Newspapers More Useful Than American Spies

Major General Micheal Flynn criticized his own intelligence gatherers recently, saying that the information found in Afghanistan Newspapers is more useful than the information they provide. The so called spies spend a great deal of their time finding Taliban insurgents to attack and very little time getting to know the needs of ordinary Afghan citizens. It is those citizens that are key to beating the insurgency, installing a proper police state and ending this war.

A direct quote from the report says that intelligence officers are "...ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power-brokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers...[they] acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries."

Flynn feels his soldiers should act more like "roving foreign corespondents" who move across the land collecting valuable information up to headquarters. To facilitate this change Flynn has established the "Stability Operations Information Center" which will help to store and disseminate knowledge about the area.

I for one am very happy to see this report being published. They acknowledge that killing insurgents doesn't necessarily subtract from their number. When one man is killed, his brothers and father will rise up to avenge him, so killing Taliban only serves to create more. The key to victory in the middle east is gaining the local's trust. In the article as reported by The Guardian it is mentioned that military leaders seem to think that building wells in local communities is a sure fire way to gain their trust. And that's all well and good but I think it needs to go further than that, much further.

We need to make this people understand that we're there only to help them. We don't want violence, even though we are prepared for it. We need to convince them of out pure intentions. They seem to think we're there to destroy their society, when really, we only want to provide them with a better one. A society free of war and terror, that's all we want as Americans, and it's all we want for our friends in the east as well. The key is to make them believe as we do.