Intelligence and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Intelligence and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars COMMENTING IN 1950 ON THE ACCURACY OF intelligence reports and assessments that the U.S. public expected the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to produce, newly appointed director Walter Bedell Smith purportedly remarked that Americans “expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin, and I’m not sure they are so much interested in God.”1 Smith exaggerated, but not by much. Americans’ expectations (both within and beyond the Beltway) about the value of intelligence for conducting foreign policy and promoting national security are uniformly unrealistic. Collecting intelligence is hard, and analyzing it is even harder. The most one can expect from intelligence, in the words of a veteran official, is to “reduce uncertainty, identify risks and opportunities, and by doing so, deepen understanding so that those with policymaking responsibilities will make ‘better’ decisions.” Done right, intelligence can provide policymakers with a “decision advantage.”2 Intelligence, particularly strategic intelligence, was not done right during the lead-up to and conduct of either the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war. 1 Quoted in Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 9. 2 Thomas Fingar, Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 25; and Jennifer E. Sims, “Decision Advantage and the Nature of Intelligence Analysis,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 389–403. RICHARD H. IMMERMAN is Professor and Edward Buthusiem Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History at Temple University, Marvin Wachman Director of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, and former Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Integrity and Standards. POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 131 Number 3 2016 | www.psqonline.org # 2016 Academy of Political Science DOI: 10.1002/polq.12489 477 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 RICHARD H. IMMERMAN 478 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 3 Uri Friedman, “The Ten Biggest American Intelligence Failures,” Foreign Policy, 3 January 2012, accessed at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/1/3/the_ten_biggest_american_intelligence_failures, 7 February 2016; and Willis C. Armstrong, William Leonhart, William J. McCaffrey, and Herbert C. Rothenberg, “The Hazards of Single-Outcome Forecasting,” in Inside CIA’s Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency’s Internal Journal, 1955–92, ed. H. Bradford Westerfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 253–254. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 It thus did little to reduce policymakers’ uncertainty or to provide them with a decision advantage. This judgment begs questions about who was responsible for this failure and, therefore, for its consequences. This article argues that although the Intelligence Community (IC) did not perform well, its customers—America’s policymakers—are primarily culpable for the grief that befell the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan. (Currently, 16 agencies make up the IC, most notably, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Intelligence and Research; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is often included as the IC’s seventeenth element, although its responsibilities are primarily managerial.) First in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and then when waging two wars, the architects of America’s national security relied far too little on intelligence in reaching their decisions, forfeiting the advantage it could have provided them. Policymakers did not depend on intelligence to guide their decisions because they did not feel the need to; too many high-ranking officials’ minds were closed. Furthermore, they too often saw intelligence reports, and those who wrote them, as obstacles to actions they were predisposed to take. By the second term of the George W. Bush presidency, moreover, and throughout that of the Barack Obama administration, officials used the IC largely to assist in taking those actions—primarily by conducting the drone campaign and undertaking other covert paramilitary operations. For this reason, intelligence played a larger role in efforts to prosecute and terminate the wars than it did in decisions to engage in the wars. This is not to say that in the lead-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the IC served policymakers well. Intelligence reporting on Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and stateless terrorist networks such as al Qaeda severely challenged American capabilities. The CIA’s inability to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 appears on almost all lists of the agency’s greatest Cold War failures.3 Nevertheless, by covertly providing billions of dollars in arms and material (funneled through Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate or ISI) to Muslim guerrilla warriors, the mujahedeen, in their battle against the INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 479 THE ANTECEDENTS Since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and the protracted Iran-Iraq War that raged over much of the next decade, the intelligence role in Iraq, in contrast to that in Afghanistan, focused more on analysis than operations. Initially it performed well in this capacity. Although the CIA lacked the assets necessary to collect human intelligence (HUMINT), the IC drew on photographs taken from satellites (IMINT, imagery intelligence) to monitor the buildup of Iraqi forces along the Kuwait border in 1990 and provide advance warning that it was “highly likely” that Saddam intended to invade Kuwait. Once the invasion occurred in August of that year, the CIA assessed it unlikely that economic sanctions would compel Saddam to withdraw his forces, a judgment that was probably accurate. The agency also estimated that the international community was likely to support a U.S. military response not only by cheering from the sidelines but also by contributing troops, money, or both. This judgment was accurate. Moreover, CIA analysts outperformed General Norman Schwarzkopf’s Central Command intelligence staff by correctly evaluating the damage to Iraq’s 4 Bruce Riedel, What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2014), x. 5 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Soviets and their Afghan clients, the CIA did contribute to the Kremlin’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989. “WE WON” cabled the agency’s chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, after Moscow called it quits in what another CIA veteran described as an “intelligence war between the United States and its allies and the Soviets and their ally, the Afghan communist party” and “the most successful covert intelligence operation in U.S. history.”4 In the sense that a Soviet defeat meant a U.S. victory, the CIA station chief was right. Still, throughout that conflict, intelligence analysts displayed little understanding of the complexity of the country’s internal dynamics or appreciation of the emergence of the Taliban as both a political and a military force. The withdrawal of CIA operatives from Afghanistan quickly followed that of the Soviet troops. By the time the Taliban captured Kabul, established an Islamist government headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar, and turned Afghanistan into a base for global jihadism in the second half of the 1990s, U.S. intelligence capabilities there were virtually nonexistent.5 480 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 6 Richard L. Russell, “CIA’s Strategic Intelligence in Iraq,” Political Science Quarterly 117 (Summer 2002): 191–207, at 194–204. 7 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, Intelligence Successes and Failures during Operations Desert Shield/Storm, 103rd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 23–24. 8 Russell, “CIA’s Strategic Intelligence in Iraq,” 191–207, at 201. 9 House Committee on Armed Services, Intelligence Successes and Failures, 23–24. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 military capabilities inflicted by the America-led coalition as dramatically less than that claimed by Schwarzkopf.6 Overshadowing these successes, however, was the CIA’s inability to accurately evaluate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in the early 1990s; this underestimation would influence intelligence assessments a decade later. Because the CIA had few assets on the ground in Iraq to provide HUMINT, the United States had little appreciation of Saddam’s WMD capabilities. A postwar study of the “successes” and “failures” of U.S. intelligence during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm conducted by a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee judged that because of insufficient information, the IC’s estimates of his cache of biological weapons were too ambiguous to be useful. Intelligence on Iraq’s chemical capabilities was better. But the committee also found fault with the community’s assessments of Iraq’s nuclear program.7 At the start of 1990, according to U.S. estimates, Iraq was five, perhaps 10 years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But intelligence received from Israel that summer suggested that Iraq was further along in its efforts to produce the requisite enriched uranium, which shortened the time that the IC estimated Iraq required to achieve a nuclear capability.8 But it was information collected by United Nations (UN) inspectors in 1991 and 1992, after the first Gulf War, that revealed more accurately the state of Saddam’s nuclear program. These inspectors learned that by the time that Iraq invaded Kuwait, it possessed the capacity to produce enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs, that Saddam had funded the program with virtually no limits, and that the United States was “totally unaware of more than 50 percent of all the major weapons installations in Iraq.” Furthermore, because Saddam could readily conceal facilities to build and store unconventional weapons, and because the equipment was mobile, it was less vulnerable to attack than the United States had anticipated.9 Concluding that Saddam could never be trusted, the IC resolved never again to underestimate Iraq’s capacity to conceal nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. This resolve grew stronger as the CIA’s covert efforts to INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 481 10 Ronald Kessler, The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign against Terror (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 21–28. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 topple Saddam in the mid-1990s failed even as his regime crushed a Kurdish insurrection that the CIA encouraged, funded Palestinian terrorists, and provoked anxiety among U.S. regional allies from those states extending to Turkey that shared the Persian Gulf with Iraq. Yet although Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, remained a priority for U.S. intelligence throughout the decade of the 1990s, the IC’s ability to monitor—let alone influence—developments there eroded further. U.S. intelligence had suffered prior to the first Gulf War because, devoid of “boots on the ground” in Iraq, it was unable to collect HUMINT. Nothing improved this situation in the years following Saddam’s defeat. John Deutch, whom President Bill Clinton appointed director of central intelligence (DCI) in 1995, believed that intelligence acquired from intercepting communication signals and satellite photography (SIGINT and IMINT) should take precedence over HUMINT. He also so vigorously opposed using foreign assets with records of criminal behavior or human rights violations that he issued a directive prohibiting their recruitment. This prohibition probably had little effect in Iraq. Saddam did not allow anyone into his inner circle who was not family or with whom he did not have a long history. CIA officials nevertheless complained that Deutch’s edict made a bad situation worse.10 Moreover, the agency’s budget was a casualty of the Clinton administration’s post–Cold War quest for a “peace dividend.” U.S. intelligence, consequently, depended on UN inspectors to detect efforts on the part of the Saddam regime to reconstitute its WMD, including its nuclear, program. Saddam kept these inspectors at arm’s length until 1998. That year he expelled them. At the same time, the evolving threat of stateless terrorist networks diverted attention from both Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the IC performed no better in that realm. DCI William Casey had in 1986 established a Counterterrorism Center. But its mandate was almost exclusively to conduct covert operations against terrorists as opposed to identifying who they were and assessing their motivations, capabilities, and intentions. Further constraining the CIA’s capacity for analyzing issues related to terrorism was the makeup of its analytic workforce. The agency dedicated a high proportion of its analysts to the Soviet Union, which was poor preparation for understanding stateless terrorism. Yet even as the agency struggled to reassign and retrain its analysts after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the uptick in terrorist attacks was 482 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 11 Presidential Decision Directive 39, “U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism,” 21 June 1995, accessed at http:// www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/pdd-39.pdf, 22 April 2016. 12 Coll, Ghost Wars, 405–411. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 unmistakable. In June 1995, President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39, “U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism.” It made the DCI responsible for pursuing an “aggressive program of foreign intelligence collection, analysis, counterintelligence and covert action” aimed at reducing U.S. vulnerabilities to international terrorism.11 Almost precisely one year after Clinton signed the directive, 19 U.S. servicemen died when Islamic militants associated with Hezbollah, an Islamic organization based in Lebanon, bombed the U.S. military barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Deutch resigned as DCI at the end of Clinton’s first term; the Senate confirmed George Tenet as his successor in July 1997. For reasons having to do with both the national interest and the CIA’s institutional interest, Tenet quickly moved to position the agency at the center of a ramped-up counterterrorism campaign by reviving its capacity for covert operations. He did not move quickly enough. On 7 August 1998, only a year after Tenet’s confirmation, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The IC identified Osama bin Laden as the mastermind. In the late 1980s, bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi family who had joined the mujahedeen resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan, had put together a loosely organized network called al Qaeda (the Base). Its purpose was to wage holy war against foreign influence in Islamist territories. The United States, with its forces stationed in bin Laden’s native Saudi Arabia, was, from al Qaeda’s perspective, the chief offender and thus its primary target. By the mid-1990s, al Qaeda had shifted its headquarters from the Sudan to Afghanistan, where it received protection from the Taliban. Two weeks after the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies, Clinton ordered a missile strike on al Qaeda’s training camp at Zhawar Kili in eastern Afghanistan. According to CIA intelligence, bin Laden was attending a meeting there. Scores were killed or wounded, but bin Laden was not among them. The Pakistani ISI may have tipped off the Taliban, which warned bin Laden.12 Pakistan supported the Taliban as an ally in its conflict with India over Kashmir and as a buffer should it experience unrest among its own Pashtun population. For the Clinton administration and the CIA, bin Laden and al Qaeda overtook Iraq and Afghanistan as priorities. In 1999 Tenet appointed J. Cofer Black to head the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Black had INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 483 13 Anonymous [Michael F. Scheuer], Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004). 14 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of American’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 188–221. 15 Quoted in Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 231–232. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 been following bin Laden’s trail since serving as the CIA station chief in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1993, and he kept close tabs on the progress of the “Bin Laden [code-named “Alec”] Station.” This was the special unit led by Michael F. Scheuer and housed in a building separate from but close to the CIA’s Langley headquarters. The agency had established the station in 1996 to track the wealthy Saudi.13 Clinton signed a memorandum in December 1999 authorizing the CIA to use lethal force if necessary to cripple the terrorist organization. The agency’s operatives, however, even the most highly trained personnel in the Office of External Development’s “nonofficial cover” program, were unable to penetrate al Qaeda. Furthermore, neither the Counterterrorist Center nor the Alec Station acquired “actionable intelligence.” Bin Laden remained out of harm’s way.14 On 12 October 2000, al Qaeda-directed terrorists blew up the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. Seventeen Americans died. The next month Americans elected George W. Bush president (the final outcome had to await the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in December). The new president and his national security team dismissed Clinton’s hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda as an overwrought obsession. In their view Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, owing to its present capabilities, its potential capabilities, and its alleged sponsorship of other terrorists’ capabilities, represented a far more severe threat than did, in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the “little terrorist in Afghanistan.”15 Their overriding concern was with states, especially those states that it believed were willing to violate international law and that could potentially acquire nuclear weapons. The new administration intended defense against nuclear missiles, not terrorism, to be the cornerstone of its national security strategy. Bush retained Tenet. Throughout the administration’s first eight months, no one sought more strenuously than the DCI to convince the president that his predecessor’s emphasis on counterterrorism was legitimate and justified. During this period—in fact, beginning with the transition—Tenet personally briefed Bush dozens of times on the IC’s judgment that bin Laden intended to attack the United States. But it was Michael Morrell, a senior CIA analyst who later served as the head of the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence and its acting director, who briefed the president on 6 August 2001, while Bush was vacationing at his ranch in 484 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY Crawford, Texas. The lead item in that day’s President’s Daily Brief was a report titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Although available intelligence did not point toward a specific date, the purpose of the report, according to one of its authors, was to warn the president that the risk was so high, and the danger so imminent, that he should take extraordinary precautions.16 16 Peter L. Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011), 48; and Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer, The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 152. 17 Bergen, The Longest War, 53–67. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM The administration, surely influenced by its predisposition to perceive the threat of al Qaeda as less severe than that of nuclear-armed outlaw states, was unimpressed by the CIA’s alert. Bush interpreted the President’s Daily Brief as an effort to provide historical context to the contemporary situation, not to signal any change in the assessment. But the CIA’s intent was to signal a change, and that estimate proved sound. Shortly before 9:00 on the morning of 11 September 2001, a hijacked airliner slammed into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Before the morning was over, a second airliner struck the other Twin Tower, a third crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth, en route to the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, was brought down in rural Pennsylvania by courageous passengers. The CIA rapidly pinpointed al Qaeda as responsible for the calamity, which claimed more lives than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Almost as rapidly, the agency began to make amends for what it conceded was a failure to detect the preparations for the attack and its implementation strategy. Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, briefed the National Security Council on a plan to take revenge on al Qaeda on 13 September. In but a few weeks, he boasted, the terrorists responsible for the outrage would have “flies walking across their eyeballs.” At Camp David two days later, Tenet provided a more detailed briefing to Bush on what came to be called Operation Enduring Freedom. On 17 September, President Bush instructed the CIA to execute it.17 By early October, agency operatives had returned to Afghanistan, having left with the Soviets in 1989. Preceding and then collaborating closely with special operations forces from the U.S. and British militaries, the agency’s paramilitary operatives (the seven-member Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team, code-named Jawbreaker and led by Gary INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 485 18 Gary C. Shroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Presidio Press, 2005); and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 50–62, 317. 19 John A. Bonin, U.S. Army Forces Central Command in Afghanistan and the Arabia Gulf During Operation Enduring Freedom: 11 September 2001–March 2003 (Carlisle, PA: Army Heritage Center Foundation, 2003); Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and AlQaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander (New York: Crown, 2005); and Robert L. Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). 20 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 4–6, 12. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Schroen) quickly reestablished contacts with the Northern Alliance’s antiTaliban warlords. Schroen’s team provided them with intelligence and, according to Bob Woodward, some $70 million in money and supplies.18 Jawbreaker also coordinated its efforts with the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan, and other operatives previously stationed in Uzbekistan to direct Predator drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) on surveillance missions over Afghanistan. After the arrival of U.S. military forces and the official launch of Operation Enduring Freedom on 7 October, relations between CIA operatives in Afghanistan and General Tommy Franks’s Central Command, and even between those operatives and offices at the agency’s Langley headquarters, most notably, the Counterterrorism Center, became at times strained. Nevertheless, over the subsequent months CIA agents in the field (ultimately, a total of about 110) provided vital support by collecting real-time, “actionable” intelligence, identifying and helping to guide American bombs to designated targets, and interrogating prisoners. CIA officer Johnny “Mike” Spann became the operation’s first fatality when he was killed on 25 November. By that day, the allied Taliban and al Qaeda forces had lost the battles for Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul in the north and were being pummeled, presumably along with Osama bin Laden, in the Tora Bora cave complex near Afghanistan’s eastern border, where Jawbreaker’s forward Team Juliet led by Gary Berntsen had found them to be hiding.19 In early December, the Taliban’s southern stronghold of Kandahar fell. Its leader, Mullah Omar, fled to the Tora Bora mountains to join bin Laden and his al Qaeda colleagues. In March 2002, following the defeat of the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban, major combat operations ended. By then, American bombers had steadily clobbered Tora Bora. An estimated 700,000 pounds of ordnance landed on the mountains between 4 and 7 December alone.20 Yet victory eluded the Americans. Bin Laden, his chief lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and others were able to find shelter in the tunnels and bunkers built with CIA money in the 1980s by the 486 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM James Woolsey, Deutch’s predecessor as DCI, was a leading champion of the theory that tied Saddam Hussein to bin Laden. But the agency’s sources did not support the claim. In Tenet’s words, the “intelligence did not show any Iraqi authority, direction, or control over any of the many specific terrorists acts carried out by al-Qa’ida.”22 Rumsfeld, nevertheless, described evidence of the link as “bulletproof,” and to marshal support he established a two-person Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) to comb through the files of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The PCTEG claimed that the files showed “consultation, training, financing, and collaboration” between Saddam and al Qaeda. Rejecting this claim as “Feith-based analysis,” a play on the name of Paul Wolfowitz’s deputy, Douglas Feith, the CIA held to its position.23 The CIA’s evaluation of the administration’s accusation that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and sought actively to develop nuclear weapons was less resolute and more complicated. Bush and his closest advisers alleged that Saddam not only possessed (and was determined to acquire more) WMDs, but he also was prepared to supply them to bin Laden and other terrorists. The CIA continued to resist connecting Saddam to bin Laden. But the agency, including Director 21 Henry A. Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service (New York: Penguin, 2012), 257–261. 22 George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 341– 358. 23 Bergen, The Longest War, 138–140. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Afghans who fought the Soviets. Moreover, consistent with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence that the U.S. military maintain a “light footprint,” General Franks refused to deploy the reinforcements that Henry Crumpton, an agency legend who commanded the CIA’s “forces” in Afghanistan, requested for the purpose of preventing the enemy from fleeing. Whether additional troops could have blocked all avenues of escape from Tora Bora is an open question. What is not is that the al Qaeda and Taliban survivors fled over the border to Pakistan. The Bush administration was unconcerned. Already it had redirected the crusade against terrorism to target Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Presuming, without reliable intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had assisted bin Laden in executing the September 11 attacks, the managers of America’s national security had begun to develop war plans against Iraq in early November. The U.S. Intelligence Community was spiraling toward irrelevancy.21 INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 487 24 John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman, “The Selling of the Iraq War, the First Casualty,” New York Review of Books, 30 June 2003, accessed at http://www.tnr.com/article/the-first-casualty, 22 January 2016; Thomas Powers, “The Vanishing Case for War,” New York Review of Books, 4 December 2003, accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/dec/04/the-vanishing-case-for-war/? pagination=false, 22 January 2016; Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011); John Walcott, “What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know about Iraq, 24 January 2015, Politico Magazine, 24 January 2016, accessed at http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ 2016/01/iraq-war-wmds-donald-rumsfeld-new-report-213530, 25 January 2016. 25 Woodward, Plan of Attack, 107–109; George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 29 January 2002, accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902.htm, 22 January 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Tenet, did share the assessment of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell that Saddam intended to augment a cache of WMDs that he had successfully concealed since expelling the UN inspectors in 1998 with a nuclear capability. When military intelligence sent Rumsfeld a report casting doubt on the administration’s claims, Rumsfeld buried it. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he famously quipped. September 11 attested to U.S. vulnerability; there was no time to lose in eliminating the threat.24 Still bereft of human assets in Iraq, the CIA relied on U-2 spy planes, drones, and other technological means to collect intelligence on the danger Saddam posed. It remained unable to uncover evidence of WMDs, however, let alone of Saddam’s intentions. This inability did not shake the belief of Bush and his chief advisers in Saddam’s guilt. In his January 2002 State of the Union speech, the president devoted more attention to Iraq than to any of the other states that made up what he labeled the “axis of evil.” Among his many allegations, Bush indicted the regime’s effort “to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.” The challenge for the IC was to confirm that this effort continued. Moreover, the community sought intelligence that would reveal that Saddam Hussein already had WMDs available to use and to share.25 Having observed Saddam’s reprehensible behavior for decades, CIA analysts had little reason to doubt that Saddam had hidden in Iraq a stockpile of WMDs. The IC collected no evidence disconfirming this assumption. But neither did it collect confirming evidence. So it hedged its judgments. The effect on an administration that had already rushed to judgment was inconsequential. But a conflicted Congress sought a more conclusive estimate, if only to support whichever direction its members were leaning toward or to justify, even if reluctantly, going along with an invasion. In September 2002 members of Congress requested a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). 488 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 26 Fingar, Reducing Uncertainty, 89–108; Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 123–155; and Bob Drogan: Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007). 27 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Directorate of Intelligence, “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspections Created Picture of Deception,” 5 January 2006, accessed at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ news/20120905/CIA-Iraq.pdf, 22 January 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 By 3 October the National Intelligence Board (at the time called the National Foreign Intelligence Board), composed of senior leaders from across the IC, had approved a 92-page NIE on “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” It was new only in the most technical definition. Because of time constraints and the absence of current intelligence, the NIE was a synthesis of previous reports and estimates. In addition, violating the most basic tenets of analytic tradecraft, the authors conflated “fact” with assumptions and failed to identify the gaping holes in their data. Kept too much in the dark by collectors, moreover, they insufficiently expressed their confidence, or lack thereof, in the reliability of their sources. They likewise did not warn their readers that the IC had serious doubts about the credibility of some of those sources. The most notorious of these was “Curveball,” an Iraqi defector to Germany who concocted evidence that Saddam had hidden from inspectors mobile laboratories that produced biological weapons. German intelligence, British intelligence, and many in both the CIA and DIA doubted Curveball’s claims, but the NIE omitted mention of these suspicions.26 The IC’s failure to detect Saddam’s secret WMD programs prior to the first Gulf War made it easier for intelligence analysts to accept as logical the premise that if Saddam had pursued such programs before, he must be doing so again. This logic also led analysts to inflate the probability of worst-case scenarios, thus making themselves more vulnerable, to quote the CIA’s own self-study, to “Iraq’s intransigence and deceptive practices.”27 The NIE’s first Key Judgment read, “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” The claim was as inaccurate as it was categorical. (Tacked on to the end of the list of Key Judgments was the assessment of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR]that the available evidence was “inadequate to support” the judgment that Iraq was currently pursuing an “integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons”; the INR could present no evidence to the contrary, however.) Comparisons are difficult, but the New York Times could not have been far off INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 489 28 Key Judgments [from October 2002 NIE],“Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction”], accessed at http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html, 22 January 2016; and David Barstow, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth, “How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence,” New York Times, 3 October 2004. 29 Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 13–42; Key Judgments [from October 2002 NIE]; CIA, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs” (white paper, October 2002), accessed at https://www.cia. gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm, 22 January 2016; and National Intelligence Estimate, “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” (sanitized), 30 October 2002, accessed at http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd-nie.pdf, 22 January 2016. 30 CIA, “Misreading Intentions.” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 when it described the NIE as “one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence.”28 Those in favor of and opposed to the invasion of Iraq, at the time and subsequently, have held the NIE responsible for their positions. That charge is exaggerated, if not baseless. The most a policymaker can expect of intelligence is for it to provide a decision advantage. The policymaker should never hold it responsible for that decision. Furthermore, very few in Congress, the White House, the State and Defense departments, or elsewhere in Washington actually read the estimate. And its critics outside of (and perhaps some inside) government read a different document, most likely the NIE’s Key Judgments, which, under pressure, the administration released out of context. Some may also have read a white paper that Congress insisted that the National Intelligence Council, the interagency body that generates reports reflecting the IC’s collective judgment, produce at the unclassified level. But unlike the NIE, the white paper was not coordinated among the IC’s different agencies. Nor did it include the caveats and acknowledgments of dissents (primarily by the INR) that appeared in the NIE itself, even if only in footnotes.29 This is not to absolve the IC. The CIA titled its after-the-fact examination of its estimates about Saddam Hussein “Misreading Intentions.” The postmortem insightfully explains how Saddam, appreciating how precarious his situation was, had in the run-up to the invasion genuinely sought to provide the international community with the information it sought. But he could not work out a way to do so without admitting that he had for years concealed and lied about this very information. At the same time, he did not want to sacrifice his deterrent against enemies by acknowledging publicly that he had destroyed his chemical and biological weapons capacity and ceased efforts to obtain a nuclear one. The CIA, guided by Saddam’s history of “cheat and retreat,” was deceived as much as Israel and Iran, the key targets of his deception. The agency fell victim to what it euphemistically labeled “analyst liabilities.”30 490 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 31 Tyler Drumheller and Elaine Monaghan, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), 43–44. For the contrasting argument, see Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 137–184. 32 George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 28 January 2003, accessed at http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html, 22 January 2016; Joseph C. Wilson 4th, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” New York Times, 6 July 2003; and “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government,” September 2002, accessed at http://www. gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc05.pdf, 22 January 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 For this reason administration efforts to politicize the intelligence on Iraq, while inappropriate, were immaterial. There is no reason to conclude that the October 2002 NIE or any other analytic product would have reached different judgments had the administration signaled its preference to invade Iraq less blatantly, let alone had Vice President Cheney refrained from visiting CIA headquarters to look over analysts’ shoulders as they sifted through data.31 But there is also no reason to suspect that the administration would have behaved any differently had the IC correctly read Saddam’s intentions and assessed his capabilities. The fact that Secretary of State Powell was skeptical of claims made by the president and most of his core advisers and yet pushed no less strenuously to invade Iraq supports this argument. In his infamous State of the Union address on 28 January 2003, President Bush referred explicitly to Saddam’s supposed effort to purchase from Niger “yellow cake” uranium, which, with further processing, can be used to make nuclear weapons. The basis for that allegation, which the administration’s critics cite frequently to illustrate its politicization of intelligence, was a British report, the socalled September Dossier, that relied on forged documents. Harboring reservations about the report’s credibility, the CIA advised against Bush citing it. He nevertheless did.32 Powell did not in his equally infamous address to the UN General Assembly a week later. The secretary of state was more cautious about the evidence he used to charge Saddam Hussein. That his indictment was no less vigorous or categorical illustrates how prevalent was the presumption of Saddam Hussein’s guilt. Far more systematically than Bush, Powell drew on the available intelligence to close the administration’s case. With Tenet seated at his shoulder as a stamp of approval, the widely respected secretary of state proclaimed that “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources.” He then highlighted the extraordinary means that he alleged that Saddam had taken and was still taking to conceal a range of WMDs, and the devious dictator’s continuing efforts to develop and acquire others. In what became the most notorious example, Powell INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 491 33 Secretary Colin L. Powell, Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, 5 February 2003, accessed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/transcripts/powelltext_020503.html, 22 January 2016. 34 Quoted in Walter LaFeber, “The Rise and Fall of Colin Powell and the Powell Doctrine,” Political Science Quarterly 124 (Spring 2009): 71–93, at 89. 35 Sam Lebovic, “Limited War in the Age of Total Media,” in Beth Bailey and Richard H. Immerman, ed., Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 225–226. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 cited four different sources to condemn Iraq for maintaining mobile production facilities capable of producing “a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.” Chief among these sources was Curveball, whom, despite IC doubts about his credibility, Powell described as a defector “currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him.” The subtext of the address was that because of its unique capabilities, the United States, in contrast to the UN and all its member nations, had access to the most sensitive intelligence.33 Powell later publicly apologized for his pitch. But, he explained, his duty was to mobilize support for the administration’s policy—which was to invade Iraq. Powell “wanted to sell a rotten fish,” a former intelligence officer commented. “His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as he could scrape up.”34 He performed this assignment so well that his allegations were invulnerable to criticism. Although the intelligence Powell cited for his authority turned out to be unreliable, no official of any government or nongovernmental organization, or any scholar or journalist, had the evidence to challenge him. As a consequence, it was U.S. intelligence that became the scapegoat for the ensuing grief that befell both the United States and Iraq. But that is getting ahead of the story. On 19 March 2003, when President Bush announced the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the preemptive invasion aimed at ridding the world of Saddam and the threat he posed, he had successfully mobilized not only domestic but also international support.35 In less than two months Baghdad fell, Saddam and his sons fled into hiding, and Bush proclaimed an end to military operations. Behind the president when he made this proclamation aboard the USS Lincoln was a banner with the words “Mission Accomplished” blazoned on it. But the fundamental mission—to find and destroy Saddam’s cache of WMDs—had not yet begun. That mission turned out to be impossible. Notwithstanding Bush’s, Powell’s, and other administration officials’ claims that U.S. intelligence was solid, Iraq was devoid of hidden WMDs. 492 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 36 Walter Pincus, “Before War, CIA Warned of Negative Outcomes,” Washington Post, 3 June 2007; and Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung, “Analysts’ Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed,” Washington Post, 26 May 2007. 37 Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 139–181; Mark Danner, “U.S. Torture: Voices from the Black Sites,” New York Review of Books, 9 April 2009, accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/04/09/ustorture-voices-from-the-black-sites/, 4 June 2016; and Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, “Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations,” Washington Post, 18 April 2009. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Even as the American people and the globe’s population became progressively aware that the U.S. Intelligence Community had gotten the threat posed by Iraq very wrong, the Bush administration, the Iraqis, and America’s military became progressively more aware of a different threat that U.S. intelligence had gotten right. In August 2002, the National Intelligence Council, in a report titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq,” had warned of the danger of the invasion turning into a boon for al Qaeda by destabilizing the region and providing safe havens from which terrorists could operate. Six months later, still before Bush greenlighted Operation Iraqi Freedom, the council produced two additional reports: “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” and “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq.” Together they estimated that a U.S. invasion would generate profound ethnic and religious factions within Iraq that would likely collide violently. A “surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups” throughout the Muslim world would probably result, was the quote that appeared in the Washington Post.36 By the time the Post and other sources disclosed these intelligence reports to the public in 2007, the failure to locate WMDs in Iraq had already gravely damaged the CIA’s reputation. That the agency had forecast the eruption of the sectarian violence that was producing so many casualties among both the Iraqis and Americans was at this point of little importance—on the home front or the battlefield. The agency’s image, and, some argue, its capability to assist the war fighters as well, were further undermined by revelations about the CIA’s use of extraordinary renditions (kidnapping suspected terrorists and spiriting them off to countries known for sanctioning torture) and the enhanced interrogation techniques that agency personnel employed. These techniques included waterboarding, which involved tying the prisoner down at a slight incline, covering his nose and mouth with a cloth, and pouring water over his face to simulate drowning. The press and human rights groups publicized waterboarding as the CIA’s preferred means of torture. But waterboarding was but one of a list of interrogation methods sanctioned by a team of psychologists under contract to the agency.37 INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 493 38 U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” Executive Summary, 3 April 2014, accessed at http://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html?emc=edit_th_20141210 &nl= todaysheadlines&nlid=28943244, 22 January 2016; “CIA comments on the Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program,” 27 June 2013, accessed at http://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/document-cias-response-to-the-senate-torture-report.html, 22 January 2016; and U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” (Minority Views), 20 June 2014, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/document-republican-response-to-the-ciatorture-report.html, 22 January 2016. 39 Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 2013), 126. 40 Carl Hulse and Majorie Connelly, “Poll Shows a Shift in Opinion on Iraq War,” New York Times, 24 August 2006. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Whether these techniques constitute “torture” remains fiercely debated, between the CIA and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, between Republicans and Democrats, throughout the United States and the world.38 What intelligence the enhanced interrogation techniques yielded, and, consequently, what impact the prohibition on their use had on U.S. intelligence gathering, is debated no less. By 2005, the year Congress banned the “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of any prisoner held by the United States, growing numbers of Americans in and out of Washington were reaching the point that the IC’s failure in collection and estimation prior to the invasion was almost beside the point.39 The Iraq War was claiming more and more victims with no end in sight; terrorist networks, many of which were professing to be affiliated with al Qaeda, were increasing; and bin Laden himself appeared to be all but mocking U.S. efforts to find him. Rather than benefiting the conduct of the war, CIA behavior was contributing to the dramatic shift in U.S. public opinion against the war. Polls showed that by 2006, a majority of Americans thought it a mistake and wanted it over, regardless of the outcome.40 But the combination of the U.S. military surge in 2007, the shift to a revised counterinsurgency doctrine that accompanied General David Petraeus’s assuming command of U.S. (and multinational) forces that year, war weariness on the part of the Iraqis, and the emergence of an indigenous opposition to al Qaeda in Iraq signaled a change in America’s fortunes. The next year Barack Obama, who had been an early opponent of what he judged a “war of choice” and a vocal advocate of a U.S. withdrawal, announced his candidacy for president. In November 2008, Americans elected him. 494 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 41 U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, 108th Cong., Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Ordered Reported 7 July 2004, accessed at http://web.mit.edu/ simsong/www/iraqreport2-textunder.pdf, 23 January 2016; and 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 42 “Obama’s Address on the War in Afghanistan,” 1 December 2009, New York Times, 2 December 2009, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/world/asia/02prexy.text.html?ref=asia, 23 January 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 REFORM AND RESURGENCE The U.S. Intelligence Community underwent its most radical transformation since the CIA’s establishment in 1947 even before Obama’s election. At the end of 2004, President Bush signed into law the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA). Chief among IRTPA’s provisions was the establishment of a new official, the director of national intelligence, who would oversee the CIA as well as the 15 other official elements of the IC. For the CIA especially, this “demotion” added insult to the injury. More than any other contributing agency, it had suffered from the debacle over the NIE on Iraq’s WMD program (and, to a lesser extent, the charge that by not “connecting the dots” it had failed to prevent the September 11 tragedy). Indeed, in large part, the intelligence reform legislation resulted directly from the Senate investigation of the prewar intelligence on Iraq, which placed paramount responsibility on the CIA, not the administration, for the ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Put another way, there is a direct connection between the CIA’s indictment for all but causing the Iraq War and the legislation that cost the director of the CIA the title of chief of American intelligence.41 The resurgence of the war in Afghanistan transformed the CIA in ways that may very well prove as dramatic as IRTPA’s effect on it and the Intelligence Community as a whole. Only a month into his first year as president, President Obama, to the surprise of no one, announced that he intended to wind down the war in Iraq by withdrawing U.S. combat troops by August 2010 and America’s remaining forces by the end of the next year. In December 2009, however, to the surprise of many, Obama announced that he would deploy an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, a surge comparable to Bush’s in Iraq in 2007. From the president’s perspective, Bush’s decision to divert U.S. attention and resources to Iraq had allowed the Taliban both to revive and to regain the initiative in Afghanistan. Thus he was risking 30,000 more American lives to wage “a war of necessity.” “I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Obama spoke to the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on 1 December. “This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda.”42 INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 495 43 Matthew M. Aid, Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight against Terror (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 10–38, 65–67. 44 Matt Waldman, The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents (London: London School of Economics, Crisis States Research Centre, 2010); and Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: American in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 For more than six years, the U.S. Intelligence Community had been producing assessments that warned the White House about deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, which U.S. forces there came to call the “Lumpy Suck” because its mountainous terrain was so conducive to never-ending guerrilla warfare. The warnings began prior to the decision to invade Iraq and continued unabated. Not that the IC’s intelligence had gotten markedly better since the 1970s. Reporting on the escalation of insurgent attacks, the Afghan government’s loss of control over large swaths of territory, and the increase in crime and narcotics trafficking was easy. So, too, was assessing the feebleness of the corruption-plagued army, police force, and even more important, regime of Afghan’s president Hamid Karzai. But neither the CIA nor the DIA, which are responsible for collecting HUMINT, and certainly not the National Security Agency or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collect and process SIGINT and IMINT, could provide quality information about the nature of the enemy. The key questions—who were Taliban, who were al Qaeda, and to what extent were they still allied—were left unanswered. Notwithstanding the 2004 intelligence reform legislation, the “disjointed and dysfunctional” relationships among the more than 20 intelligence organizations that competed for both authority and collection systems in Afghanistan produced more paralysis than insight.43 Exacerbating this situation was the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. intelligence long suspected Pakistan, particularly its ISI, of sympathizing with and possibly abetting Afghanistan’s Taliban. The reason was that Pakistan’s priorities differed from America’s. It was primarily concerned with India, which it identified as its greatest enemy, and the allegiance of its own Pashtun population. In addition, Pakistan had its own “Taliban.” While independent of the Taliban in Afghanistan and much more focused on its opposition to the government in Islamabad, it shared a strict interpretation of Islam. Finally, many Pakistanis were convinced that sooner or later, the Americans would leave and the Afghan Taliban would win.44 Until its last days in office, the Bush administration paid insufficient heed to warnings about Afghanistan. It did not challenge the reporting. Rather, preoccupied with Iraq, where American forces were committed in 496 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 45 Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 126–128. Mark Mazzetti, “C.I.A. Takes on Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines,” New York Times, 1 January 2010. 47 John Sifton, “A Brief History of Drones,” The Nation, 27 February 2012, accessed at http://www. thenation.com/article/166124/brief-history-drones#, 23 January 2016. 46 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 numbers that precluded their deployment to Afghanistan, its options in Afghanistan were too limited to take aggressive countermeasures. At least it could not do so publicly and in a way that required substantial military forces. Yet incrementally and covertly, the administration did begin to employ a tactic that it estimated could slow the momentum, if not defeat, of the Taliban in Afghanistan, continue to cripple al Qaeda, and not seriously risk further eroding U.S. military capabilities or provoke a domestic reaction. By the end of the Bush presidency, the United States was using unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, to provide much better support to military operations by meeting filed commanders’ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance requirements.45 Beginning in the administration’s last year, it began to use these same instruments to decapitate the leadership of al Qaeda and both Talibans. For this purpose it would rely on the CIA.46 So even as the CIA remained a scapegoat for the ill-fated war in Iraq, and its prominent place in the IC fell with the enactment of IRTPA in 2004, it became the linchpin in the war in Afghanistan—and its concomitant in Pakistan. The drones’ purpose when U.S. forces first arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 was to provide aerial reconnaissance to support combat operations. They were soon reconfigured to carry missiles and other munitions, however, and their first use for “targeted killing” came in early 2002 in Paktia Province in Afghanistan. But the presumed target, Osama bin Laden, was a case of mistaken identity.47 Initially the armed drone campaign was limited to Iraq and Afghanistan and basically represented an extension of the conventional warfare in those theaters. In 2008, however, with al Qaeda and its surrogates entrenched in the lawless mountain area which overlaps the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, CIA director Michael Hayden, as reported by New York Times veteran reporters Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, requested authorization from the lame-duck Bush administration to escalate the drone campaign with or without Pakistan’s concurrence. It agreed, and the successor Obama administration expanded the campaign still. Since 2008, the United States has launched more than 1,000 drone strikes on Afghanistan and hundreds more against Pakistan. Moreover, the “disposition matrix,” popularly known as the “kill list,” has expanded to include INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 497 48 Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign against Al Qaeda (New York: Times Books, 2011), 99–103; and Sarah Krebs and Micah Zenko, “The Next Drone Wars: Preparing for Proliferation,” Foreign Affairs 93 (March/April 2014): 68–79, at 71. 49 Jane Mayer, “The Predator War: What are the Risks of the CIA’s Covert Drone Program,” The New Yorker, 26 October 2009, accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/ 091026fa_fact_mayer, 23 January 2016; David Cole, “Obama and Terror: The Hovering Questions,” New York Review of Books, 12 July 2012, accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/ 12/obama-and-terror-hovering-questions/?pagination=false, 23 January 2016; and Micah Zenko, “Obama’s Embrace of Drone Strikes Will Be a Lasting Legacy,” New York Times, 12 January 2016, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presidency/obamasembrace-of-drone-strikes-will-be-a-lasting-legacy, 7 February 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 targets in Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Because these are countries with which the United States was not at war, America cannot officially acknowledge its use of lethal force. Under American statute, such covert killings must come under the authority of the CIA. As a consequence, to quote Schmitt and Shanker, the drone campaign resulted in the director of the CIA becoming “America’s combatant commander in the hottest covert war in the global campaign against terror.”48 That covert war escalated rapidly. In Pakistan, the Bush administration authorized 45 strikes between 2004 and 2008. Obama authorized his first two strikes the third day he was in office, and from 2009 through 2012, he authorized 255 more. Public sources place the current number at over 500. To use another example, Bush authorized a single strike in Yemen. Obama approved 38 in his first term.49 These strikes, managed by CIA personnel out of harm’s way, have occurred against the backdrop of the president’s declaration of an end to combat operations in Iraq, intention to end combat operations in Afghanistan, and avowed opposition to deploying U.S. forces (with the exception of a small number of special operations forces) in Syria. They have provoked intense controversy, especially because among those killed by drones have been American citizens. Nevertheless, the “body count,” even if the identities are only occasionally disclosed and have unquestionably included civilians, has allowed President Obama to claim progress in what he calls overseas contingency operations or a counterterrorism campaign (in 2009, he dropped the term “global war on terror”) even as he takes credit for bringing America’s forces home and reducing the number of American casualties. The CIA’s contribution to degrading the capabilities of al Qaeda and to a lesser extent the Taliban, especially when coupled with its role in the successful 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan which finally killed al Qaeda’s leader, has resurrected its stature. But its achievements in drone warfare and other paramilitary operations 498 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 50 Cole, “Obama and Terror”; Lloyd C. Gardner, Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare (New York: New Press, 2013); and David Ignatius, “Leon Panetta Gets the CIA Back on Its Feet,” Washington Post, 25 April 2010. 51 Greg Miller and Julie Tate, “CIA Shifts Focus to Killing Targets,” Washington Post, 1 September 2011. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 have come at the cost of its core mission: the collection and analysis of intelligence.50 Obama’s selection in 2011 of David Petraeus as CIA director epitomizes the agency’s increasing militarization. By 2011, Petraeus was arguably the most celebrated U.S. military commander since the Vietnam War. He had orchestrated the redesigned counterinsurgency doctrine, and consequently he was identified in Washington and throughout the informed U.S. public with turning the tide in the Iraq War. Subsequently, Obama turned to Petraeus to take command of the United States and international forces fighting in Afghanistan from the cashiered General Stanley McChrystal. That he was unable to turn the tide in that war as well did not tarnish his reputation for leadership and brilliance. While Petraeus directed the CIA, producing intelligence estimates was a secondary concern in the IC. It came no closer to answering questions about how many—if any—al Qaeda remained in Afghanistan or across its border with Pakistan, about the ties between al Qaeda and the Taliban, about the relationship between the Taliban and Pakistani government, or about the severity of the threat posed by the emerging Islamic State (initially called the Islamic State of Iraq). But the drone campaign continued to expand inexorably, and the press coverage of it expanded commensurately. The Washington Post quoted a former intelligence official as remarking that at the time of Petraeus’s appointment the CIA was “chugging along.” His leadership “turned it into one hell of a killing machine.”51 In the waning days of the 2012 presidential election, the press reported that Petraeus asked to expand the CIA’s drone force. But before the administration could reach a decision, Petraeus, caught up in a scandal over an extramarital affair with a woman with whom he had shared classified information, abruptly resigned. Obama selected John Brennan to succeed him. Brennan was a longtime veteran CIA official whom the newly elected president brought with him to the West Wing in 2009 to manage the drone campaign as his special adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism. Under his management the campaign was successful—if the number of killed Taliban and terrorist leaders is the barometer. Still, Brennan agreed with many senior CIA officials and retired veterans that the militarization of the CIA was corroding the analytic capabilities of the agency to the extent that it was impairing its contribution to America’s INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 499 52 Karen DeYoung, “A CIA Veteran Transforms U.S. Counterterrorism Policy,” Washington Post, 24 October 2012. 53 Greg Miller and Missy Ryan, “The U.S. Was Supposed to Leave Afghanistan by 2017. Now it might take decades,” Washington Post, 26 January 2016, accessed at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ checkpoint/wp/2016/01/26/the-u-s-was-supposed-to-leave-afghanistan-by-2017-now-it-might-takedecades/?postshare=1291453845778460&tid=ss_mail, 26 January 2016; Greg Miller, “CIA Closing Basis in Afghanistan as It Shifts Focus Amid Military Drawdown,” Washington Post, 23 July 2013. 54 Charlie Savage and Peter Baker, “Obama Plans Shift on Drone Strikes and Guantanamo,” New York Times, 23 May 2013; Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler, “Despite Administration Promises, Few Signs of Change in Drone War,” New York Times, 3 August 2013; and Ken Dilanian, “CIA, Special Ops Cooperate to Kill Extremists in Syria, Iraq,” Military Times, 28 September 2015, accessed at http://www.militarytimes. com/story/military/2015/09/28/cia-special-ops-cooperate-kill-extremists-syria-iraq/72969854/, 23 January 2016. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 global posture in general and counterterrorism campaign in particular. Brennan advised the administration to leave “lethal action to its more traditional home in the military, where the law requires greater transparency.” The CIA, along with the rest of the IC, could then focus on collection and analysis.52 President Obama has repeatedly backtracked on his pledge to bring an end to what he has called America’s “endless” war in Afghanistan. Now in his last year in office, close to 10,000 U.S. forces still remain in the country, and plans for withdrawal have been put on indefinite hold. The drawdown of the CIA in Afghanistan has experienced fewer interruptions. Since 2014, it has proceeded to close about half of its bases. But the press has reported that the Kabul stations remains the agency’s largest, and that will not change. The Kabul station is essential for collecting intelligence, and not only for targeting drone strikes. Moreover, the CIA needs the station in order to “keep tabs” on the Afghan intelligence service that it had trained and funded.53 The CIA is committed to remaining in Afghanistan for the long haul. In addition, the drone campaign will go on. To what extent and under what authority, however, remain in question. A New York Times headline story on 23 May 2013 reported that President Obama intended to gradually transfer control of the drone attacks to the Pentagon. A bit more than two months later, another Times story quoted Secretary of State John Kerry claiming that the administration had a timeline to end the drone campaign in Pakistan “very, very soon.” Yet Kerry’s State Department quickly issued a statement clarifying that although ending the drone strikes was an aspiration, there was no set timetable. Over the subsequent years, moreover, the CIA, National Security Agency, and Joint Strategic Operations Command have cooperated closely to harness “an array of satellites, sensors, drones and other technology to find and kill elusive militants across [“AfPak’s”] vast, rugged area.”54 500 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY 55 Michael S. Schmidt and Helene Cooper, “More Is Needed to Beat ISIS, Pentagon Officials Conclude,” New York Times, 29 January 2016. 56 Mark Mazzetti, “Plan Would Shift C.I.A. Back toward Spying,” New York Times, 24 May 2013; and Miller and Tate, “CIA Shifts Focus to Killing Targets.” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 Despite hard-fought gains on the Iraqi battlefield, the feeble U.S. efforts to train effective indigenous forces and painfully slow preparations for military operations to recapture Islamic State–controlled cities in Iraq and Syria, coupled with Russian–American discord over the future of the government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and the stumbling efforts to negotiate a multiparty settlement to that country’s civil war by agreeing to a plan for future elections, signal that the defeat of the now ascendant Islamic State, or perhaps a future iteration, will not come about any time soon. Obama’s decision to deploy special operations forces to Syria brought the total number of U.S. troops there and in Iraq to more than 3,500, and many military experts and government officials judge that number as insufficient.55 Furthermore, with the Islamic State having now extended its reach to Afghanistan, the Taliban insurgency showing no signs of diminishing, and peace talks likewise stalled, the conflict there and in neighboring Pakistan is sure to persist regardless of when the last U.S. troop withdraws. The danger of battle-hardened insurgents acquiring access to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal will remain. The counterterrorism campaign, therefore, will continue as a top priority for Obama’s successor, whomever she or he may be. More than ever, that campaign will depend on intelligence—strategic intelligence. The history of intelligence’s contributions to both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars suggests that for U.S. counterterrorist efforts to be effective, the IC’s priorities will need to be reversed: collection and analysis must take priority over operations. Given the militarization of the CIA, that reversal will require a cultural revolution. The massive influx of analysts hired in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedy, juxtaposed with the retirements of many veterans of the Cold War during the preceding decade, produced a “greening” of the IC. The maturation of this new generation of analysts overlapped the evolution of the drone campaign. Because career advancement often depended on supporting this campaign, some 20 percent of the current analytic workforce has concentrated its efforts “almost exclusively on the work of manhunting and killing.”56 Identifying targets for drone attacks (in other words, producing “disposition matrices”) may well produce tactical benefits. But success in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, political as well as military success, will depend on strategic analysis, a capability that has INTELLIGENCE IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS | 501 eroded over the past decade. The primary mission of intelligence must not be operations. But rather to reduce the uncertainty of policymakers and to provide them with the deeper understanding necessary to afford them a decision advantage.57 * Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/131/3/477/6846346 by guest on 13 January 2023 57 Richard H. Immerman, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 225–228.  This article is adapted from Richard H. Immerman and Beth Bailey, eds. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: NYU Press, 2015).