Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the summer after the fall of Afghanistan, I received an invitation to speak at CIA headquarters. I used to work as a paramilitary officer at the Agency and a former colleague of mine attended the discussion. Afterward we went back to his office to catch up over a drink. The two of us had once advised the CIA-backed Counter Terrorist Pursuit Teams in Afghanistan. At their height, the CTPTs numbered in the tens of thousands. During the fall of Kabul, they played an outsized role in bringing any semblance of order to the evacuation after the government and national army dissolved.   As we discussed those dark days and the role that the CTPT had played, my friend reached behind his desk. He pulled out two overhead surveillance photographs blown up and mounted on cardstock. When Congressional leaders had asked about the CTPT’s performance versus that of the Afghan National Army, the CIA had shown them these photographs. Both were taken at Kandahar airfield in the final, chaotic days of the war. In the first image, a C-17 cargo plane sits on the runway, its ramp lowered with a gaggle of panicked soldiers clambering aboard. Their equipment is strewn on the airfield behind them.  “That’s a photo of the last Afghan Army flight out of Kandahar,” my friend explained. He then showed me the second image. It had been taken a few hours later, also at Kandahar airfield. In it, the C-17 is in the exact same position, its ramp lowered, except the soldiers loading into the back are ordered in neat, disciplined rows. There is no panic and they are carrying out all their equipment. “This is a photo of the last CTPT flight out of Kandahar.”    Having worked as an advisor to both the Afghan National Army and the CTPTs, this difference came as no surprise. The Afghan National Army, which had systemic issues with discipline and graft, was deeply dysfunctional, while the CTPT was as effective as many elite U.S. infantry units. Unlike the Afghan National Army, the CTPT didn’t report to the Afghan government, but rather to the American government through its CIA handlers. It was a private army.   After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the newly established government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan needed an army. National cohesion was placed at a strategic premium, lest the defeat of the Taliban return the country to the factionalism of the 1990s, in which rival warlords battled one another for primacy. A national army could create national cohesion, or so the theory went. It would seat military power in Kabul and away from the warlords. The creation of an Afghan army designed to recruit from across Afghanistan was viewed as essential to the success of the Afghan national project. At the time we did not focus on the fact that, in Afghanistan’s tribal culture, an ethnically Hazara soldier from Mazar-e-Sharif deployed to Helmand Province would inevitably be viewed by the local Pashtuns as being as foreign as any American.   In those early years, while the Afghan government was building its army, its American allies, led by the CIA, were also hunting al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan. America’s counter-terrorists needed their own Afghan forces and, unconstrained by participation in the Afghan national project, they created a different type of army. The CTPTs would, by and large, be recruited locally, relying on tribal ties to provide the cohesion essential to any unit. If a soldier in the Afghan National Army was found guilty of incompetence, graft, or any other infraction, he was held accountable by a vague disciplinary system in Kabul. In contrast, if a member of the CTPT committed a similar infraction, he was held accountable not only to the military discipline that existed within the unit, but also to those in his tribe, because his noncommissioned officers and officers served double duty: they were also his cousins and uncles.    Systems of tribal discipline, though effective, were deemed inappropriate for a national army. The concern of the central government — which was not without merit — was that a national army recruited tribally would devolve into a nation governed by tribal armies.