediately disappeared, but not before collecting suitcases of cash from NATO and Afghan officials to compensate him for his services.
According to Robert Baer
, a veteran CIA clandestine services officer, the incident was yet “another worrying sign that we're fighting blind in Afghanistan.”

More often than not, Western newspapers and reports put out by nongovernmental organizations have done a better job of correctly assessing the security situation in Afghanistan than the classified reporting being produced by the U.S. intelligence community in Washington or the Kabul-based intelligence analysts.
The former chief of intelligence in Afghanistan
, Major General Mike Flynn, has admitted that some of his battalion intelligence officers had told him that they were getting “more information that is helpful by reading U.S. newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries.”