Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  • Intelligence cooperation with Pakistan came to a near-complete standstill in early 2011, calling into question whether Pakistan can ever again be trusted as a full and valued partner in the global fight against terrorism.

  • The intelligence community failed to provide any discernible warnings prior to the collapse of the pro-American regimes in Egypt and Tunisia in early 2011.

  • The U.S. intelligence community did a creditable job of monitoring the activities of Muammar Qaddafi’s military during the six-month-long Libyan civil war in 2011. But very little of this information was ever given to the frontline Libyan rebel fighters because of questions about their reliability. Despite this, the rebels still managed to beat Qaddafi’s forces and capture Tripoli on their own.

  • The CIA’s counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia have been stalled for two years. In Yemen, for instance, since the spring of 2011 anti-government tribal forces have seized more territory from government forces. After Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh was gravely wounded on June 3, 2011, and left the country for medical treatment, the security situation deteriorated even further. Street protests in the capital of Sana’a and in other major Yemeni cities intensified as various opposition groups united for the first time against the Saleh regime. And the al Qaeda affiliate in the country has taken advantage of the situation to expand its zone of control in the southern part of the country.

  • Iran continues to work diligently on building a nuclear weapon despite the imposition of harsh economic sanctions and the interdiction efforts of the U.S. intelligence community.

  • The threat of domestic homegrown terrorism has continued to evolve in more dangerous directions since Obama became president, but the intelligence community has not shown any sign that it is adapting to meet the new threat.

  Rather than describe, as other books have already done, the role played by President Obama and his national security team in Washington, this book instead focuses on the role played by the intelligence community on the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran, just to name a few.

  The book also seeks to answer some fundamental questions, such as: Is the U.S. intelligence community finally working as it should ten years after 9/11? Does the intelligence community currently have the kind of strong, authoritative leadership needed to perform its vital mission? Have the vast number of appendages that comprise the U.S. intelligence community ever been merged into a fully functioning and cohesive organization? Is the intelligence community producing the kind of information needed by the U.S. government and military? Have the White House and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security establishment made full and effective use of the material that has been produced by the intelligence community?

  CHAPTER 1

  Lipstick on a Pig

  Warning Signs in Afghanistan

  Guard against arrogance, avoid underestimating the enemy, and be well prepared.

  —MAO TSE-TUNG, NOVEMBER 1949

  British prime minister Winston Churchill is purported to have said that “Americans will always do the right thing … once they have exhausted all the alternatives,” which is a nice way of saying that we Americans have a nasty habit of repeating different variations of the same mistake over and over again until, usually by sheer happenstance, we finally get it right.

  Churchill’s words are as meaningful today as they were seventy years ago. Newly declassified documents and leaked Pentagon and State Department cables show that at the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the U.S. and NATO militaries were still making exactly the same mistakes in Afghanistan that American commanders had made in Vietnam over forty years earlier, and that, with some slight variations, the Soviets had repeated during their disastrous war against the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s. A decade after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the White House is still, to paraphrase Churchill, exhausting all the alternatives in the search for a formula for victory. This is the story of how we got there, as seen through the eyes of American and NATO intelligence officials.

  The summer of 2008 was an uneasy time for America. The economy was in a state of free fall, ultimately leading to the near-total collapse of the U.S. banking sector four months later. Nearly every evening, the network news led with stories about falling home prices and the collapse of a number of major mortgage lending institutions. The stock market was beginning to fluctuate wildly; prices for basic foodstuffs, such as bread and milk, were rising rapidly; and companies across the country were beginning to lay off thousands of workers as orders for goods and services began to dry up.

  In the midst of the financial meltdown, on June 3, 2008, a formerly obscure first-term senator from Illinois named Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s presumptive candidate for president of the United States. But the election that would pit Obama against the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was still five months away. The vast majority of Americans headed off on their summer vacations, not intending to pay much attention to the race for the White House until after the summer was over.

  Almost seven thousand miles from Washington, the war against the Taliban, which had been raging without respite for almost seven years, was not going well.

  On June 3, 2008, the same day that Obama became the Democratic candidate for president, General David D. McKiernan assumed command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, and with it command of all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

  A grizzled combat veteran with thirty-six years of service, McKiernan was widely viewed within the U.S. military as one of the army’s top field commanders. He had participated in the liberation of Kuwait (Operation Desert Storm) in 1991, then commanded U.S. forces in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and led troops during the war in Kosovo in 1999. He had earned plaudits for commanding all U.S. and coalition ground forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, leading some inside the Pentagon to whisper that he was destined to become the army chief of staff. In February 2008, McKiernan was offered the command of the 52,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which on the surface was a prestigious assignment. But the choice of McKiernan puzzled many in the Pentagon because, despite his numerous accomplishments, he was a tank man who had no experience whatsoever with Afghanistan or with counterinsurgency warfare.

  At McKiernan’s first staff meeting, on the morning of June 4, 2008, in the wood-paneled conference room at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, his acting intelligence chief, Lt. Colonel Patrick “Pat” McNiece, told him in no uncertain terms that the 52,000 heavily armed American and NATO forces that he now commanded, backed by artillery, tanks, and limitless air power, were slowly but inexorably being driven back by a much smaller force of Taliban guerrillas, most of whom were illiterate villagers and farmers with no formal military training armed with nothing heavier than AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers left over from the war with the Soviets in the 1980s.

  As the PowerPoint slide briefing progressed, it became increasingly clear to those in the room just how serious the situation was. Taliban attacks in the American zone of operations in eastern Afghanistan during the first six months of 2008 were up 40 percent over the previous year. In the NATO zone in southern Afghanistan, attacks had jumped by 60 percent. In the previously quiescent Italian zone of operations in western Afghanistan, Taliban attacks had jumped a startling 50 percent. The casualty figures for U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops killed or wounded in action were well above what had been experienced in 2007.

  The bleakness of the briefing took many in McKiernan’s party by surprise because it differed so markedly from what they had been told in Washington. One of the general’s aides turned to a colleague and muttered, “Oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into!”

  Back in Washington, the Bush White House and the Pentagon were in a “state of denial,” doggedly proclaiming that the trajectory of the war in Afghanistan
was headed in the right direction despite much evidence to the contrary. The Pentagon and NATO’s respective public relations machines furiously countered the incessant bad news about the war by giving the public a steady drumbeat of “all good news, all the time,” insisting that the security situation in Afghanistan was actually improving and that the war against the Taliban insurgency was being won. Take for example the illusory assessment contained in a June 2008 Pentagon report to Congress that assured the lawmakers that “the security situation in [Afghanistan] was improving.”

  There were others who, at least publicly, thought that the war in Afghanistan was going well. One such person was General Dan K. McNeill, the man whom Dave McKiernan had replaced as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who wrote that “Afghanistan is clearly on the road to recovery; a president and parliament elected by the people; a constitution that is among the best in central and south Asia; an Afghan National Army and National Police that are growing in capability by the day; and reconstruction and development that are steadily improving the quality of life of the Afghan people.” McNeill caustically dismissed as alarmist much of what was then appearing in the press about the increasing number of armed attacks, telling a group of amused reporters that these incidents were not the work of the Taliban but rather a reflection of what he described as increased “criminal activity, narcotics trafficking and tribal disputes.”

  The classified diplomatic and intelligence reporting reaching Washington from Afghanistan told a much grimmer story, one almost completely at odds with what was coming out of the White House and the Pentagon press briefing rooms, or General McNeill’s assessment of the situation. According to the late Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special adviser for Afghanistan and Pakistan, “There has always been a disconnect between what was being reported internally [about Afghanistan] and the talking points that the White House and Pentagon officials worked off for the Sunday talk shows … You would never know we were talking about the same war.”

  It is certainly true that in every war since the dawn of time, governments have sought to put the best possible spin on events, especially when a war is unpopular. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, plus the U.S. military in Vietnam, played fast and loose with the facts in order to justify an increasingly unpopular war. And just as with Vietnam, the Bush administration and the American commanders in Kabul refused to accept the bad news, and would not admit to the public that the war in Afghanistan was not going well, proving correct Senator Hiram Johnson’s famous assertion that truth is the first casualty of war.

  An excellent example of this disconnect was the portrayal of President Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government. Publicly, the U.S. government was characterizing Karzai’s government as being the epitome of a vibrant new democracy.

  In fact, the Afghan government was a train wreck. Seven years of ineptitude, corruption, and misrule by the Karzai regime had opened the door to the Taliban’s resurgence. Angry Pashtun tribesmen, many of whom had been preyed upon by venal Afghan government officials or policemen, were flocking to the Taliban’s banner by the thousands.* Not because they believed in what the Taliban stood for. Rather, they just wanted a modicum of justice and security in their lives. According to an internal planning document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Kabul, “In many areas, the Afghan population neither trusts nor respects a government they perceive to be involved in abuse of power, rampant corruption, and predatory behavior with few opportunities for redress … Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban-rule provided.”

  Afghanistan was, according to the watchdog group Transparency International, the second most corrupt nation on earth. Only the failed state of Somalia was worse. Longtime observers of Afghanistan are quick to point out that corruption has always been a fixture in Afghanistan society. In order to get anything done in Afghanistan, whether fixing a speeding ticket or getting a permit to sell kebabs on a street corner, payment of a small bribe (baksheesh) is a necessity. But the level of corruption in Afghanistan, especially within the Afghan government and military, has grown unchecked since the U.S. invasion of the country in 2001. By 2008, not only was corruption pervasive, it was endemic at all levels of the Afghan government, with a Pentagon document admitting that it “went beyond even cultural norms.”

  Centuries ago, the Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that “the first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” In the view of many officials in the U.S. intelligence community, the open corruption of the clique of officials who constituted Karzai’s kitchen cabinet spoke volumes about the regime the U.S. government and military were fighting to protect and the man who led it. The venality of many of Karzai’s closest advisers was so transparent that one of the staunchest supporters of the war General Barry R. McCaffrey, President Bill Clinton’s drug czar, was forced to admit that Karzai “has a collection of ruffians in his inner circle.”

  One notable example was the hilariously inept effort by President Karzai’s political allies to rig the August 2009 Afghan presidential elections. Election monitors noticed that 3 million Afghans voted for Karzai or his political allies, but no ballots could be found for these voters. So Karzai officials hurriedly manufactured 3 million ballots to account for these “ghost voters.” The fraud was quickly exposed, but of course none of the officials involved were ever punished, and Karzai’s election to another term in office was certified despite what had just occurred. According to Dr. Thomas H. Johnson, a longtime Afghanistan watcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, “The Kabul government is so corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent that even its election rigging is buffoonish.”

  With a few significant exceptions, Afghanistan’s provincial and district governors, all of whom were political appointees named by Karzai, were taking advantage of their positions to shamelessly line their pockets by stealing reconstruction aid provided by the U.S. government, as well as through organized crime activities, narco-trafficking, smuggling, and a host of other illegal schemes. Little effort was made to hide these activities. A classified 2009 State Department survey of corruption in Ghazni Province in southeastern Afghanistan found that graft was so pervasive that the report concluded that the local provincial government was a “criminal enterprise masquerading as public administration.” And the governor of neighboring Paktia Province, Juma Khan Hamdard, was deemed to be so corrupt that a secret State Department cable described him as “detrimental to the future of Afghanistan.”

  The Afghan National Army (ANA), which the Pentagon was loudly claiming was “a significant success story,” was in fact riddled with corruption at all levels of the chain of command. Captain Carl Thompson, a Maryland Army National Guard officer who served as an adviser with the ANA from May 2006 to May 2007, recalled that his Afghan brigade commander siphoned off half the fuel out of every shipment his unit received and diverted it to gas stations owned by his family; and one of the brigade’s logistics officers stole thousands of prepackaged meals (MREs) meant for his soldiers and sold them on the black market.

  Corruption in the poorly trained and ill-disciplined 98,000-man Afghan National Police (ANP) was much worse, with Afghan policemen in many instances openly preying on the Afghan villagers they were supposed to protect. The predations of the ANP were most apparent in Kabul. On the road into downtown Kabul from the airport, Afghan policemen routinely stopped taxi drivers at checkpoints to demand bribes for alleged minor driving infractions. You could rid yourself of this hassle by paying a 1,000-afghani ($20) bribe to the police commander at the first checkpoint leading to the airport, who then radioed all other checkpoints down the road to let you pass without incident. A prominent Kabul businessman only half-jokingly admitted that he could not leave home without a thick wad of 100-afghani bills in his pocket so that he could bribe all of the policemen who routinely stopped him on the way to work
. The situation was so apparent that a 2008 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan described the ANP as “a predatory force plagued by systemic problems beyond lack of professionalism, equipment, and training.”

  The U.S.-government-run reconstruction effort in Afghanistan was both underfunded and horrendously mismanaged. Tens of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money intended to help rebuild Afghanistan was being stolen from right under the noses of the U.S. government agencies that were supposed to oversee these programs. A British aid official interviewed in 2010 recalled one particularly egregious example in which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) paid some politically connected Afghan construction contractors $600,000 to build a grammar school in downtown Kabul that should have cost only $30,000. The remaining $570,000 ended up in the Dubai bank accounts of the contractors and their patrons in the Afghan government. A March 2010 report estimated that every weekday, couriers carrying $10 million in stolen financial aid left on the daily Ariana Airlines flights from Kabul International Airport bound for offshore banking centers in Dubai, Turkey, Yemen, and even the United States.

  But corruption was only a small part of the problem. Another factor driving the Taliban insurgency forward was that Afghanistan economically was a basket case. The United Nations still ranked Afghanistan as the fifth-poorest nation on the face of the earth, despite the billions of dollars of U.S. financial aid that had been poured into the country since the 2001 U.S. invasion. More than 41 percent of the Afghan populace still lived below the poverty line, and unemployment stood at a staggering 40 percent. Food shortages were widespread, and malnutrition was pervasive. Seventy-two percent of all Afghans could not read or write, the lowest literacy rate in the world. The average life expectancy of an Afghan was still only forty-two years, and twenty-six out of every hundred Afghan children died before they reached the age of five, the worst infant mortality rate in world.