US intelligence 'failing Afghan operation'

US intelligence is failing to provide vital information needed for success in Afghanistan, a Nato expert has warned.

Eight years into the war its work is only “marginally relevant” to the overall mission, focusing too much on the enemy and not enough on civilian life.

The stinging assessment said field agents were not providing intelligence analysts with the information needed to answer questions asked by US President Barack Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

US intelligence officials and analysts are “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers 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,” US General Michael Flynn said in report released for the Centre for a New American Security think tank in Washington.

The officials “can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency,” Gen. Flynn said.

“These analysts are starved for information from the field – so starved, in fact, that many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work,” said the report.

“It is little wonder then that many decision makers rely more on newspapers than military intelligence to obtain ’ground truth’.”

Field intelligence officers should not limit their reports to diagramming insurgent networks, Gen. Flynn suggested.

They also should provide information about meetings with villagers and tribal leaders, translated summaries of local radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and field observations of Afghan soldiers and aid workers.

He suggested setting up one-stop information centres where unclassified information could be organised and made available to the military, donor nations and aid workers.

The report does not mention the CIA, which suffered a deadly blow to its operations on December 30 when a suicide bomber attacked inside Camp Chapman, a highly secured forward base in eastern Khost province.

The report uses “intelligence community” to refer to the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defence Department and joint interagency operations in the country.

In conventional warfare, troops depend on big picture intelligence to work out their ground strategies, but in a counterinsurgency, troops, aid workers and others on the ground are usually the best informed about the enemy, the report said.

Brigade and regional command intelligence summaries that rehash the previous day’s fighting are of little use compared with periodic reports that also address changes in the local economy, corruption and governance.

“I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are,” says one operations officer quoted in the report. “We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.”

“The US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” the report concluded.