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US intelligence chief criticizes spy failings in Afghanistan
US army intelligence chiefs in Afghanistan find foreign newspaper articles about the country more useful than the information collected by their own soldiers in the field, a highly critical report by the top US intelligence officer said yesterday.
According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is "only marginally relevant" to NATO's overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.
Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers", the report says.
It claims that some battalion-level officers looking for an overview of the political and economic situation in key areas "acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries".