NATO Official: US Spy Work Lacking in Afghanistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:58 a.m. ET
KABUL (AP) -- Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only ''marginally relevant'' to the overall mission, focusing too much on the enemy and not enough on civilian life, according to NATO's top intelligence official.
The stinging assessment -- released less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer in eastern Afghanistan -- said field agents are not providing intelligence analysts with the information needed to answer questions asked by President Barack Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
U.S. 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,'' U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a 26-page report released Monday by the Center 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,'' Flynn wrote in the report, which was co-authored by his adviser, Capt. Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
(More here.)
Filed at 5:58 a.m. ET
KABUL (AP) -- Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only ''marginally relevant'' to the overall mission, focusing too much on the enemy and not enough on civilian life, according to NATO's top intelligence official.
The stinging assessment -- released less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer in eastern Afghanistan -- said field agents are not providing intelligence analysts with the information needed to answer questions asked by President Barack Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
U.S. 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,'' U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a 26-page report released Monday by the Center 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,'' Flynn wrote in the report, which was co-authored by his adviser, Capt. Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
(More here.)
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