Maj Gen Michael Flynn says newspaper articles about key areas in Afghanistan can be more useful than their own information.
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. More >>>
