Afghan Debacle : The Intel

August 18, 2021–The game of secrecy is so very odd. The CIA is still sitting on half-century old documents on its secret war against Castro–which law required be declassified no later than 2018–when Afghanistan collapses and people start talking about an intelligence failure bound up in the fall of Kabul. The next day there is a leak to the New York Times of CIA and other intelligence reports purporting to show that the spooks were increasingly doubtful of the stability of the U.S. ally. Time to pick apart that claim, and add a little to it.

First, what is the function of intelligence? To inform foreign and defense policy. Not to tell you today that your favorite ally will fall tomorrow. What is in the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) is important of course, but it is supremely ephemeral. Tell you today so you can get your ambassador to London to say x and your representative in Kabul to offer a safe passage to Ashraf Ghani. The PDBs have nothing to do with intelligence that permits you to choose either to plan an orderly withdrawal or to ramp up your military intervention to the degree necessary to afford the Afghan state a new lease on life. The proper measure of merit is the longer-term analyses.

Now a bit of confusion sets in. Both the PDBs and the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are the province of the Director of National Intelligence, America’s intelligence czar. Beyond that long-range reporting is mainly the product of the Central Intelligence Agency, in fact Gina Haspel’s CIA. Haspel, who came out of the operations side of the agency, even out of the depths of the black prisons program, took over the agency at Donald Trump’s behest, at a time when CIA’s largest field project was backing a militia movement in Afghanistan. Continuing that project required an ongoing Afghan war. The Times leak indicates that when Haspel left, replaced by William J. Burns, the intelligence prediction was that the Kabul government had at least 18 months left to it. So far as we know this was a CIA report, not from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), although even if it were the latter, the DNI would have been reliant upon CIA input.

The CIA had unique intel sources–the opposite side of the coin from the complaints heard now that it is going to lose its channels in Afghanistan. Militia members represent Afghan ethnic groups that were the foundation of the CIA secret war in Afghanistan against Russia–they were its “Afghantsy,” as the word was then. To take just one example, the Haqqani network, now held to be a secret ally of the Taliban, was then one of the CIA resistance groups. There had to be rumblings in the ground, to say nothing of CIA’s radio intelligence, phone monitors, or aerial photography, of the increasing unreliability of local allies. The same phenomenon had to be evident in the reporting from U.S. military channels, since the military were supporting the Afghan national security forces. The press, of course, was right out there reporting how national police or troop units melted away when fighting for villages, or even when merely tasked to hold local districts. CIA analysts had all that to ponder. They warned of Kabul’s weakening grip but, in deference to CIA’s operational interests, put no timeframe on the moment of maximum danger.

Gina Haspel made all the usual genuflections at her nomination hearings. She promised to get the CIA back to its traditional functions of esp[ionage and analysis, and out of the politically-charged places it had been. Afghanistan was the CIA’s make-or-break challenge on Haspel’s watch. She seems to have produced the same policy-tainted intel as ever. Donald Trump’s “acting” DNIs (they play ones on TV?) Joseph McGuire, Richard Grennell, and John Ratcliffe reserved their attention for impeachment matters and favorite sons. They had no time for Afghanistan. Professional analysts apparently punted, it is reported, and offered different forecasts depending upon the size of the U.S. deployment, with an optimum timeframe that hinged on a deployment larger than the Trump administration was then planning for. The NIE record on Afghanistan, when we see it, is going to be interesting. In 2019, the last year in which Dan Coats was the (not acting) DNI, overlapping with Haspel’s first as CIA director, the Afghan assessment was that neither the Taliban nor the Kabul government would be able to gain the upper hand.

Director Burns succeeded Haspel. He was confirmed in March 2021. In July, the Times leak tells us, the CIA view had changed to one of more immediate peril for Kabul. By then Afghan district seats were falling regularly to the Taliban and province capitals were increasingly exposed, soon to begin falling. Kabul’s general reserves, the commando units, were shuttling from place to place so quickly they were not only exhausted but were perfectly able to see the disintegration among the regulars and police. By July the CIA’s darkening views of the intelligence were too late to give the White House fair warning of impending events. And here we are.

Next Steps in Afghanistan

August 17, 2021– Now it’s time to get real. No more magical thinking that the “interpreter problem” will solve itself, that the Ashraf Ghani government is a stable, supple entity, or that the Afghan security forces will wake up and start fighting. Also, we have an armed Taliban army that controls the lands of our former ally. And we have an American expeditionary force, sent to Kabul to protect an evacuation, that could become entrapped among a sea of enemies. What to do?

First, believe it or not, we need to talk to the Taliban. Everyone who we want to save who’s not already located at Kabul international airport is in enemy-held territory. The women and children whose social environments have been upended, they are there too. The Taliban may go on a rampage, but they will grow tired of killing, and distressed at the international condemnation they will incur. This situation is ripe for an orderly departure program. The United States previously ran such a program with Cuba, and with Thailand we had such a program for the Hmong in Laos, and the Vietnam era of “boat people” ended with a quasi-program of this sort. The U.S. needs to waive immigration paperwork and issue laissez-passer permissions to Afghans who want to leave.They can process out through the airport. There’s been talk of some intermediate “holding area”-type destination–the U.S. used Guam for this purpose after the collapse of South Vietnam–but those kinds of considerations are exactly what leads to red tape and more/worse bureaucratic nightmares. Just get the thing done.

Our troops at the airport will also benefit from a better understanding of their relationship with their adversary. Orderly departure will take off the pressure and make it less likely that some outburst between Taliban and U.S. soldiers will erupt and turn into full-scale war. Don’t forget our forces are surrounded, not numerous, and at the end of a tenuous aerial supply line that has also to serve as the main avenue for evacuation of our Afghan friends. This could easily turn into a repeat of 1839 and the massacre of a residual British force trying to evacuate into India.

Done properly, orderly departure could function well enough that, under the best case, American troops could hand over to Taliban Afghans who would continue to facilitate the flow of refugees–who, by the way–would be people now able to carry critical documents and possessions with them. In the near term the U.S. security perimeter would be there to dissuade the Taliban from false moves. Apart from everything else, Orderly Departure would greatly reduce the probability of panic, which is among the most dangerous aspects of the current situation.

Done properly, an orderly departure program could manifest as an ingenious political move from the Biden administration. If talks fail, or if a program starts and then ruptures, Biden will also avoid charges he did nothing for our Afghan friends. There’s little to lose but plenty to be gained here. The rush to apportion blame for Afghanistan is stupid–the blame goes everywhere and the struggle to one-up the opponent distracts from the real crisis. Blame is really an extension of magical thinking.

Afghanistan Debacle

August 16, 2021– I will need to rework this piece later but it’s necessary to get something up right away. Some colleagues, including some who should know better, are trumpeting the failure of President Joseph Biden amid the ruins of the American war in Afghanistan. For some of them this is about nailing Biden for anything they can get him on, for others it is about guilt that America did not long ago start to do better for its local helpers and indigenous allies. The fall of Kabul, complete with helicopter scenes identical to the last days of Saigon in 1975, should be an object lesson for us all–but not in the way that these pundits try to put it.

Longtime readers of this space will know that now many years ago I posted on the reasons America had lost its Afghan war. And you didn’t need to read me to learn that–American presidents since Barack Obama have already conceded as much. This defeat didn’t happen on Joe Biden’s watch. Indeed, Donald J. Trump promised the very withdrawal Biden has been carrying out. The generals dissuaded Trump, and they tried to back Biden down also. The Taliban watched it all, while the military balance shifted such that they were gaining ground even with American forces still in-country. That’s when the war was finally lost, and it was during the Trump presidency.

Trump’s fierce disdain for immigration was also where the kibosh was put on the evacuation of the Afghans who had helped American soldiers in the war. The obstacles, red tape, deliberate slow walking of paperwork, and all the rest started then, not now. Joe Biden had nothing to do with it. In fact he was not even in government then.

Trump did something else too–agree a diplomatic arrangement that enthralled the Taliban while cutting out the U.S. Afghan allies. That had the purpose of assisting the U.S. withdrawal that Trump intended but never completed. The boost the Taliban got from that helped them in the final round of fighting. The demoralization of the Ghani government did nothing to enthuse the defense of the state that has just collapsed.

The time is past to take a much harder look at America’s military and intelligence services. They have been the ones saying, for years now, that we were winning the war, that stabilization had come and the Afghan military and security forces were up to the job, that the defense could hold, even, most recently, that Kabul had months or more than a year still ahead of it. The swan songs were garbage. The only question is whether the generals and spooks knew they were weaving a tapestry, and how soon. We have a overpriced, overbearing, overswearing, underperforming and misunderstanding national security apparatus that is willing to lie to get its way. That has to change, the sooner the better.

Mike Gravel was Fearless

June 28, 2021– A few words for today. The papers carry word of the passage of former Alaska senator Mike Gravell. He played a key role in bringing to light the Pentagon Papers, the 50th anniversary of the leak of which we’ve recently been celebrating. For decades the most authoritative version of the Pentagon Papers was one published by Boston’s Beacon Press in 1972. That edition was made possible by Gravel, who used his post as chairman of a Senate subcommittee on buildings and grounds to call a hearing which no one attended, and then use the fact of being in session to read into the record the huge leaked study. Beacon Press used the resulting version in the Congressional Record as the basis for its four volume publication.

Much more recently Senator Gravel undertook an initiative for which he should also be remembered. This was to create a system for direct voting. He thought of this at first as a mechanism to pass laws, but think how valuable it would have been in last year’s presidential election. No tinkering with state voting regulations or electoral votes, no delay for mail-in or other ballots. In particular, no way to dispute the outcome of the election. Voters go up or down on buttons connected to their televisions, telephones or other electronic devices. That’s it. Vote cast. The outcome would be the outcome.

Mike Gravel could think outside the box. We need more like him.

Pentagon Papers v. Government Secrecy–Still At It After All These Years

June 15, 2021— Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the moment–also a Sunday– when the New York Times began publishing the leaked “Pentagon Papers.” The papers were a top secret compilation of U.S. government records plus analyses by experienced observers of the roots and process of United States intervention in Vietnam. The papers had actually been commissioned by then-secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara, perplexed at the seeming intractability of the American situation in Vietnam.

As McNamara had hoped, the Pentagon Papers taught many things. The men who copied the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and Ellsberg, who circulated them and finally made the leak a reality, hoped the secret record might bring a halt to the war. That did not happen. But for a very long time–decades–the Papers formed the foundation for much of the historical analysis of the Vietnam war. Today, when declassification, even at its snail’s pace, has advanced the record past what is available in the Pentagon Papers, that collection remains a major source for Vietnamese historians in reconstructing their wartime experience.

With a tip of the hat to Ellsberg and Russo, the historical issues are not my target today. Rather it is the secrecy. Government secrecy. This seems to be an obsession, and the leak of the Pentagon Papers marked a milestone in the evolution of the struggle over secrecy. Within hours of the appearance of the Times’s edition of June 13, 1971, officials at the White House were already considering counterattacks. The president, Richard Nixon, was actually relatively calm about the leak, figuring that the documents and analysis dated to the Johnson administration and thus were embarrassing only to his Democrat opponents, but staff adviser Alexander M. Haig was adamant that secrecy had to be upheld. The strong countermeasures turned into an attempt to impose prior restraint, to deny the press the opportunity to report this story to the people. Had the Nixon White House succeeded the U.S. government would have established a principle that it could censor the information available to the American public. But after initial success in district courts, Nixon officials failed at the Supreme Court, which denied the administration’s bid for prior restraint.

In the torrent of commentary accompanying the 50th anniversary, New York Times author Adam Liptak contributed a piece arguing that the Pentagon Papers decisions actually led to an “incoherent state of law” because they did not draw precise boundaries around what was and was not permissible for government. There is a certain amount of sense to that, but the bigger truth is authorities have contested the public’s right to know all along. The Pentagon Papers case tied down one flap of the tent, but there is plenty more blowing in the wind. In fact, today, as it happens, we are smack in the middle of the latest battle over government secrecy, where it turns out that officials of the last administration sought the private communications and contact information (and perhaps, more) of political opponents, journalists, and even the administration’s own White House counsel. There will be more to say about this scandal before it ends, but for now let me simply say that the motives were as black, and the methods every bit as outlandish as those of fifty years ago.

BIDEN BEWARE: BACKING INTO TROUBLE

November 24, 2020– It seemed forever that our outgoing president made way for his successor. Now he has, however, and the world was treated yesterday to the announcement of the first group of people nominated to serve in Joe Biden’s incoming administration. The initial list includes Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence. Judging from that, and from the water fountain gossip of other possible appointees, Mr. Biden may be backing into trouble.

The root of the problem traces to the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency–where Mr. Biden served as vice-president and so knows the people I’ll be speaking of–and Mr. Obama’s predilection for looking forward, not back. What that meant was to avoid dealing with the huge problem of CIA black prisons and torture. No truth commission, special prosecutor, or presidential commission looked into this matter, which involved known officials, including Gina Haspel, the present director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, permitted only a single, already ongoing investigation, of a single obstruction of justice, the destruction of evidence by Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s clandestine operations chief.

The Senate intelligence committee, less tin-eared, or perhaps more outraged at the way the CIA had stiffed it, preventing the overseers from access to the true record of its misdeeds, did undertake an investigation. I wrote at some length about this in early posts on this webside as well as in my book The Ghosts of Langleyhttp://thenewpress.com/books/ghosts-of-langley . Aside from preventing a review of the CIA torture, the Obama administration acquiesced in agency maneuvers to impede the Senate investigators, and then essentially conspired to prevent emergence of this Senate report.

That happened when John Brennan headed the CIA. A long-time spook, Brennan had moved over to Obama’s NSC staff to handle intelligence matters and was aware of the play-by-play on the torture investigation. Questioned on his opinion of forms of interrogation during his confirmation hearings, Brennan agreed that some met the definition of “torture.” He also declared he favored release of the Senate torture report. Once at Langley, Mr. Brennan did his best, under the guise of secrecy, to prevent the report from reaching the public.

John Brennan brought Avril Haines in as his deputy CIA director in September 2013. She watched as CIA general counsel Robert Eatinger spearheaded a spy effort against the Senate investigators to discover how they had accessed certain documents. Haines sat with Brennan in January 2014 meetings that permitted further intrusions onto Senate computer networks. Haines accompanied Brennan to a meeting held at Vice-President Joseph Biden’s house that tried to clear away the bad feelings between senators and CIA operatives (and, in fact, Biden employed the look ahead-not behind rhetoric on that occasion too). Meanwhile the CIA excesses led to an internal IG investigation that identified agency perpetrators of the intrusion into Senate working spaces and systems, and an accountability board met to review their behavior, which included lying about what had been said and done. Deputy Director Haines handled that report, which confirmed the intrusions but refused to apply accountability. The CIA Inspector General resigned instead.

Another individual mentioned as a potential Biden appointee is Michael Morrell, now retired from the agency, who spent part of the Obama administration as CIA’s White House briefer, and part as Langley’s deputy director. Morrell is someone who took the Senate torture report and invented arguments to justify the strong-arm methods, employing moral relativism to talk about torture, evoking discredited Justice Department memoranda to assert, against a stack of national and international laws, that the legality of torture is “debatable.” Morrell actually performed the accountability review of Jose Rodriguez. Now he is being mentioned as a possible director of the CIA.

In short, President-elect Joseph Biden looks to be starting by bringing back people whose hands are covered with torture affair dirt. This returns us to the stupidity of the Obama administration–if the CIA torture had been properly reviewed in the first place, Haines, Morrell and others would not have this black mark on their records. You’ve been warned. Now, by the way, Mr. Biden is talking of not further reviewing the question of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians because he wants to look ahead, not behind. Could be the same thing all over again.

Gamer’s Corner: Reflections on Kanev

November 15, 2020– A number of you have been interested in my piece “Reflections on Kanev.” It’s not available on Download because I had to curtail that function of the website. But if you’re interested in a copy in return for a contribution to my PayPal account, leave a message on my “Feedback” list and I’ll get in direct touch with you. Thanks!

Round 2 on “The Memo”

February 10, 2018–If this were Sherlock Holmes we would call it “The Case of the Disappearing Memos.” But it’s today’s America instead, where government regulations can be turned on their heads and run in reverse. –And no one says anything. To recapitulate–in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) the Republican majority and Democratic minority each crafted memoranda on the scandal of the Russian Caper (commented on here on many occasions). The Republicans were ready first, with a paper that essentially smeared the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Horrified Democrats then wrote their own paper to show how and why the Republican essay was a smear job.

We’re talking here about documents that contain classified information. A procedure exists whereby the HPSCI–and its Senate counterpart–can decide on their own to declassify information. About a week ago the Republican memo appeared. HPSCI had used the procedure I mentioned but not in the way it was intended when established forty years ago. The original mechanism provided the committee could vote to release a document and the president would then have five days to express himself yea or nay on its release. If a president kept his silence, the document was released. If the president objected, the committee could then go to the full House (or Senate) for an up or down vote on release. The document would then be declassified or not depending on the result. (You can go to the National Security Archive website, look for my “Electronic Briefing Book no. 596” on the Pike Committee of 1975, and read as much as you want about how this procedure was established–as a safeguard against the executive branch using secrecy to suppress congressional investigation.)

That’s not what happened here. Instead the Republican majority voted along party lines to release their own memo, and acquiesced when the Trump White House took the opportunity to assert the power to edit the document for content on secrecy grounds. As a smear on the FBI, of course, Mr. Trump found nothing to object to and he happily approved release. But the cover letter from White House lawyer Donald McGahn asserted the declassification power mentioned. Democrats on HPSCI then demanded their competing paper be released. I had expected this bid would be defeated at the committee level by adverse vote but the GOP was a little smarter than that–they voted with Democrats to approve release unanimously. Republicans were confident the Trump White House could be depended upon to quash the paper for them. That happened yesterday. We can now rank HPSCI chairman Devin Nunes with the Ghosts of Langley.

McGahn pontificates that Mr. Trump is “inclined” toward release of the Democratic rebuttal if it can be shorn of classified information where, in truth, the president has no authority to audit/edit the content of a document being released by congressional committee vote. 

The HPSCI Republican memo is rapidly sinking out of sight due to its disjointed substance and lack of coherence. The Democratic memo is being sunk deliberately.

McMaster the Enabler

December 16, 2017–Evidence is mounting that Harold Raymond McMaster, the Army lieutenant general who currently functions as national security adviser for President Donald J. Trump, is doing the nation no favors sticking around. Previously I had written that McMaster is guilty of the same “dereliction of duty” as that charge he hurled, in a book by that name, at the Vietnam-era military brass facing President Lyndon Johnson. Now McMaster parrots the senseless foreign policy antics of Mr. Trump and even tries to represent them as coherent and clever strategy.

I’ve not got much time today but I wanted to underline press reporting that has given us a fresh example of the dangers of an unchecked Harold McMaster. Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a remarkable piece of reporting from Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Philip Rucker (“How Trump’s Pursuit of Putin Has Left the U.S. Vulnerable to the Russian Threat,” December 15, 2017). In their story the journalists report an incident involving the National Security Council staff director for Russia and how Mr. Trump dissed her in a key White House encounter. At a meeting held preparatory to a Trump telephone call to Vladimir Putin the president treated the staff director, Fiona Hill, as a secretary, throwing a marked up memorandum at her and telling her to rewrite it. When Hill did not immediately rush away to do that, President Trump apparently yelled at her. When Hill did leave, General McMaster followed her out of the room and added to the hurt with an extra dollop of criticism.

How ’bout that? Harold McMaster curries favor with the president, his boss, by dumping on his own staff. Rather than defending Fiona Hill as a professional expert and reminding Mr. Trump of the boundaries of proper behavior, The Derelict imitates his master and digs the hole deeper. Is it any wonder the national security policy of this administration has descended into incoherence? In my book The Ghosts of Langley  I argue that, at the CIA, characters who furnish bad examples, or demonstrate behaviors to avoid, become “ghosts” to their successors. It’s looking very much like Harold McMaster is entering that spirit world. So far, in deference to his status as an Army general officer, observers have been reluctant to call a spade a spade. Watch out!

The Derelict Is At It Again: McMaster at the Reagan Library

December 6, 2017–In Simi Valley the thing folks still talk about is how Air Force One made it into the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Granted, the aircraft was not the one which President Reagan got approved and funded on his watch, it was the older Boeing 707 version that had served presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, not the plush Boeing 747 version of today. The newer aircraft would hardly have made it through the suburban avenues, much less up the steep, winding two-lane hillside road that is the only approach into the Library. Even the older aircraft had to be taken apart to make it.

They still talk about Air Force One. I don’t think that will happen for the visit of Harold Raymond McMaster, today’s national security adviser, who spoke at the Reagan Library last weekend at an event billed as the Reagan National Defense Forum. I’ve written before about McMaster as practitioner of the same sort of “dereliction of duty” of which he accused the Vietnam-era generals in his book of that name. General McMaster, as security adviser, is acting as enabler and defender of President Donald Trump’s fractured foreign policy. At the Reagan Library McMaster continued in his now-standard mode–he sought to lay claim to the mantle of Reagan, proposing Trump as the Gipper’s true descendant. Saying the nation must design its policy to counter Russia and China, reclaim confidence in American values, and align diplomatic, military, intelligence, and law enforcement [read immigration] policies, McMaster the Derelict dug his hole deeper. For myself, I had little use for the Reagan national security policy at the time–it sought unbridled military superiority, carried out a weapons build up that caused domestic economic problems, nearly triggered a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and was confrontational across several continents in conducting aggressive covert operations. However, the Reagan program was a policy–that is, the different elements were planned, fit together, and corresponded to some concept of overall strategy. It would be a mistake–one Harold McMaster is even now making– to represent Trump national security policy as following a strategy in any way. For example, his “America First” stance is antithetical to the nation’s longest, closest alliances. His pro-Russia and pro-China rhetoric is contradictory to the proposition that forces must be built to defend against Russia and China. Trump’s opening to Saudi Arabia is fueling instability on the Arabian peninsula and in the Persian Gulf which it has long been U.S. policy to avoid. Trump’s Syria policy is incoherent altogether. In Africa and Asia there is no policy worth the name. The Afghan war is being pursued in a brainless fashion while the Afghan government–our Afghan government–disintegrates before our eyes. Then Mr. Trump makes nice with a rightist Indian government which hates Pakistan, with whom we have to work in order to fight the Afghan war. And, if national security is being designed to counter Russia and China, what is Trump doing kicking up an unnecessary conflict with North Korea where he wants Russia and China to help us resolve it. To garnish this pastiche of disparate elements with the name “strategy” is, in a word, to create fake news.

I have been on Reagan’s Air Force One. It is the centerpiece of the largest gallery in the museum portion of the facility. The plane is not all that impressive after all, given the inherent limitations of a Boeing 707 fuselage. What is truly remarkable is the planning effort necessary to get that thing to this place and then build a museum gallery to hold it. That kind of planning is not happening in the Trump administration today. Their hopes for a bigger, plusher -747 amount to a bunch of component parts littered about on factory floors. The problem is that we’re not really talking about inert objects. Trump’s arbitrary diktats and vertiginous changes of direction will ultimately lead to complete immobility and confusion. –And Derelict McMaster helped make it happen.