In the comments to my post last Friday about President Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan, Y_Y Sima Qian asked if I’d write a post addressing the question of whether there was or was not an intelligence failure in regard to Afghanistan. The short answer is both from what I’ve seen reported and the professional work I was involved with that dealt with Afghanistan there was not. Or at least not in the sense that the term is generally used.
My professional opinion as someone who has provided assessments to senior leaders serving in Afghanistan or working on issues pertaining to it, pre-deployment preparation and training for units deploying to Afghanistan at brigade and echelons above brigade, reach back research support for personnel deployed to Afghanistan, and as a technical subject matter expert assigned to a working group about how to better handle cultural information for elements deployed to Afghanistan is that the intelligence and information work, especially at the tactical and operational levels, was not and has not been a failure. One of the problems, as was very well described in this interesting and excellent article, is that quite often we had the information, but we didn’t have the context to make sense of it. Another part of the problem is that just because the information was accurate, does not mean that the senior leaders and decision makers understood it, accepted it, wanted to hear it, or acted on it an appropriate manner. This itself follows from a related problem, the collection, analysis, and preparation of the intelligence may have been done correctly, but it may not have been briefed to the senior leaders and decision makers the way the product was prepared by the actual subject matter experts. This is a major problem with what we call the intelligence cycle. Because everyone knows the policy preferences of the senior leaders and decision makers, this can skew any and all parts of the cycle from collection to presentation. Another major problem, as a former boss refers to it, is the Legion of Frightened Men (LOFM). These are themselves senior personnel who refuse to speak up to contradict more senior leaders or at all because of their professional conditioning over 20 plus years of service.
I think another major problem is that everyone wants to grade their own homework. So the Intelligence Community has a set of metrics for progress or success and the military has a separate one. And as long as you’re meeting those metrics or exceeding them, then you’re successful. I had this discussion as part of a panel in 2009 on counterinsurgency hosted by NYU’s Center for Law and Security that included John Nagl as one of the other three panel members with me. I was on the panel to talk about the gap between our theory of counterinsurgency as delineated in US Army/military doctrine and the actual application in Operations in Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. I also discussed the implications of the failure of the Bush 43 administration to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqis, as well as the debacle that were the provisional elections and what would be the forthcoming national elections based on the work I’d done in Iraq on how Iraq’s electoral system was then structured and functioning. After I went through all the disconnects and complications, Nagl then made his presentation where he explained that because we’d just spent X amount in Y locations in Iraq and Afghanistan building all sorts of infrastructure, that we were succeeding in the hold and build phase of operations (Phase IV of conventional operations), and that, as a result, the US would maintain at least 100,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely and a smaller, but still significant number in Afghanistan indefinitely as well until we completed remaking both states and societies, as well as the region. Leaving aside that this was completely delusional in terms of what the US would do in the long term, especially given that at that point the US was on a ticking clock to withdraw from Iraq in 2010, it also is a very good example of the dynamic I’m trying to describe. Nagl, and some of the other top names within in the public perception in regard to counterinsurgency, had a set of outcomes for success and metrics that they had delineated for Iraq and Afghanistan, and as long as positive progress was being made on those, then were making progress and success was achievable. This doesn’t make them bad people, it just made them wrong. Then and now.
Another major contributing problem is related to and a result of the Legion of Frightened Men problem. One of the things that senior leaders and decision makers need is someone who not only can tell them what they need to know, not what they want to hear, but whose job is to do just that, who is not afraid to do so, and who is empowered to so. This was what my job was for the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division, for the 48th, 49th, and 50th Commandants of the US Army War College, for the Commanding General of III Corps, and for the Commanding General of US Army Europe (same general officer). Not every commander, senior leader, and/or decision maker has someone who can or will do this. I’m sure there are some that don’t want it. Often we see, both in terms of senior military personnel and senior elected and appointed officials, that senior leaders and decision makers have a team of trusted personnel that they take from assignment to assignment, elected office to elected office, appointed position to appointed position. While this is often a good thing as it provides the senior leader with a cohesive and coherent team that he or she can trust. However, it also can cut in the opposite direction leaving the senior leader without someone who can bring them information and give them and their staffs advice they don’t want to hear.
The last point I want to make on this issue is that we also do a good job of lying to ourselves. Everything we’ve been trying to do in Afghanistan once operations shifted to counterinsurgency and what is popularly being called nation building, has been based on Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24: Counterinsurgency. FM 3-24 is a mess. It has numerous, significant historical and factual errors. One striking example is the completely inaccurate narrative around the Tupamaros and their campaign in Uruguay. The basic historical events recounted are correct. The placement of them within Uruguayan history, including what the Tupamaros actually did or did not accomplish and why, is historically/factually incorrect.