NATO Official Blasts U.S. Spy Work In Afghanistan

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Source: NPR/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 from U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn orders changes to address these shortcomings. His 26-page report was published Monday by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington - an unconventional release, Flynn acknowledges, but one he says will help broaden the reach of his directives.

The report was compiled before the CIA suffered a deadly blow to its operations on Dec. 30 when a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer inside Camp Chapman, a highly secured forward base in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. The CIA is not mentioned in Flynn's report, which focuses on the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country.

The report 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," Flynn wrote.

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," said the report, which was co-authored by Flynn's adviser, Capt. Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"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."'

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