Khost Rethought

In my blog titled, “Time to Bring Back the Dinosaurs” I suggested that had CIA received an infusion of good, old-fashioned tradecraft, the Khost massacre might have been avoided. In light of the article titled, “A family bereaved and divided,” (Washington Post 29 Jan. 2012) it would appear that assigning full blame to the base chief, Jennifer Matthews, was most unfair.

So, where to begin affixing blame? First, I’d suggest it was negligence on the part of the Agency to permit Jennifer to apply for the posting. What was behind this? The Agency is not noted for personal consideration when making assignments. So, was it impossible for the Agency to find any operations officers to accept this job? Was this why they put an analyst vice an operations officer into this dangerous place? Granted, she was a highly trained analyst. Maybe she’d worked with operations officers in conducting debriefings, but she was not an agent handler. She had not received special operations training which should have been the sine qua non for such a job.

Next, I’d fix blame on the case officer in liaison with the Jordanian service. An Agency officer cannot accept a foreign intelligence service’s word for the trustworthiness of an agent they’d recruited. It was incumbent on the Agency officer in liaison with the service to conduct his own validation procedure. This, he clearly had not done. Why not? Had he just been remiss? Had Headquarters been so enthused at running jointly with the Jordanians an agent who claimed to have direct access to bin Laden that they told this officer, “Just get on with the program?” We’ll never know the answer to this question.

It was poor tradecraft for Headquarters to order the debriefing to take place at Forward Operating Base Chapman. Jennifer should have been ordered to travel to a more secure location maybe in the Kabul area where better security could have been exercised. When is it permitted to bring an unvetted agent into your base, to meet face-to-face with other CIA officers? Never!

Jennifer deserves praise for having agreed to undertake such a dangerous assignment. She left home and hearth to do her part to protect our Homeland by operating against al Qaeda. Her husband, her children, her family can be proud of this CIA analyst who was prepared to give up so much, to take such a risk, all in the hopes of making this world a safer place. In the end, she gave her all.

Afghanistan - Let's get it right this time

We hear nothing from the generals. They’ve spoken out in the past, telling us of the need for a surge of between 2000-6000 troops if we are to be successful in Afghanistan. But now they are silent. It is time for the politicians to do their thing.

Wisely, our political leaders are discussing among themselves two issues: What would constitute success in Afghanistan? What shoring up of the Afghanistan political structure would be required for the American and coalition forces to neutralize the Taliban and the al Qaeda remnants in that country?

The first challenge is to undo the fraudulent election that returned Karzai to the presidency. Current polls suggest, were new elections to take place in the near term, Karzai would be unlikely to receive even fifty percent of the vote. How would a non-Pashtun president sit with the majority of the Afghan people? Would it be better to seek out a Tajik or even an Uzbek in order to find a non-controversial figure from a non-entity tribe á la Kenya?

It will be a long, hard slog but this is the only way to proceed. More later on the subject of what constitutes “success” in Afghanistan.