Study: US-led troops not protecting civilians enough

U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan still do not adequately protect civilians and their operations are plagued by a reluctance to share intelligence information, a study prepared for the U.S. military says. Activists from the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks downloaded the unclassified report from a military website, which they said was public. The U.S. military shut down the site, which U.S. forces used to share information with allies in Afghanistan, after Wikileaks published several NATO documents last week. The report said that while U.S.-led forces now widely accepted that local populations were key to defeating an insurgency, "too little attention is given to protecting members of the noncombatant community." "Too often, the friendly force is also perceived as a threat, negatively influencing civilian willingness to cooperate with coalition intel (intelligence) collection and other initiatives," said a summary of the report's findings. The study was prepared for U.S. Joint Forces Command by two analysts from the RAND Corporation research group, based on interviews with more than 90 military officers and intelligence experts from the United States and allied nations. Entitled "Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq and Afghanistan," the study highlighted a reluctance by some U.S. intelligence officers to share information with NATO allies. It cited one anonymous source recalling that Dutch F-16 fighter pilots would fly bombing missions in Afghanistan but then be denied assessments of the damage they had caused because those were classified as secret by the United States. A Dutch officer was quoted in the report saying there had been 13 separate intelligence sections -- including those run by Dutch, Australian, United Arab Emirates and U.S. officers -- when he was at Camp Holland, a base in southern Afghanistan. "One section knew the location of an IED (improvised explosive device) factory, and we drove by it for three months," said the officer, Lieutenant Neils Verhoef. The authors, Russell Glenn and S. Jamie Gayton, suggested intelligence officials should sometimes abandon the long-held notion of distributing information on a "need-to-know" basis and instead be driven by a "need to share." Wikileaks, a website that publishes leaked documents, said it downloaded the report and others from an unprotected website run by the U.S. military, oneteam.centcom.mil, but the documents could be read only by entering the password "progress." A spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Greg Julian, played down the importance of the breach. "It's not being considered that big of a deal," he wrote in an e-mail, noting the site was not classified. RAND said it did not discuss leaked reports as a matter of corporate policy.