The CIA Has to Raise Its Game in Afghanistan, Pakistan

David Ignatius

The suicide-bomber catastrophe at Khost five days after the Christmas attempt on Detroit reminds us that a war based halfway around the world is inching closer to stateside. Triple Agent Dr. Balawi pulled off a horrific coup when he 'sploded himself and seven Americans plus his Jordanian Royal Family Intelligence minder in a gruesome masterpiece demonstrating the "Religion of Peace's" loathesome doctrines. Alzheimer-senile Helen Thomas keeps asking why the Al Qaeda and Taliban attack America. Maybe they are as crazy as she is demented. Or as David Ignatius would reply:

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the most costly mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future.
CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaeda. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary, and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now -- not with a spasm of second-guessing that will further weaken the CIA but through the agency's own adaptation to this war zone. As the Khost attack made painfully clear, the CIA needs better tradecraft for this conflict.

By getting a suicide bomber inside a CIA base, the al-Qaeda network showed that it remains a sophisticated adversary, despite intense pressure from CIA Predator attacks. "They didn't get lucky, they got good, and we got sloppy all over Afghanistan," says one agency counterterrorism veteran

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As Ignatius notes in detail, the CIA's reorganization in 2004 added more suet and lard, and put LESS career incentives in learning local and regional languages and dialects. For example, Robert Baer just came back from a visit to Kabul and environs and found that only two CIA officers spoke a local language, Dari, while NONE speaks or understands Pushtun, the language of most of the Al Qaeda Pathan in Afghanistan and their Taliban Punjabi brothers in Pakistan and Baluchi Taliban in Quetta converse in.

Baer said this dependence on translators makes intelligence penetration of CIA operations child's play, and the sophistication of the Al Qaeda/Taliban counterintelligence now surpasses that of the smug, self-satisfied Langley crews.

Much of the damage done to the CIA has been done stateside by Fifth Column bloggers whining that the CIA still employs Blackwater as security. Maybe the candy-ass libtards should volunteer for security duty===oops, forgot they're craven cowards. Nancy Pelosi did a bit of damage when she was Minority Chief on the Special Committee on Intelligence. And continued her damage by not giving Jane Harman, a Harvard grad with an iQ at least fifty points higher than Botox Nancy's, the job when she became Speaker. Instead she appointed an illiterate ESL who didn't know the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis [from Texas border country, where reading isn't necessary to get through life]. Despite the disloyal leadership in this country, Ignatius notes that the Agency should save itself:

Muslim extremists are using increasingly sophisticated tools -- sometimes the very techniques that have been deployed against them. One example is the software used by Hezbollah to analyze patterns of cell-phone calling and expose an Israeli spy network in Lebanon last year. Iran, too, uses sophisticated pattern analysis to study which of its nuclear scientists might have been recruited by the West.

Despite this growing threat, the CIA has devoted only limited resources to defending itself. Within its large Kabul station, the CIA is said to have just two officers working full time on counterintelligence. There's a similar lack of resources devoted to Pakistani operations against the agency.

The 2004 intelligence reorganization added more layering and bureaucracy but not more muscle. It created a new National Counterintelligence Executive, but this group has focused on traditional targets, such as Russia and China, rather than new ones. "What good is it?" asks one CIA counterterrorism veteran. "It's overhead. It contributes little, other than additional tasking and more meetings."

The CIA's career track is another troubling part of the problem. The complex penetration and deception operations that could counter al-Qaeda take time and patience. But agency operations mirror the short, two-year tours of assignment -- or the even shorter deployments to war zones. "We live in two-year cycles," says one insider. The rational careerist looks at a penetration or deception plan and concludes: "It's too time-consuming, it won't get me promoted."

What's most troubling is that over the past year, the CIA has had what this source calls "egregious lapses of counterintelligence and security at the bases in Afghanistan."

Evidence of sloppy procedures is said to have surfaced last fall at one of the agency's bases in southern Afghanistan. One of its vehicles was stolen, but headquarters wasn't notified for several weeks. Someone was caught photographing the entry gate to the base, but he was turned over to the Afghan police initially, rather than agency operatives. An Afghan guard failed a polygraph, raising worries that he might be a double agent. Yet aggressive countermeasures weren't taken.

A final obvious problem is training. Case officers need more preparation for high-threat meetings and paramilitary challenges than they're getting now.

After any calamity, there are always haunting "what ifs." But looking in the rearview mirror isn't going to make the CIA any stronger or better. The Khost attack shows that the al-Qaeda network, though badly wounded, remains a wily and resourceful foe. The inescapable conclusion is that the CIA and its allies need to lift their game.

Now we have another disloyal coming back from the UK to replace George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings on ABC. A senile fool named Koppel insists that the media exaggerated the importance of the crotch bomber and shouldn't be making such a fuss, as it throws Obama off his perfect equilibrium.

Just when I was hoping the country was shedding Helen Thomas-type dementia victims, another comes to pollute ABC News.