KABUL, Jan 6 : NATO’s top intelligence officer has ordered significant changes in the way information is collected and shared in Afghanistan , saying that without reform the US intelligence community will continue to be only marginally relevant to the counter-insurgency mission.
In a stinging assessment of the US intelligence effort after eight years of war, US Major General Michael Flynn directed intelligence workers to focus less on the enemy and more on civilian life.
The report was compiled before a suicide bomber killed seven CIA operatives in eastern Afghanistan last week. Flynn’s reform plan was published Monday by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington . Flynn said the report was intended for commanders and intelligence professionals in Afghanistan and in the United States and Europe .
The report said field agents are not providing the kind of intelligence that analysts need to respond to inquiries from President Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan , General Stanley McChrystal.
Intelligence gathering in Afghanistan suffered a deadly blow on Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber - believed to have been a Jordanian working as a double agent - killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer inside Camp Chapman , a highly secured forward base in Khost Province , in eastern Afghanistan .
However, Flynn wrote, US intelligence officials and analysts have spent too much energy focused on enemy activities and are “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers.’’
The report quotes McChrystal as saying in a recent meeting: “Our senior leaders - the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the president of the United States - are not getting the right information to make decisions with. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues.’ INP
No comments:
Post a Comment