Topics include:
1) Yemen learns to profit from al Qaeda,
2) Maj. Gen. Flynn wants social scientists, not military intelligence officers.
Yemen learns to profit from al Qaeda
The nearly successful Christmas Day downing of a Detroit-bound airliner has suddenly shifted the U.S. national security community's focus to Yemen. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Nigerian-born "knicker bomber," reportedly confessed to being trained in Yemen by an al Qaeda group.
Yemen and its problems are suddenly on everyone's agenda. On Jan. 1, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus announced a doubling in annual U.S. assistance to the country. On Jan. 28, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will host an international conference on Yemen, where he will no doubt call for increased international donations. It seems that whenever the international community discovers another al Qaeda franchise, a financial reward to the host seems to follow. Pakistan has perfected how to profit from this perverse incentive. Yemen is now showing itself to be an able student of the same technique.
Writing in Small Wars Journal, Lawrence Cline -- a career military intelligence officer, Middle East foreign area officer, and an instructor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School -- provides a comprehensive summary of Yemen's political and economic challenges. According to Cline, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his government do not view al Qaeda's presence in Yemen as their most important problem. To Saleh and his government, the Houthi rebellion in the Shiite northwest and the separatist unrest centered around the southern city of Aden (due to unresolved issues from the 1990 unification of Yemen) are far more urgent. Yemen's problems do not stop there. The country is running out of both oil and water, hosts over 150,000 Somali refugees, and its trade suffers from the Horn of Africa's ongoing piracy problem. Yemen is an obviously very troubled place and Saleh is understandably seeking out as much foreign assistance as he can.
In this context, Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Saleh government may have settled into a mutually beneficial relationship. According to Cline, Yemen's government is not the focus of al Qaeda's terror campaign. Instead, al Qaeda likely values the sanctuary it finds in Yemen's remote areas and the access it enjoys to elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. Threatening the Yemeni government would risk these advantages.
From Saleh's perspective, he has likely learned from Pakistan how rewarding al Qaeda's presence -- largely benign to him -- can be. The impending deluge of U.S. aid, with Brown's conference to add to the bounty, illustrates the perverse incentives offered to leaders like Saleh.
Does this mean that the United States should not assist Saleh and his government? At this point it has little choice; it can only access al Qaeda by partnering with Saleh, Yemen's ministries, and its security forces. A decade after the bombing of USS Cole in the Aden harbor, the al Qaeda problem in Yemen seems as bad as ever. Over the past 10 years, the United States has provided funding and training to Yemen's security forces, a program frustrated by corruption and perceived Yemeni indifference to al Qaeda. This matches the frustrations the U.S. suffers with its security assistance program in Pakistan. Neither should be a surprise given the current incentives.
The solution is for the U.S. government to develop alternate paths to al Qaeda that bypass those local institutions that lack an incentive to confront al Qaeda. It seems as if the CIA officers recently killed at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan were attempting to create such an alternate path. Although that operation suffered a disastrous setback, such efforts are one of the few ways the U.S. can keep its reluctant partners honest.
Maj. Gen. Flynn wants social scientists, not military intelligence officers
Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, has ordered a major overhaul of the intelligence analysis effort in that country. Flynn took the highly unorthodox step of publishing his reorganization order, embedded in a report, through the website of the Center for a New American Security.
Flynn has ordered the military intelligence structure in Afghanistan to redirect its focus away from enemy insurgent groups and instead focus on "fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade." Flynn's justification for this overhaul in the analysis effort is the population-focused counterinsurgency mission now assigned to coalition forces. According to Flynn:
What we conclude is there must be a concurrent effort under the ISAF commander's strategy to acquire and provide knowledge about the population, the economy, the government, and other aspects of the dynamic environment we are trying to shape, secure, and successfully leave behind. Until now, intelligence efforts in this area have been token and ineffectual, particularly at the regional command level.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy has tasked Army and Marine Corps infantry battalions with being not only warfighters, but also civil administrators, municipal engineers, and local politicians. Given this mission, Flynn has concluded that such an expanded list of tasks needs an expanded array of intelligence products to match. Perhaps just as critical to Flynn (and also mentioned in his report) was the apparent embarrassment he and his staff suffered when they were unable to provide the White House staff with more than the most rudimentary information on key Afghan districts.
Flynn's analysts will now focus on local demography, economics, sociology, and politics instead of just the enemy's structure and battlefield positions, the traditional focus of tactical military intelligence. Flynn's analysts will do this by attempting to become multidisciplinary experts on a specific piece of territory.
Such an overhaul seems both an intellectual stretch and an organizational gamble. The general is asking his military intelligence personnel to perform the research normally done by graduate-level anthropologists, economists, and other professionals in the social sciences. Flynn's order for analysts to study all the disciplines within a geographic area rather than specialize on a particular function only magnifies this problem. To produce valid research, professional social scientists spend years learning the local culture and collecting and analyzing data. The work product of Flynn's redirected analysts is likely to vary widely in quality and usefulness.
Second, Flynn has called for military leaders in Afghanistan to select "the best, most extroverted and hungriest analysts" to serve in the new analysis positions he is creating. Combat commanders will still face a determined and clever enemy and are not likely to part with those intelligence officers who they believe can provide the battlefield intelligence that will keep their troops alive.
Flynn's overhaul is an understandable response to both the counterinsurgency mandate and to his command's admittedly poor support to the White House during the Afghan policy review. But it remains to be seen whether his new structure will produce useful intelligence for troops in the field or gain the cooperation of commanders.
Comments
Fuad Kamal's entire family is involved in terrorism. Anaara Media just outside Washington, D.C. is the hub of Fuad Kamal's linking of terrorist websites throughout the world. This guy is a creepy and vicious monster who hates the U.S. and has vowed to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden. Check out www.sofiaecho.com and www.scaredmonkeys.com for all the dope on Fuad Kamal and Anaara Media.
Fuad Kamal of Anaara Media is a Registered Sex Offender who did a stint of five years in Maryland for sex-related offenses. He is also a high level al Qaeda operative. He maintains a very low profile, both because of his criminal background and his association with international Islamic extremism. He is definitely under close surveillance by the federal government, but until he commits a crime which they can fully substatiate he will remain free.
Robert, I believe that your critique of MG Flynn's order is wide of the mark. What he is asking for is a focus on the people who must be won for the US/ISAF/Afghan govt to succeed. This involves two separate but related tasks. (1) Construction of what used to be called Basic Intelligence on Afghanistan and related tribal areas in Pakistan. Here your critigue is most appropriate. Good Basic Intel is best done by the appropriate academics (both social scientists and historians) but failing that, it must be done by ordinary intel analysts. That is the case because Flynn needs this baseline just as much or more than the White House does. I would note that back in the day when I was a junior intel analyst CIA regularly produced and just as regularly updated its Basic Intel books. The Area handbook series does this as well but is not updated with sufficient timeliness and regularity. (2)One of the weaknesses we found in our intel efforts in El Salvador during the 80s was a lack of knowledge of the local population. I found that simply by talking to local civilians I could collect most of what the ESAF needed to protect them. This, I think, is the kind of intel collection and analysis that MG Flynn is talking about. Not something that MI ever really focused on but the same collection and analysis techniques used for "normal" tac intel work here. It is simply a matter of focus. But this intelligence needs to feed into the Basic Intel picture as well as be informed by it.
U.S. Intelligence is overlooking and underestimating the imminent threat of homegrown terrorism in the Washington, D.C. area. The extremist Salafi mosque in Silver Spring, Maryland harbors some of the most dangerous Jihadists in the country. Major Hasan who massacred over a dozen people at Fort Hood was a highly regarded member of this mosque. His close friend, Fuad Kamal, runs a covert organization named Anaara Media. Anaara Media is a worldwide recruitment network for Islamic militants. Fuad Kamal, a martial arts expert, has helped trained female Islamic militants in the art of throat cutting. He is one of the most extreme idealogical Jihadists. He is highly trained in both explosives and munitions technology. His contacts at Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, are one of the greatest threats to U.S. security. Fuad Kamal may or may not be listed on the top 100 list of suspected terrorists. It is amazing that he has continued to recruit and train without the slightest suspicion. His telephone number is (240)210-7118. He is a prime example of homegrown terrorism. The current administration is extremely lax in monitoring these homegrown Jihadists and it is the innocent people of the United States who will pay the price for this coddling of Muslim extremists in our own backyard!
Though not one to espouse conspiracy theories, given that TSA is rushing to purchase full body scanners(another feckless purchase)to put into operation, one might think the manufacturers employed the alleged bomber to improve their 1st quarter profits. As for Yemen, when will we learn that endemically corrupt and mercenary oligarchs are equivalent to the boy crying wolf?! Our response to each threat has been hysterical. Both, I guarantee, will underserve us.
BLUF: MG Flynn did make several good points in his paper but the overall conclusion was over zealous in emphasis on changing the priority of intelligence analysis and collection from targeting insurgents to that of the local population.
His best point, by far, was that battalion and brigade commanders need to be held responsible for the intelligence sections in their commands and, by proxy, the intelligence officers shall also be held accountable for their work. Therein lays the problem that most commanders cannot be perceived to have knowledge of the best use and practices of intelligence. Most commanders direct their intelligence officer as if he were a squad or a plane. That is the intelligence officer is ordered to look a specific objective which will change at the whim of the commander thus achieving nothing but reactive intelligence that paints the picture the commander wants to see.
MG Flynn lost the mark by pushing too heavily the demographic agenda. This information is important but it does not solely enable you to target at the tactical level. Perhaps he overstated his point to ensure it was communicated to thick skulled commanders and intelligence officers but MG Flynn still need to pay lip service to the targeting process at the battalion level because it is the targeting processes that allows for removal of the enemy without creating more insurgents. Removing key leaders is still an essential task in counter insurgent operations.
"Good basic intel is best done by the appropriate academics (both social scientists and historians) but failing that, it must be done by ordinary intel analysts." - John T. Fishel
I respond, respectfully, as a military intelligence professional; I am better suited to interpret cultural knowledge and its impact on my units mission then an academic who has no inclination or understanding of war (read Civilian Intelligence Agency, key word CIVILIAN). My degree is in psychology and I continue to study history in order to improve my analysis. I am a professional. That means I will do anything and everything to improve my abilities, including reading vast amounts of studies written by academics. Yet nothing I have read can be taken without a grain of salt and so I constantly fall back to my "ordinary" analyst training.
A solution to the problem of poor intelligence at the tactical level is to supply the manpower for company intelligence sections as MG Flynn discusses but this change needs to be a institutional change not a theater change where NCOs are simply told to become intel.
To increase experience at the lower levels, perhaps the first assignment for a new military analyst should be the brigade with a senior NCO who teaches the basics of IPB and ASCOPES before going to a company or battalion intelligence shop thus creating more experienced analysts at the lowest level where personnel are limited and efficiency counts.
Finally; national agencies and theater commands need to do two things: Stay out of my Area of Operations and show me the assets baby. If MG Flynn is upset about the intelligence quality at the battalion level, then he needs to encourage self motivated and independent thinking officers to stay at the battalion level. In addition to empowering these individuals, a generous helping of full motion video, signal intelligence, human intelligence teams and interpreters who have a clearance would drastically improve the combat multiplying effect of the battalion intelligence section.
Chicken Little
The sky never falls
Chicken Little--
I like your motto! I agree with your comment about you as an intel professional. As a former intel professional and as a current practicing social scientist, I acknowledge that you are fully competent to collect and analyze basic intel. My point, however, is that given the current situation, you and the junior tactical analysts must do a job that in a more ideal situation would be contracted to academics. Your skills in that ideal world are better suited to integrating the basic intel available with newly collected material on the civil pop target AND the enemy target. My argument is one of efficiency and current necessity.
Cheers
JohnT