Afstan: Reforming inadequate US intelligence

Looks in part like another knock-on from the McChrystal doctrine:

Intelligence overhaul ordered for Afghanistan
The new strategy is to move beyond simply hunting extremists and gather information about local concerns, people and leaders in an effort to win over Afghans and marginalize the insurgency.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Washington Laura King -- U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have ordered steps to overhaul intelligence gathering and analysis in response to deficiencies uncovered during a lengthy White House strategy review last year.

The overhaul announced Monday will broaden the scope of intelligence gathering from hunting down extremists to gathering information about local attitudes, concerns, people and leaders as part of an effort to win over the Afghan population.

The changes were ordered by Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, director of intelligence for the military command in Afghanistan [he is also double-hatted with ISAF], and were detailed in a paper published Monday by the Center for a New American Security, a military think tank...

...in the paper, Flynn and two other officials argued that intelligence efforts in Afghanistan have been focused too tightly on searching for insurgents and roadside bombs, often ignoring crucial information from knowledgeable Afghans, local council meetings, radio broadcasts and similar sources.

"This vast and underappreciated body of information, almost all of which is unclassified, admittedly offers few clues about where to find insurgents, but provides information of even greater strategic importance: a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself," Flynn and his coauthors wrote...

As part of the U.S. intelligence overhaul, commanders want to amass more information on leaders at the district and local levels. Flynn ordered the creation of teams to work across the military hierarchy to collect information and pass it up the chain of command.

The teams will work out of new information centers, where analysts will compile reports on many of Afghanistan's nearly 400 districts. Flynn and U.S. officials compared the operation of the intelligence teams to journalists, in that they can operate somewhat outside the traditional military hierarchy and move from unit to unit across regions.

The moves by Flynn were prompted at least in part, by deficiencies discovered during last year's White House strategy review.

During the review, administration officials pressed for information about dozens of critical Afghan districts, asking about local attitudes to the international military effort and about the strengths of local officials. But intelligence analysts are so lacking in data, they "could barely find enough information to scrape together even rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts," Flynn and his coauthors wrote.

Flynn makes it clear that intelligence plays a significant role in "finishing off enemy leaders." But he believes the military's priorities must be balanced to better understand local conditions.

He also wants the intelligence reports to be available to allied militaries and nongovernmental organizations.

More in an AP story.

NATO's top intelligence officer has ordered significant changes in the way information is collected and shared in Afghanistan, saying that without reform the U.S. intelligence community will continue to be only "marginally relevant" to the counterinsurgency mission.

In a stinging assessment of the U.S. intelligence effort after eight years of war, U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn directed intelligence workers to focus less on the enemy and more on civilian life...

When he took command in Afghanistan in June 2009, McChrystal made similar calls for collecting more "white" information about local goings-on along with "red" analysis about enemy activities. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, second-in-command to McChrystal [recent interview with Lt. Gen. Rodriguez here, BruceR. was rather unimpressed], subsequently ordered regional commands to begin answering wide-ranging questions about the Afghan government and local populations. Little, however, has changed in the collection of mostly enemy-related intelligence, the report said...

Plus from November 2009:

Improving links with the ANA...

...is not as easy as perhaps it should be--and other intelligence challenges:

U.S. intelligence chief in Afghanistan wages battle for resources
Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn encounters military resistance in his task of overhauling U.S. intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan to boost efforts to defeat the Taliban...

Update: BruceR. comments on the report at Flit, concluding:

...the examples of intelligence brilliance detailed in the main text are both at the battalion level, while the main body of the critique in terms of structural change requirements, etc. is aimed at intelligence cells working at the regional commands and the theatre HQ levels, with little in the way of useful examples of success for intelligence teams at those headquarters to emulate. In this context, I just wanted to point out footnote #10, reproduced below, which is the closest the most senior U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan comes in his report to praising a higher-level intelligence product about his own AO:

(10) The closest thing to a substantive district-level assessment that we were able to find was produced not by the intelligence community, but by a research team commissioned by the Canadian government to explain the general situation in Kandahar City. This 75-page unclassified product, widely read in Regional Command-South, offers a rough model for the sort of district assessments Information Centers would write. See District Assessment: Kandahar-city, Kandahar Province (Commissioned by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade: November 2009).

Kudos to all involved in that one. I guess we Canadians aren't completely hopeless after all.