The Enemies Multiply in '88 Days to Kandahar'

By John Waters

February 8, 2015

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In the War on Terror, CIA has become an operations-oriented outfit, moving away from its traditional role of analysis and developing its own cadres of warfighters and paramilitaries. One indicator of this shift is the will to do whatever it takes to obtain the Holy Grail of actionable intelligence.

-- paraphrased from Philip Lisagor’s “Should Intelligence Officers be ‘Hunters’ or ‘Gatherers’?”

In a recent article for Cicero Magazine, retired Army Col. Philip Lisagor opines that CIA has drifted from an organization focused on collections and analysis to one consumed with finding, fixing and killing ambiguously designated terrorists. Lisagor’s point is intentionally uncomplicated: The agency traded in the unglamorous work of predictive analysis in order to drop bombs on ‘celebrity militants’. A compelling argument, but is it accurate? 

With the release of 88 Days to Kandahar, Robert Grenier – the former CIA Chief of Station for Pakistan and director of the vaunted CIA Counterterrorism Center during the mid ‘00s – casts an introspective gaze on his involvement in the early actions of the War on Terror. A seasoned operative with a “natural advantage over desk-bound, bookish analytic types,” Grenier outlines in detail the integral role he – and the agency writ large – played in what is called ‘The First American-Afghan War’. Grenier’s tale is inflected by inter-personal conflicts at home and abroad. He offers a cautionary, firsthand perspective for the agents, bureaucrats and decision-makers who must work together to sort out the next chapter in America’s wars in Southwest Asia and the Middle East. Although unintended by its author, 88 Days (Simon & Schuster, 2015) also serves as a personal account of transformation and tumult from inside America’s leading spy agency. 

An Agency in Transition

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 changed everything for CIA. Grenier “knew that it would no longer be enough to report on problems; [he] would have to try to solve them.” The unique combination of swelling pressure over another 9/11-style attack waiting around the corner, and advances in ‘technical collection and information technology’ forged a new breed of alpha-figures in the Directorate of Operations world: ‘targeters’ tasked to find, prioritize and facilitate deadly strikes against militants worldwide. These analysts would bear responsibility for not only finding insurgent ‘bomb-makers’ or ‘military commanders’, but also quarterbacking the agency’s effort to action their intelligence. 

The early 2002 detention of ‘senior’ al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubayda is the story’s landmark example of CIA’s evolution into a targeting-centric organization. In a chapter titled ‘The Reckoning’, Grenier describes a “targeting system [in overdrive]” that incorporated players from an array of agency units – CIA’s station in Pakistan, DC-based Counterterrorism Center and the mysterious Incident Response Team (a loose organization of pseudo-military operatives), to name a few. All of these analysts and operatives converged on the singular task of pinpointing Zubayda’s GPS coordinates, presumably for capture or a kinetic strike. Zubayda was eventually found badly wounded in the back of a pick-up truck in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and later interned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

At the time, Zubayda’s detention was a watershed moment for Grenier and CIA’s growing targeting enterprise. Reflecting several years later on what initially seemed a major victory against a noted al-Qaeda leader, Grenier writes: “CIA was supposed to make sure [the next attack] didn’t happen […] This was the thinking and the unbearable pressure which led us, starting with Abu Zubayda, […] down the road that led to CIA ‘black sites’ and coercive interrogation techniques.” Against a resilient enemy, capturing or killing militant leaders is merely a short-term solution to a long-term problem. 

Coercive interrogation techniques granted the interrogators more tools to extract critical pieces of information from high-value detainees – information that would ultimately drive future targeting endeavors to capture or kill more terrorists. Although the program began shortly after the capture of Abu Zubayda in 2002, “Interrogation [was] not a core function of CIA, nor [was] it a traditional skill of the CIA,” Grenier writes. Despite the admittedly marginal impacts Zubayda’s capture had on the larger effort against al-Qaeda, the success of CIA’s efforts became an end in itself. Capture or kill another insurgent and the world will be safer for it. The sweeping demand for this caliber of actionable, target-worthy intelligence created a ‘hunter’ culture in CIA that continues to this day. 

Conclusion 

We cannot measure success by the number of terrorists captured, killed or interrogated. In 2010’s widely acclaimed essay Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn observed, “The second inescapable truth [of reactive intelligence efforts] is that merely killing insurgents serves to multiply enemies, rather than subtract them.” ‘Mowing the lawn’, in agency parlance, of violent extremists has failed to degrade the jihadists’ strategic messaging campaign, to bolster strong, central governments or to improve the effectiveness of indigenous military forces. In short, while we have racked up more than 2,000 ‘militant’ deaths from drone strikes, our enemies have continued to multiply.

While political leaders dither over conditional justifications for putting ‘boots on the ground’, the United States continues to wage a semi-secret war with drone and airstrikes in places such as Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. This time, perhaps the nation’s collective intelligence enterprise would be better served returning to its traditional role – predicting geopolitical tipping points, optimizing operational courses of action and providing consistent intelligence support to civilian decision-makers and military commanders. Fighting terrorism ‘one target at a time’ has failed to produce lasting results. As Lisagor aptly points out, it may be time to “put the meat-eaters on a leaner diet and return to a ‘gatherer’ culture.”