But they're efficient, or are they?
It depends upon how what measure is being applied.
Iraq is a difficult environment with many challenges to fighting an insurgency.
For one, in my opinion, there's a tremendous lack of records available detailing exactly which Iraqi family lives where, or even who is an "authentic" Iraqi (by blood or soil). Tribal records have not been available (if even kept). And the Baathist government either destroyed, or we have not yet found, these pertinent records that would assist in fighting the insurgents. Perhaps the Iraqi government has them, but if they were passed to the US, I did not observe them.
In essence, of the 20+ million people who are supposedly Iraqi citizens, analysts still seem to lack what can only be deemed a "census" of people. It should have been one of the first requirements prior to the election, but did not occur (that I am aware of). If so, the information has not been passed to those who can utilize it.
One of the elements that remains critical to dealing with "foreign fighters" is revealing the networks that recruited, brainwashed, trained, and "exported" these young people to conduct martyrdom missions. THAT information is available by merely looking at individual religious leaders at various mosques throughout the world (and especially in Saudi Arabia). But the political will needs to be generated to target these inciters of violent Jihad who are filling their heads with visions of martyrdom.
I can give you a list of 26 of them right now in Saudi Arabia.
memri.org (look at footnotes).
memri.org
Another issue that exists is reducing the bureaucracy that still permeates the intelligence community. There are just too many cases of information "hoarding" going on, where on agency may possess raw fundamental data, but are not sharing that with analysts from other intel agencies. Thus, we are seeing redundancy of efforts and waste of analytical and collection resources.
I'm of the view that Mr. Negroponte will need to focus on creating inter-agency working groups that include resources from ALL of the various agencies. And the personnel within those working groups must be professionally evaluated by the leadership structure of those groups, rather than the agencies that people are derived from.
There's a tremendous synergy that can be created when analysts from the various agencies actually function together, knowing that their professional careers depend upon cooperation and sharing, rather than compartmentalization.
Furthermore, there is one issue I found rather interesting in Iraq. Essentially it is difficult to "encourage" seasoned analysts to volunteer to serve in Iraq. When an office deploys a person to go there, they must reserve their job position in the states (which depletes personnel in that office), and many supervisors are still focused on preserving their fiefdoms, including the personnel serving under them. And in many cases, they are justified in their fear that sending people to Iraq will result in their personnel being permanently lost to them as talented analysts often find themselves being recruited by other departments upon return to the US. These supervisors must be encouraged to permit their people to find the niche within the analytical community where they can shine, rather than stubbornly seeking to hang on them.
Negroponte is the only one who can set the tone that individual fiefdoms should be subordinate to the overall mission and that these talented people should be encouraged to seek work in various inter-agency working groups where their talents can be blended with the talents of personnel from other agencies.
I think I'll have have to leave my comments at that. There are many other issues, but they are bit too sensitive to discuss here.
One last point. You mentioned "inflaming Muslims". But who are we really inflaming? I opine that we're inflaming hostile feelings amongst those RELIGIOUS POWER BROKERS who rightfully fear that their spiritual and psychological domination of the young people of that region is being threatened.
The reality is that CORRUPT AND VIOLENT MUSLIM CLERICS are inflaming the tensions, not the US. The only thing the US presence has caused is that the inflammatory arguments of these Jihadist clerics are finding more receptive ears amongst the econmically dispossessed and uneducated of the region. And rather than continuing to "bide their time" in recruiting and brainwashing adherents to their violent Jihadist theology to the point where they are ablet to overthrow their own governments and establish theocratic rule, they are now being forced to defend themselves against a potential secular threat (because we're certainly not trying to christianize Iraq).
That's who is doing the inflaming. And they must be the targets that we focus upon because they are ones who are recruiting the youth of the middle east to wage Jihad for their own cynical and totalitarian agenda.
Hawk |
