I highly recommend to readers of this site the following article: Barbara Bolland’s excellent, “5 Infuriating Takeaways from the ‘Afghanistan Papers’,” American Conservative, 10 December 2019. (1) Ms. Bolland’s incisive article recounts the deliberate waste of U.S. human and financial assets in Afghanistan, as well as the wholesale lies that were, for 18-plus years, used to mislead Americans by presidents, media pundits, senators and congressmen, and, most especially, consistently, and vigorously by multiple Chairmen of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and many other U.S. general officers. (NB: I suspect that Iraq has been as bad, but that shoe has yet to drop.)
While I have often discussed America’s Afghan War on this blog, I cannot add much to Ms. Boland’s article, which clearly presents evidence from just-released documents and focuses on the years after the war began on 7 October 2001. I can, however, add a bit about what happened in the short span of weeks between 9/11 and the war’s October start. (NB: I worked on Afghanistan at CIA — from several different directions — from December, 1985, to November, 2004.)
The following points underscore, I think, how lightly the most senior levels of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took the Agency’s responsibility to provide the best possible support to the U.S. government’s Afghan war effort. I tend to believe that this fact was, in major part, the result of senior CIA officials knowing that the Bush Administration’s main goal in the Afghan War was to use it to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as to use it as the driver for a vast expansion of the police/surveillance state in the United States, which is still growing. (NB: On Iraq, for example, I recall that Agency leaders began shifting Arabic-speakers from the Bin Laden unit and other CTC components by late-2001/early-2002, and sending them to aid preparatory efforts underway for the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.) Following is the story of these five weeks as I remember it. I was recalled to the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center in the early evening of 11 September 2001.
–1.) On 9/11, the CIA was flush with officers who had prolonged experience working on Afghanistan and the varities of war as they are conducted therein. A substantial number of these individuals – from lower GS grades to the most experienced Senior Intelligence Officers — had worked on Afghanistan for the entire length of the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-1989, stayed on from 1989-to-1992 to assist in the final destruction of the still Soviet-armed and supported Afghan Communist regime, and then continued working on the country’s involvement in terrorism, insurgency, and heroin-trafficking to the day of the 9/11 attacks.
Now, 14-years of experience working on one facet of a private-sector institution’s business might not seem unusual – men and women spend thirty-or-more years making steel or automobiles, others preside over logistics or financial operations for the same period – but at CIA, and in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) generally, such expertise is thought unnecessary and as a sure sign of an officer’s lack of career ambition. Some intelligence officers are permitted to specialize on particular issues for prolonged periods, but only at the personal cost of few and widely separated promotions. An officer’s decision to specialize is always made with knowledge that it will limit his-or-her chances for promotion.
–2.) Before the fires of 9/11 were damped and bureaucratic priorities took control of CIA decision-making, a team of several of the smartest, bravest, and most experienced CIA Afghan hands were deployed to Afghanistan. There they prepared the ground for U.S. relations with the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, secured airfields and other areas for the use of U.S. Special Forces, gathered intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taleban activities, and made sure the coffee was hot when Afghanistan-ignorant U.S. general officers swaggered into the country.
These CIA officers did a magnificent and courageous job, one whose success shone even brighter after it was learned that Pentagon had no off-the-shelf plan for war in Afghanistan – not much of a surprise, as it already had refused to assist in killing/capturing bin Laden – and had no interest in exploiting the detailed plans formulated by the CIA and other IC components for destroying Afghanistan’s poppy fields and the organizations that facilitated the export of heroin to Europe, Turkey, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere.
–3.) By a week or so after 9/11, CIA’s senior bureaucrats substantially reduced the quality of Agency support not only for the U.S. military, but also for the Agency officers on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere in South Asia. (NB: The exceptions to this statement are the superb support for Afghan operations from the Counterterrorism Center’s Bin Laden unit — which of course gave President Clinton 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden in 1997-1999, and thereby 10 chances to prevent 9/11 — and CIA’s always excellent and daring paramilitary operators.)
Four senior CIA officers are primarily and directly responsible for the self-inflicted wound of refusing to exploit CIA’s substantial stock of Afghan operational experience to support the Afghan war effort: Cofer Black, Henry Crumpton, James Pavitt, and George Tenet.
–4.) The gist of this travesty is that the four men responsible for providing CIA’s best effort, instead used the just-started war to test out their belief that it took no special talent or experience to understand Afghanistan and defeat Islamist terrorists and insurgents. They championed the delusion that any Afghanistan-ignorant Directorate of Operations (DO) officer could be plugged into waging the new Afghan war and do as well or better than those CIA officers who were already armed with a decade or more first-hand Afghan experience in assisting the mujahidin to defeat the Soviet superpower and/or searching for bin Laden.
James Pavitt, in particular, is at fault on this issue. He appeared to strongly dislike the Counterterrorism Center; had no significant experience in the Islamic world or its wars; and abhorred approving covert operations meant to protect Americans if there was chance they might fail and thereby further undermine his very thin credentials for serving in a senior-most CIA leadership position. Pavitt did, however, have what counted most; namely, DCI George Tenet’s willingness to coddle him and ignore examples of his human frailties.
–5.) Two of the other men mentioned above — Cofer Black (Chief/CTC) and Henry Crumpton — had spent almost all of their pre-CTC careers working issues that had nothing to do with Afghanistan or South Asia. Working on intelligence issues in other areas of the world, of course, is nowhere close to an easy thing. It is a very dangerous world, and both men were reputed to have done excellently in the region in which they were stationed. But each – whether for self-aggrandizement or their sharing of Pavitt’s view that the Afghan war, Islamist insurgency, or Islamist terrorist experience was nothing special and any DO officer without it could do the job – proceeded to form an Afghan Task Force (ATF) led by Crumpton. With Black’s okay, Crumpton filled it with officers who had spent much of their careers working on Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Again, I must add that each of these regions present a wealth of intricate and dangerous problems for the Agency officers working there, and each problem requires experience, talent, and bravery to solve successfully.
That said, in supporting an unanticipated and emergency U.S. military invasion/occupation of a country where U.S. military forces had never operated, it beggars commonsense not to have exploited the abundance of Afghan-experienced CIA officers. If your goal was – as it should have been – to have CIA do its utmost to support U.S. forces, and the victory that U.S. generals should have but never did seek, then it was absolutely necessary to bring to bear CIA’s best brainpower and country-savvy. This was never done by the CIA while it was headed by George Tenet. This struck me as odd. Tenet had been the staff director of the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Agency (SSCI) during much of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. Throughout those years, Tenet was regularly briefed in detail on precisely how the mujahedin were gradually defeating the Soviet superpower. Ironically, Tenet, after 9/11, presided over an effort that allowed the mujahidin to defeat a second superpower in exactly the same way in which Tenet knew they had defeated the first. (NB: How do I know this? I delivered or participated in several dozen of these briefings.)
–6.) The new, post-9/11 Afghan Task Force (ATF) – not be confused with the first ATF, which successfully helped the Afghans defeat the Soviets — also operated in a way that made it apparent that its main task was to prove Pavitt’s belief that “anyone can do this Afghan/terrorist stuff”, and not to bring pertinent Agency experience to bear and thereby optimize the Agency’s contribution to the war effort. Set up in a secure-access vault, the ATF’s chief — Crumpton — decreed that each officer working in the vault had to have an extra marking on his/her badge before being permitted to enter. In essence, this chucklehead ensured that his able but Afghan-ignorant officers were all but sealed-off from the wealth of pertinent and recent experience that stood just outside the door of their now-sacred vault. More than a few times, the Army and Marine field-grade officers who visited the ATF for pre-deployment briefings left the vault and immediately sought out Afghan-experienced CIA officers they knew – at the time, many were working on al-Qaeda and other Sunni fighters in CTC, and had been for 5 to 10 years – to get the real skinny on what they would face in the unique world inside Afghanistan.
In the next few years — my first-hand experience ends in mid-November, 20o4 — many CIA officers were amazed to find that virtually no field- grade officers had been prepared by their superiors for the new Afghan war by being directed to read and study the Red Army’s Afghan after-action report — written by that army’s General Staff — about the causes of the USSR’s disastrous defeat in the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-1992. (2)
Almost none of military officers being briefed – and I suspect more than a few ATF members – seemed to be aware of this surprisingly frank study that detailed Soviet military, political, and intelligence failures during Moscow’s Afghan war. One of these failures was not having studied how illiterate, technology-poor, and ill-armed Afghans had been able, almost without exception, to defeat the far better armed and much more technically advanced armies that had invaded Afghanistan on multiple occasions since the time of Alexander the Great.
The Soviet generals also noted that they failed to understand the importance of the Islamic faith to the Afghans’ conduct of war. This failure was especially prominent in the areas of the mujahidin coping well with high casualties, especially family members; attaching minimal importance to defeat in individual engagements with the Soviets because defeat meant only that they had not yet earned the victory only Allah could deliver; demonstrating extreme patience, born of faith, that Allah eventually would award victory to His faithful; and the minimal war-weariness and morale-decline among the mujahidin due to the foregoing realities of their faith.
CIA’s Afghan hands not only read the Soviet generals’ book, but had first-hand experience in working with and supporting the Afghans whom the Red Army generals described as their conquerors. U.S. general officers had no idea of how to defeat the mujahedin, but CIA officers could easily have instructed the clueless American and NATO generals on how those haphazardly armed Islamist insurgents defeated a Soviet army loaded with superior technology and weaponry, and how they surely would be defeated by them. None of this was allowed to be shared with U.S. soldiers and Marines — unless they searched out the veteran Afghan CIA officers — going off to fight the Afghan enemy in a war that is now more than 18-years old.
In the end, there are three iron-clad lessons that CIA’s Afghan hands would have shared with the U.S. military had they had the opportunity.
–First, take to heart the lessons of a superpower’s defeat by Afghans that were graciously detailed by Red Army generals, and do not repeat them.
–Second, there will never be Western-style democracy, secularism, civil liberties, women’s rights, meaningful elections, or rule of law in Afghanistan; in other words, Westernization and secularism can never be imposed on Afghanistan. There was no sign in 2001 that more than a distinct minority of Afghans — many of them expatriates — would accept such an imposition. Even fewer would accept it in 2019, because the power of Islamism is now far stronger in Afghanistan and because the Afghan insurgents believe they have won.
–Three, because remaking Afghans into secular, libertine, and democracy-addled Westerners cannot be done by a war of any length, there is no use hanging around for more than the 18-24 months needed to conduct a savage, country-wide, and punitive campaign of human and material desolation, and then get out of the country. That course of action would have made the Afghans think twice about again messing with the U.S. military, a thought process that would have been accelerated, deepened, and lengthened once there were no more U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
Just before the October, 2001, opening of the Afghan war, the renowned, at times brilliant, British military historian John Keegan offered U.S. leaders the same first-rate advice (3) that would have been offered by CIA’s Afghan hands had they been allowed to participate in supporting the war. Keegan explained that,
The pattern to Afghanistan’s foreign and domestic wars seems to go as follows. Foreign interventions aimed at dominance founder on the belligerence of the population, who abandon internecine conflict to combine against invaders, and [up]on the country’s severe terrain. In the absence of foreign interference, however, Afghans fall easily into fighting each other, often seeking outside help, which provokes intervention, thus restarting the cycle. Limited campaigns of penetration, aimed simply at inflicting punishment, can succeed, as long as the punitive forces remain mobile, keep control of the high ground and are skillful at tactical disengagement. … Is this analysis any help to the Americans? It certainly warns against any plan to station large ground forces inside the country….
Then Keegan got down to nuts and bolts. “As America may, and should, plan to mount only punitive attacks,” Keegan wrote, “they should do so from outside Afghanistan, adding that central Asia promises to be the best basing area available.” Keegan closed his on-point advice for the Bush Administration by confiding that the most important lesson the British military had learned from more than a century of mostly failed invasions of Afghanistan from India was to have no ambition of conducting a long occupation or of reforming the people and their governing practices. “What the product of punitive attacks might be defies prediction,” Keegan wrote,
As one of President Bush’s closest advisers is reported to have asked recently: “What can we do to Afghanistan that Afghanistan hasn’t already done to itself?” Always poor and backward, it has been reduced by civil and foreign war to a wasteland. The best that can be hoped of military action is to regenerate division between its many tribes and factions, which may yield terrorist hostages to American wrath, and to frighten the Taliban leaders. … Afghans, though doughty warriors, are also pragmatists. They like fighting but are prepared to live to fight another day if the odds are stacked against them. The trick America must achieve is to stack the odds in its favour.
Obviously, neither Bush, his advisers, or his generals, nor – astoundingly, the British cabinet and generals – gave a hoot for Keegan’s defeat-avoiding advice and so will end with a much more humiliating and total defeat than did the Red Army. That reality is bad enough, but the fact that CIA officers – and, ironically, Red Army generals — could have provided as good advice as Keegan, but based on much more recent and detailed evidence and first-hand experience, speaks to the unrelenting danger that cowardly, self-aggrandizing, and grossly ignorant senior bureaucrats consistently pose to U.S. national security.
Endnotes:
–1.) Barbara Boland, “5 Infuriating Takeaways from the ‘Afghanistan Papers’,” American Conservative, 10 December 2019, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/5-infuriating-findings-in-the-afghanistan-papers/
–2.) Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress, (Eds.). The Soviet-Afghan War How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Manhattan, KS: Kansas University Press, [21 January] 2002
–3.) John Keegan, “If America decides to take on the Afghans, this is how to do it,” 20 September 2001, at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4265748/If-America-decides-to-take-on-the-Afghans-this-is-how-to-do-it.html
