Intelligence and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Abstract

COMMENTING IN 1950 ON THE ACCURACY OF intelligence reports and assessments that the U.S. public expected the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to produce, newly appointed director Walter Bedell Smith purportedly remarked that Americans “expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin, and I’m not sure they are so much interested in God.”1 Smith exaggerated, but not by much. Americans’ expectations (both within and beyond the Beltway) about the value of intelligence for conducting foreign policy and promoting national security are uniformly unrealistic. Collecting intelligence is hard, and analyzing it is even harder. The most one can expect from intelligence, in the words of a veteran official, is to “reduce uncertainty, identify risks and opportunities, and by doing so, deepen understanding so that those with policymaking responsibilities will make ‘better’ decisions.” Done right, intelligence can provide policymakers with a “decision advantage.”2 Intelligence, particularly strategic intelligence, was not done right during the lead-up to and conduct of either the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war. It thus did little to reduce policymakers’ uncertainty or to provide them with a decision advantage. This judgment begs questions about who was responsible for this failure and, therefore, for its consequences. This article argues that although the Intelligence Community (IC) did not perform well, its customers—America’s policymakers—are primarily culpable for the grief that befell the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan. (Currently, 16 agencies make up the IC, most notably, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Intelligence and Research; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is often included as the IC’s seventeenth element, although its responsibilities are primarily managerial.) First in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and then when waging two wars, the architects of America’s national security relied far too little on intelligence in reaching their decisions, forfeiting the advantage it could have provided them.