I blame the CIA
Oh jeez. I've created a few more "friends" on SI by inconveniently pointing out the rather . . . central role of the CIA in all this. There's the immediate and obvious intelligence failure, of course. But more deeply there's also the very central role the CIA had in making Afghanistan what it is today.
Just a couple months ago, there was this article in the Atlantic, from a higher up who quit the CIA in disgust. I'm not sure how it got past the censors, maybe there's somebody at Langley who will admit to a problem, too. theatlantic.com
In other words, American intelligence has not gained and will not gain Pakistan's assistance in its pursuit of bin Ladin. The only effective way to run offensive counterterrorist operations against Islamic radicals in more or less hostile territory is with "non-official-cover" officers—operatives who are in no way openly attached to the U.S. government. Imagine James Bond minus the gadgets, the women, the Walther PPK, and the Aston Martin. But as of late 1999 no program to insert NOCs into an Islamic fundamentalist organization abroad had been implemented, according to one such officer who has served in the Middle East. "NOCs haven't really changed at all since the Cold War," he told me recently. "We're still a group of fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We don't go to mosques and pray."
A former senior Near East Division operative says, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
Behind-the-lines counterterrorism operations are just too dangerous for CIA officers to participate in directly. When I was in the Directorate of Operations, the Agency would deploy a small army of officers for a meeting with a possibly dangerous foreigner if he couldn't be met in the safety of a U.S. embassy or consulate. Officers still in the clandestine service say that the Agency's risk-averse, bureaucratic nature—which mirrors, of course, the growing physical risk-aversion of American society—has only gotten worse. . . .
Difficulties with fundamentalism and mud-brick neighborhoods aside, the CIA has stubbornly refused to develop cadres of operatives specializing in one or two countries. Throughout the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) the DO never developed a team of Afghan experts. The first case officer in Afghanistan to have some proficiency in an Afghan language didn't arrive until 1987, just a year and a half before the war's end. Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past twenty years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect consistently first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hizbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighboring Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.
Headquarters' reply: Too dangerous, and why bother? The Cold War there was over with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as endemic, and radical Islam was an abstract idea. Afghanistan has since become the brain center and training ground for Islamic terrorism against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years.
Somebody created a monster there, and then set it free. It's not like people haven't known about the problem for a while, this article is 5 years old. theatlantic.com
For more than a decade some 25,000 Islamic militants, from nearly thirty countries around the world, had streamed through Peshawar on their way to the jihad. They came, without passports and without names, from the Palestinian organization Hamas, from Egypt's AlGama'a al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, and from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front. Five years after the jihad ended, a thousand or so remained, some in Peshawar itself, others encamped in the mountain passes of the ungovernable tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, planning and executing what investigators now believe were terrorist acts that have reached from Cairo to Algiers, Manila to Bangkok -- and to the streets of Islamabad. Riyadh, Peshawar, and New York.
"Even today you can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat told me in Peshawar last spring. "These groups, in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad. For a Moro to get a Sting missile! To make contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the consequences for all of us are astronomical."
The diplomat went on to say that many veterans of the Afghan jihad have set up an informal network of small, loosely organized underground cells, with support centers scattered around the world: in the United States, the Persian Gulf countries, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The days of mule trains like the one Sheikh Omar joined en route to Afghanistan are long gone; now E-mail and faxes drive the jihad.
America needs a good intelligence agency, but the CIA ain't it. The military will probably be able to straighten the Afghan mess out. I really fear that the CIA is just going to get more money and power out of the deal. Institutional reform is improbable, and probably impossible anyway, we'd be better off starting over. The odds are slim, I fear. |
