Gen. David Petraeus told journalists on Thursday that the United States was trying to improve its efforts to gather intelligence in Afghanistan, as reported by The New York Times. The fact that the U.S. had been doing badly was hardly a surprise, particularly since the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, had slammed U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts in a report, “Fixing Intel,” that was issued earlier this year.
Petraeus told the reporters who had gathered at a military base in Kabul, “We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq.” Yet that is not the way things started out. At one time, Americans had a much deeper understanding of Afghanistan, including its power brokers and its internal dynamics, than of the local culture and the military in Iraq.
“Intelligence gathering in Afghanistan started in 1989 or 1990,” Henry Crumpton, who used to head up the CIA’s covert actions in that country, told me. Over time, he explained, they “had [intelligence] collection in all parts of Afghanistan, and we understood it as a very fragmented place; you could learn all you want about Kabul but it didn’t matter if you had to chase someone down in Helmand Province.” As he recalled, the CIA had about one hundred people in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and considerably fewer in Iraq. “We didn’t have the relationships in Iraq as we did in Afghanistan,” he said.
Theoretically, it would have been possible to build on that impressive accumulation of knowledge about Afghanistan in order to develop an even clearer picture of what was happening in that country over time. Instead, U.S. efforts shifted to Iraq — and, at least according to critics of the Bush administration claim, many of the gains in Afghanistan, both in intelligence gathering and in other areas, were lost.
