Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS.
Eli Lake was right to profile Derek Harvey, the widely respected intelligence officer now starting a center in U.S. Central Command for the study of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Harvey has this right:
"We have tended to rely too much on intelligence sources and not integrating fully what is coming from provincial reconstruction teams, civil-affairs officers, commanders and operators on the ground that are interacting with the population and who understand the population and can actually communicate what is going on in the street," he said. "If you only rely on the intelligence reporting, you can get a skewed picture of the situation."
The only problem with this, you all will have noticed, is that this kind of cultural change often takes years to develop, and we have, what, 18 months to get things right in Afghanistan?
DIA strikes again!
I enjoyed how ADM Mullen yesterday said first "It's doable but it's going to take some time," and then said exactly how much time: "12 to 18 months to turn this thing around."
Yeah, I saw this at SWJ the other day, too. Have to commit for 10 yrs? So....we are planning to be around that part of the world for a while, huh?
Also, and I have no idea what this means, but a lot of the desi blogs I regularly read are going insane over the proposed increased aid to Pakistan, they all think it is automatically going to be funneled into the ISI or something and that it will just fuel corruption, but they are sort of India-biased as you might imagine. Purely an observation, because, you know, if I have to procrastinate on the internet I might as well do it around more smarter people than me.
*Re Boston and class in the post below, spent five yrs as an instructor at HMS and my general impression, as an immigrant raised in the midwest, is that class is a WAY bigger deal on the East Coast. I felt sorry for some of the students, they seemed to kind of live in this weird universe where only going to the right schools meant happiness. I dunno, am I projecting? Giving an overly bad rap to the EC?
good to see that someone thought it a good idea to set up a school for training Afghanistan and Pak analysts -- in 2009. What foresight!
Really.
It's OK. We are building camps. That's it.
F**k intel. Which I have, BTW. They always think....screw it not worth mentioning....
AM....Andrew...uh,,,,,SCREW INTEL..
learn it now....
Love
ELF
...not to mention that Harvey's team at DIA does exactly what he says they shouldn't do. Typically, one's record and performance has no relation to one's reputation or job prospects.
18 months - - I keep hearing everyone talking about being there for the next 10 years.
"we have, what, 18 months to get things right in Afghanistan?" Or what? I'd say more of the same until there is a new president who can withdraw from "Obamas War". Hopefully in 2012 and not 2016.
18 months or 10 years. Somebody better figure out the masterful pitch job that needs to be said to the Coalition civilian population if this needs to be 10 years. I would like to know if anyone thinks COIN can be done in 18 months to get things right? What is going to define "right"? Sure changes some of this blog, I would think.
The Reconstruction Operations Center in Iraq provided a model for this kind of co-operation. Part of its job was to provide an unclassified intelligence fusion cell that everyone would feed into and draw from. For more details, I'd like to refer you to a paper I wrote about it last year, that argued that the military should include planning for this type of organisation as part of its intelligence doctrine - http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/5/1/3/4/p2...
A longer version was published in 'Intelligence and National Security' as an article earlier this year.
In fairness, the Civil Military Overview portal, provided by the NATO Civil-Military Fusion Center (CFC) is a huge step in the right direction - covering Afghanistan and Africa. It's only open to military, NGOs and reconstruction organisations operating in those areas so not generally accessible by all, but very useful.
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