Intel Wars Page 3

  The efforts of the U.S. government and the international community to reduce the illegal narcotics trade in Afghanistan had been an abysmal failure. Almost seven years’ worth of eradication efforts had been for naught, and billions of dollars wasted with little to show the effort. As of the summer of 2008, 2 million Afghan farmers were still openly growing opium poppies, and nobody wanted to do anything about it because opium farming and cultivation accounted for a staggering 30 percent of the Afghan gross domestic product. Even the Pentagon’s “emphasize the positive” 2008 annual report to Congress had to admit that “the overall counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan have not been successful.”

  Socially, the already weak threads that bound Afghanistan together as a nation were fraying. Organized crime was pervasive everywhere, and armed robbery and prostitution, all but unheard of during the Taliban regime, were now widespread problems in Kabul and the other big Afghan cities. Drug addiction had reached epidemic proportions, with a 2009 United Nations study estimating that there were at least 900,000 drug addicts in Afghanistan. A report prepared by the ISAF Rule of Law adviser revealed that in Helmand Province alone, “provincial officials believe nearly 60% of Helmand’s police force abuse drugs and that there are at least 70,000 addicts now living in Helmand.”

  Security conditions in “the Lumpy Suck,” the less than affectionate nickname given to Afghanistan by American GIs, had become so bad that the country had replaced Iraq as the most dangerous on the face of the planet. Taliban attacks across the country had jumped by one third, clearly indicating that the Afghan insurgents had become far more aggressive than had been the case in previous years. Declassified Department of Defense statistics show that as of June 2008, there were more combat incidents taking place in Afghanistan than in Iraq. And in the fall of 2008, another grim milestone was reached. According to the authoritative casualty database compiled by icasualties.org, beginning in May 2008 and continuing for the rest of the year, more Americans were killed every month in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

  In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban had managed to consolidate their stranglehold on significant parts of four key provinces that were garrisoned by troops from Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Romania. The Dutch general commanding the NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Major General Mart de Kruif, reported that the 23,000 soldiers under his command controlled, at best, 60 percent of the territory he was responsible for, and this was an optimistic assessment. And in the American-controlled sector in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban had managed to advance almost to the gates of Kabul, capturing large parts of three provinces (Logar, Wardak, and Ghazni) to the south and west of the Afghan capital, and had made significant inroads into the two provinces northeast of the city (Kapisa and Laghman provinces).

  Even in the Afghan capital of Kabul the situation was perilous. Customs officials at Kabul International Airport admitted to visitors that they saw flak jackets and Kevlar helmets in almost all of the checked baggage that they inspected coming off incoming flights. All of the Western-style luxury hotels in Kabul had their own private security force, bomb squad, and SWAT team equipped with heavy weaponry that would be the envy of any Third World army. Guests at hotels in Kabul were frisked and their baggage searched upon checking in. Once they got to their rooms, they found on the nightstand next to their beds detailed instructions on what to do in case the hotel was bombed or attacked by Taliban gunmen. But these extraordinary security measures are little more than window dressing, as was proved by the bloody Taliban attack on the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul on June 29, 2011, which killed at least ten guests and wounded dozens more.

  Even the 2008 edition of the Lonely Planet tourist guidebook for Afghanistan urged visitors to memorize how to say “Help!” (Komak!), “Is it safe?” (Khatar day?), “Are there landmines?” (Dalta nazhde kum mayn sha?), “bomb” (bam), “rifle” (topak), “rocket” (raket), “soldier” (askar), and “fighting” (jang).

  As of the summer of 2008, the U.S. intelligence community had been trying for six years to warn the White House and the Pentagon that the security situation in Afghanistan was headed in the wrong direction, but no one in Washington was listening or seemed to want to hear what the spies were saying.

  In September 2002, as the U.S. military prepared for the invasion of Iraq, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate which expressed the concern of the U.S. intelligence community that all was not well in Afghanistan. In the year since the downfall of the Taliban regime, armed clashes among and between warring Afghan ethnic and tribal groups had increased. Organized crime and narcotics trafficking, absent during the Taliban regime, had returned. And roving bands of Taliban guerrillas were once again operating in southern Afghanistan, attacking isolated American outposts and killing Afghan government officials and policemen.

  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked U.S. Central Command commander in chief General Tommy Franks to write a rebuttal. Voicing the view of the White House and the Pentagon, in October 2002 Franks issued his own estimate, which asserted that “the CIA assessment overstates the immediate risks to stability and security, and understates the positive developments underway to bring stability to Afghanistan.” For the next six years this was to be the position of the White House and the Pentagon whenever the intelligence community raised concerns about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan.

  Six years later, no one in the White House was paying attention to what the intelligence analysts were saying. The U.S. intelligence community was still being blackballed because many senior Bush administration officials believed that CIA officials had tried to undermine the White House and pin the blame for the 2002–3 Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) intelligence fiasco on President George W. Bush and his senior advisers. In retaliation, CIA director George J. Tenet was stripped of his access to the Oval Office and eventually forced to resign in June 2004. In his memoirs published after he left office, Tenet openly criticized a number of Bush’s advisers, among them Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, for what he described as “cherry picking” intelligence to support their desire to invade Iraq. Four years after Tenet’s resignation, the White House and the intelligence community had still not patched up their differences. Much of what the intelligence community was reporting to the White House about Afghanistan was, according to a former CIA official, still being “shit-canned.”

  This was not the first time that the CIA had been blackballed by the White House. In 1964, CIA director John A. McCone had incurred the wrath of President Lyndon B. Johnson by disagreeing with the White House’s plans to expand the U.S. role in the war in Vietnam. President Johnson punished McCone by shunning him and denying him access to the White House, leading to McCone’s resignation in April 1965. As a declassified CIA history put it, “McCone found resignation preferable to being ignored.”

  In the rarefied climes of the U.S. intelligence community, being ignored by the Oval Office is nothing short of a catastrophe. Without access to the president, and with senior policymakers either refusing to read its reports or openly questioning the veracity of their contents, by 2008 the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to effectively perform its principal mission of informing and advising the executive branch of the U.S. government had been reduced to a very low order.

  Virtually no one in official Washington, except perhaps for a few senior officials in the State Department, was paying much attention to what the intelligence community was reporting about Afghanistan in the summer of 2008. A former official who was then involved in the Afghan policymaking process admitted in a 2010 interview that Afghan president Hamid Karzai “could have run through the West Wing [of the White House] with his hair on fire and nobody would have paid much attention.”

  Once the Washington bureaucracy becomes fixed in a herd mentality, nothing short of a major catastrophe can shake it. According to Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and a
thirty-year intelligence veteran, “Experience has shown that major policy changes tend to come only from actual disasters.”

  For example, the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam laid bare for everyone to see all of the fallacies of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam War strategy. The disastrous two-day battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993 made famous by the book Black Hawk Down and the film of the same name, which resulted in eighteen American soldiers killed and seventy-three wounded, led the Clinton administration to accept that the war was not winnable and pull U.S. forces out of Somalia. But nothing comparable had yet happened to wake the somnolent Washington bureaucracy up to what was happening in Afghanistan.

  What is now referred to as the “Taliban resurgence” began in February 2006, when thousands of newly recruited Taliban guerrillas swarmed across the border from Pakistan into southern Afghanistan and launched their first nationwide offensive. Their timing could not have been better. On February 22, 2006, just as the Taliban’s offensive was kicking off, Iraqi insurgents bombed the al-Askari mosque in the city of Samarra, one of the holiest shrines for Iraqi Shiites. In the months that followed, Iraq was swallowed up in wave after wave of sectarian violence, which produced carnage on a scale never seen before in Iraq. As this was happening, the Taliban overran huge portions of four key provinces in southern Afghanistan, including Helmand Province, the heart of the Afghan illegal narcotics industry.

  The 2006 Taliban nationwide offensive took the U.S. intelligence community, and virtually every senior U.S. military commander and diplomat in Kabul, by surprise. Nobody in the U.S. government or intelligence community then thought that the Taliban were capable of mounting a nationwide offensive, much less capturing huge chunks of the southern part of Afghanistan. During the summer of 2006, the CIA station chief in Kabul, John C. “Chris” Wood, sent a number of cables to Washington warning that the military situation in Afghanistan was now deteriorating. Wood’s cables were ignored by the White House and the Pentagon, who were focused on the rapidly escalating cycle of violence in Iraq.

  A small number of Pentagon officials were alarmed by what was taking place in Afghanistan. In August 2006, Defense Policy Board official Marin Strmecki wrote a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warning that “the deteriorating security situation in 2006 was principally the result of the combination of two factors: A decision by the Taliban and its external supporters to escalate the scope and character of enemy operations; and weak or bad governance, particularly in southern Afghanistan, that created a vacuum of power into which the enemy moved.” But Strmecki’s memo was ignored.

  It did not help that the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald E. Neumann, was telling Washington the exact opposite of what Wood and Strmecki were reporting, telling Washington that the war was still being won and that the rise in Taliban attacks was only a temporary phenomenon. According to Neumann, “The violence does not indicate a failing policy; on the contrary we need to persevere in what we are doing … We are on the right track.”

  In November 2006, the office of the director of national intelligence (DNI) had issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the security situation in Afghanistan, the first that had been published on this subject in over three years. Written under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Jo Powell, a career diplomat who was the national intelligence officer for South Asia in the office of the DNI, the report took serious issue with Ambassador Neumann’s rosy prognosis, warning that the Taliban had made substantial progress on the Afghan battlefield over the preceding nine months, capturing the vast majority of the strategically important Helmand Province and large parts of neighboring Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. The report also noted that the Taliban guerrilla forces were not only larger and more capable but becoming far more aggressive, and that the escalating numbers of insurgent attacks were threatening to destabilize the entire southern part of the country and bring the already stalled reconstruction effort to a complete halt.

  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 goa
l 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.