Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  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.”

  In November 2007, a widely respected London-based nonprofit organization, the Senlis Council, issued a study based on the reporting they were receiving from their personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. Its central conclusion was that the Taliban guerrillas had extended their operations into 54 percent of the 398 districts in Afghanistan and were also “enjoying increasi
ng control of several parts of southern, south-eastern and western Afghanistan, ever more complicating the NATO-ISAF stabilization mission in the country.”

  The report came under attack almost instantly, both publicly and privately, from a host of senior NATO defense officials and military commanders, including the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, all of whom disputed the report’s conclusions and claimed that the Taliban held only a small sliver of largely desolate and sparsely populated rural districts in the southern part of the country, and as such posed no meaningful threat to security or the ongoing reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. According to General McNeill’s spokesman, Brigadier General Carlos Branco, the Taliban controlled only five of the fifty-nine districts in southern Afghanistan, and the territory they did control consisted only of “very small pockets without territorial continuity.”

  On the other hand, the U.S. intelligence community’s Afghan specialists generally agreed with the conclusion of the Senlis report because it matched almost exactly what they had been saying for two years. In early 2008, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Dr. Peter R. Lavoy, sent to policymakers a classified paper, which, in essence, came down on the side of the Senlis Council, concluding that security conditions in Afghanistan were indeed deteriorating. Instead of the five districts General McNeill’s staff argued the insurgents held, Lavoy’s paper concluded that the Taliban largely controlled about 10 percent of the country; and in the territory that they controlled they had established “shadow governments,” including fully functional civil administration, police, and judicial systems, that were far more efficient and efficacious than the legitimate but corrupt and inefficient Afghan government.

  A Dutch military intelligence officer with over a decade of experience gained in hellholes like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Eritrea, Jaap Maartens (pseudonym) was one of the more than 870 officers, enlisted men, civilians, and contractors from twenty-six NATO countries who worked on the staff of the International Security Assistance Force, the combined U.S.-NATO headquarters in downtown Kabul that commanded all 52,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

  The ISAF headquarters compound where Maartens worked was located in the heart of the heavily guarded section of downtown Kabul known as the “Green Zone,” a 300-acre island of relative serenity surrounded by twenty-foot-high whitewashed walls topped by barbed wire, security cameras, and imposing guard towers that were manned twenty-four hours a day. The American commander of ISAF, General David D. McKiernan, and his fifty-man command staff had their offices on the second floor of the “Yellow Building,” a battered two-story mustard yellow structure that formerly housed the Afghan Military Sports Club until the Soviet invasion in 1979. In and around the Yellow Building were a number of first-class dining facilities, fast-food outlets, a modern fitness center complete with racks of free weights and Stair Masters, a baseball field, and a host of other modern amenities, including a pizza parlor, seven bars, and even a German beer garden in a Muslim country where the consumption of alcohol is strictly forbidden.

  A member of the ISAF intelligence staff’s “Red Cell,” Maartens was tasked with keeping track of the Taliban’s senior leadership, constantly trawling the intelligence databases that were available to him looking for new snippets of information about the men who were leading the insurgency in Afghanistan—who they were, their backgrounds, names of wives and children, education, prior military experience, and even trying to divine their motivations by what they told friends, family, and the occasional reporter. In short, his job was to put himself in the shoes of his enemy to try to figure out what made them tick.

  Like the vast majority of his colleagues, Maartens personally loathed the Taliban. He thought that everything the Taliban stood for was abhorrent, and their extreme interpretation of Islam morally repugnant. He was convinced that if the Taliban should win the war, they would return Afghanistan to exactly the same kind of extremist form of government that had existed when Mullah Omar ran the country from 1996 to 2001. Regardless of his personal feelings, though, Maartens was a consummate professional and he had a job to do, which was to try to assess the military strength and capabilities of the Taliban insurgency without passion or prejudice.

  By the summer of 2008, Maartens had become convinced from his reading of classified intelligence reporting that all the talk emanating from senior U.S., Canadian, and European politicians and generals that the coalition forces were winning the war in Afghanistan was, in the words of his supervisor, a British Army officer with long experience in Afghanistan, akin to “trying to put lipstick on a pig.”

  In the opinion of Maartens and his fellow intelligence analysts in Kabul, the Taliban were prevailing because they were fighting a smarter war than the U.S. and NATO forces, who were trying to fight a counterinsurgency campaign with a badly flawed military strategy, very limited resources, and little public support back at home.

  The biggest problem was that U.S. and NATO troop levels in Afghanistan were far below what was needed to combat the growing number of Taliban guerrilla attacks in the south. Dr. Thomas Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the leading scholars of the war in Afghanistan, has written that “the minimal U.S. troop presence in the south [of Afghanistan] means that the rugged, porous, and often ill-defined 2,450 km border between Pakistan and Afghanistan does not even constitute a speed bump to groups such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda seeking to increase their influence among the Pashtun tribesmen in the region.”

  Everyone agreed that poor leadership of the coalition war effort in Afghanistan was also a huge problem. Since 2002, a series of conventionally minded American generals, none of whom had any experience in counterinsurgency warfare, had tried and failed to beat the Taliban guerrillas using the same “search and destroy” tactics that the U.S. Army had used in Vietnam forty years earlier, and that the Soviets had repeated during the 1980s with the same disastrous results. Some American officers serving in Afghanistan who had studied military history at West Point or in college wondered how the generals in Kabul could be so stupid as to repeat the mistakes of the past. Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Chris Nash, who served a tour of duty as an adviser with the Afghan National Army in 2007 and 2008, later caustically wrote that the U.S. military in Afghanistan was “stealing pages from the Russian playbook one by one.”

  The parallels with the Soviet military’s disastrous experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s were striking. The U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, under strict orders from the risk-averse ISAF command staff in Kabul to keep casualties to a minimum, had reverted to what a U.S. Marine Corps After Action Report not meant for release to the public described as a “forward operating base mindset.” Just like the Soviet military twenty years earlier, 90 percent of all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan were holed up behind the walls of 150 heavily fortified forward operating bases and smaller outposts trying to protect the country’s cities and towns. In Helmand Province in southwestern Afghanistan, which the Taliban had controlled since 2006, British commanders admitted to American vice-president-elect Joe Biden in January 2009 that their four thousand troops were essentially being held captive inside their firebases by the Taliban, who roamed at will outside the gates of the bases.

  In the summer of 2008, the British Army garrison in the town of Sangin in Helmand Province found itself surrounded by hundreds of Taliban fighters and cut off from the rest of the British forces in the province. The garrison in Sangin, belonging to Lt. Colonel Ed Freely’s 1st Battalion of the 1 Royal Irish Regiment, was unable to move more than a mile or two beyond the town’s outskirts without coming under attack by the Taliban. When Freely’s troops opened an outpost south of Sangin called Patrol Base Armagh, the Taliban immediately cut it off, blocked the only road between the base and Sangin with dozens of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and tied down the outpost’s garrison with relentless RPG and AK-47 fire. Fearing that the Taliban might overrun the isolated and lightly manned outpost, the B
ritish evacuated it less than a month after it was established.

  When the U.S. and NATO troops did venture out of their bases, they tended not to stray far from the beaten track, staying close to the roads because their heavy armored vehicles had very limited off-road capacity. For example, the six-ton MRAP mine-resistant vehicles used by the U.S. Army and Marines, which broke down frequently, were so heavy that they could not be used off road.

  At nightfall, following the protocol laid down by the generals in Kabul, the patrols retired to the safety of their firebases, relinquishing control of the countryside to the Taliban. In the morning, the process repeated itself all over again, with one Marine Corps officer sarcastically characterizing this practice as “Clear … go back to FOB. Clear … go back to FOB,” a repeat of what the U.S. military in Vietnam had done more than forty years earlier. Over time the U.S. and NATO troops wearied of their Catch-22 predicament and abandoned to the enemy’s control the rural towns and villages around their bases that they were unable to protect, which is also exactly what the Russian military had done in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

  The situation maps in the heavily guarded joint operations center at Kandahar International Airport, from where the military activities of all NATO forces in southern Afghanistan were controlled, looked like a post-Surrealist painting, consisting of dozens of blue inkblots, representing the firebases manned by NATO forces, surrounded by a sea of red, which represented the areas that were controlled or contested by the Taliban. Major Fred Tanner, who was the military assistant to Brigadier General John W. Nicholson, the American deputy commander of forces in southern Afghanistan, recalled that “there were areas where we had absolutely no presence, that we had ceded control to the Taliban. That was shocking to me.”