Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy makes an important point about Iraq in Foreign Policy: amid a worsening political and security situation, the U.S. has little awareness of what is actually going on. He points out:
At the height of the “surge,” the United States collected fine-grain data from the 166,000 U.S. troops and 700 CIA personnel in Iraq, as well as a network of 31 Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now, U.S. embassy staff enjoy very limited freedom of movement — hemmed in by a suspicious government in Baghdad and a still-dangerous security situation. According to the Journal, the CIA station in Iraq may be reduced to 40 percent of its peak levels because the Iraqi government is extremely sensitive about its intelligence work with the Iraqi security forces.
This makes it hard for U.S. officials to even generate authoritative estimates of the numbers killed in terrorist attacks–much less to figure out what to do about this violence.
This is all the more reason why the U.S. should not repeat this mistake in Afghanistan. If we pull out completely or almost completely after 2014, it will be impossible to keep mounting effective Special Operations raids on terrorist targets because we will lose the “situational awareness” to figure out which targets to hit and where and when. We will lose, too, the kind of political intelligence we need to try to steer Afghanistan’s turbulent politics in the right direction. That kind of knowledge can only come from a substantial on-the-ground footprint of intelligence collectors, who must in turn be embedded in a substantial security and logistics infrastructure. Pull out too many troops and the remainder will be flying blind–as we are now doing in Iraq.
If you want to see just how right Max is, turn to Israel's experience. How so? n nOnce Israel pulled out of Gaza, and then parts of the West Bank, Israel lost much of its HUMINT (human intelligence) sources in the those locations. While aerial flights with unmanned aerial vehicles are good, they are no substitute for humans who can tell what is going on, what is being planned, and why the actions are being undertaken. Pictures, and even snippets of cell phone conversations, for example, are no substitute for human sources. n nAfter their pull out, Israel built a fence to keep terrorists out. It's working, but it shows that a fence as prevention is all the more necessary because of the degradation in intelligence. (Not that the intelligence was full-proof, it wasn't. But it was available.) And these places are areas Israel can fly over and are close by. For the United States, we can't just fly over Iraq to collect intelligence, not without fly-over permission. Our personnel, once gone, will no longer collect HUMINT, at least not as easily and timely. n nIndeed, as we leave, we bring home our troops, but we lose our intelligence collections in the process. n
The presence of "intelligence collectors" on the ground in Afghanistan may be effective when it comes to collecting data, but in terms of attaining "the kind of political intelligence we need to try to steer Afghanistan’s turbulent politics in the right direction", it is pointless. The 'political intelligence' that has been claimed to have been gained is merely fiction. And if it does exist? What good has come of it ? More so called targeted night raids, more innocent civilan deaths ? n nAfghans do not need to be 'steered in the right direction' by outside forces either. Its 'turbulent politics' are that way in nature because of the development of a US-backed government that every day Afghans have no control or say over. Its been over a decade of international forces trying to implement a trustworthy gov't for the Afghan people and its had the opposite effect. Afghans dont agree with the majority of Karzai's politics, nor do they trust the government to do the right things. Its well time for Afghans to choose for themselves which way to go in order to prevent the establishment of another corrupt, puppet government currently in place. n nThe fact is a ground presence on intelligence collectors will not make a difference to the life of an average Afghan…unless of course the data helps them put bread on the table