CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Oct. 31, 2008 – 8:45 p.m.
More Troops Are Nice, but More Intelligence Needed to Save Afghan War
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
We can pour thousands more troops into Afghanistan, but they are probably not going to make much of a difference if we don’t get the intelligence right, says one of the CIA officers who organized the rout of the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden seven years ago this month.
Regular readers will recall that I’ve written admiringly in the past about Gary Berntsen, who still sounds like a fireman from Queens, N.Y., despite having been a three-time chief of station for the CIA during his 23 years with the spy agency.
His first book, “Jawbreaker: The attack on bin Laden and al-Qaeda,” recounted the ups and downs of the 2001-2002 Afghan mission, from his struggles with timid headquarters bureaucrats, through the exhilaration of organizing a tribal army, to the fiasco at Tora Bora, where bin Laden slipped away through a combination of U.S. ineptitude and Pakistani skullduggery.
Berntsen retired in 2005, but he “just couldn’t stand around and watch the war on TV.” So last year he signed up as an adviser to a unit of the much heralded 173rd Airborne Brigade and shipped out.
Now he’s out with another book, “Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism & National Leadership: A Practical Guide,” a wise tutorial for anyone seriously interested in how it actually works — or doesn’t.
Berntsen repeats the familiar litany of complaints about the CIA,
“Since the mid-1990s,” he writes, “the most ambitious officers in the Clandestine Service have sought minimal time in the field and burrowed themselves in CIA headquarters bureaucracy to attain advancement.”
Berntsen, who is campaigning for John McCain , excoriates President Bush for taking little interest in CIA capabilities despite all his rhetoric — no longer heard — about the “war on terror.”
It was not until his second term that “Bush . . . learned of how small certain CIA stations were and was surprised to hear the actual (small) number of operations officers.”
The president’s order to double their ranks was welcomed, Berntsen writes, but “it betrayed the fact that he had not sought an accurate understanding of the size and needs of the Clandestine Service during his first term in the White House.”
Far from a rehash of the woes that are continuing to chase experienced and talented CIA counterterrorism officers out of the building as soon as they’re eligible for retirement, Berntsen offers a wide array of thoughtful Rx’s for sharpening the point of the spear.
The most important, echoed by a half-dozen recently retired, but still young CIA officers I’ve talked to, is retooling the spyocracy to reward men and women who like being in the field battling terrorists and want to make their careers there, rather than the headquarters horse-holders whose weapon of choice is a briefing paper.
Berntsen also recognizes the practical damage done to U.S. intelligence by revelations about waterboarding and the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo. It makes people less willing to spy for us.
More Troops Are Nice, but More Intelligence Needed to Save Afghan War
“Close Gitmo as quickly as possible,” he advises, “and establish a mechanism to legally attach enemy combatant status to those detainees where evidence exists to confirm such status.”
As for torture, “the U.S. government would be wise to discuss the option more fully,” he writes, which I take to mean Americans should get a better understanding of its real-life (as opposed to TV) limitations.
But “torture is not an option” for extracting valuable intelligence, he told me by telephone a few weeks ago, aligning himself with the FBI, which knows a few things about interrogating suspects.
“Unfortunately, torture does help despots to stay in power,” he added.
We need less hysteria about terrorism and more cool thinking about how to counter current threats, he suggests.
Al Qaeda “is not the only group in recent history that has planned to employ weapons of mass destruction,” he reminds us, singling out the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult that was hell bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and triggering Armageddon.
In 1995, Washington’s worry meter hardly stirred when the group, which had tens of thousands of followers and offices all over the world, including New York City, attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin gas. There weren’t any calls for a “war on doomsday cults” — or even terrorism — then. No “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters of its leader. Japanese authorities simply arrested him and dismantled the group.
End of story.
Today, it seems, we’re farther away from cornering Osama bin Laden than we were seven years ago. And the Taliban is growing more powerful by the day, fielding company-size combat units and launching big suicide attacks in the capital, Kabul.
And we’re still figuring out the intelligence game there, Berntsen says.
Military intelligence dominates HUMINT — human intelligence — operations there, and they’re just not very good at it, he says.
And the Pentagon wants even more control over paramilitary activities, shunting the CIA further aside.
The Army’s HUMINT Collection Teams, composed of four MI enlisted men, “are the least trained people on the point of the spear,” Berntsen said. “The most trained are back in Kabul,” lounging at headquarters.
More Troops Are Nice, but More Intelligence Needed to Save Afghan War
U.S. military commanders actually don’t much like HUMINT, the arduous, time-consuming and tricky business of recruiting spies among the Afghans, Berntsen says.
“The commanders prefer technology” — drones, satellites, electronic intercepts. “That way, they don’t have to make a decision. HUMINT is risky.”
On the other hand, he said, U.S. Special Operations troops — Green Berets, SEALs, and the like, often times working in tandem with the CIA — are “superb,” he said.
“They do a better job on intel than the intel guys do.”
The reason? Unlike their straight-leg counterparts, they put their most experienced, older guys in the field.
And “they have money for sources,” he said.
HUMINT teams “don’t have enough money for sources.”
“I was dumbstruck when I saw the amount of money they have,” Berntsen said.
And a bulky chain of command effectively prevents getting timely intelligence from informants.
“If they come into contact with a source with access to information, they’re not allowed to task him [with a specific request], he said. “The rules on tasking are so cumbersome . . . The system is designed so no one can make a mistake.”
The same goes for a covert action op, such as planting information about a province chief’s link to the heroin trade in a local newspaper.
“You can wait forever for that,” Berntsen said.
And those are “the reasons things have gone south” in Afghanistan.
More Troops Are Nice, but More Intelligence Needed to Save Afghan War
What a shame.
“The population really does support the Afghan government and the Americans more than most people think,” says Berntsen, whose unit patrolled the dangerous Afghan-Pakistan border area.
“Women, especially, don’t want the Taliban back.”
But we had better get our intel game together, he said, before it’s too late.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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