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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
He's an independent historian and journalist, author of the book Perils of Dominance about the Vietnam War.
Well, I guess the DOD's take on the Vietnam War.
And, of course, he's a journalist for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, and we run every bit of it.
So go to Antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's things?
I'm fine.
Thanks very much.
Good to talk to you again, Scott.
Well, it's very good to have you here.
So, first of all, before we get into what's wrong with the dang thing, first tell the people what a national intelligence estimate is.
The national intelligence estimate is the combined conclusions, the consensus conclusions of 16 intelligence agencies, but let's face it, the CIA is the first among equals, if you will, in the intelligence community.
So it is predominantly a reflection of CIA analysts, but with input from DIA and other intelligence agencies as well.
And so they're published within the administration.
It used to be that the major ones, you'd get some published sort of summary of major conclusions, but they've now stopped doing that for the high-profile ones.
All right.
Now, whenever the National Intelligence Council puts one of these things out, then that becomes the official position of the American intelligence community, right, regardless of what the president's being told in the morning at his morning briefing or that kind of thing, right?
Exactly.
Okay.
So we can see, like, say, for example, from history, can you name any NIEs that were important in the way things went after that?
Well, of course, I think in recent history, the NIE on Iran of November 2007 stands out as the one that's gotten the most attention and has really been politically pivotal because it took the wind out of the sails of the Bush administration in terms of its pressure on Iran, its threat through either direct or through the Israelis to attack Iran.
It removed the rationale, and basically, Bob Gates complained to David Sanger of the New York Times that it also made it more difficult for the United States to get the Europeans and the Russians and Chinese lined up behind their tough sanctions, their programmed sanctions against Iran.
So the political impact of the NIE can, in some circumstances, be considerable.
All right.
Well, and also, hey, it was 2002.
They said, yeah, hey, Cheney's VFW speech was pretty much accurate, and that became the official excuse for war with Iraq.
Right, and of course...
So it can really go either way here with these things.
The one on Iraq was obviously important, particularly giving the administration the ability to go ahead without being afraid that they would be called by the intelligence community on the weapons of mass destruction issue.
You're absolutely right.
All right.
So now everybody's got their head around how important it is when the National Intelligence Council says something.
You say that they put one out about Afghanistan, and what it says is wrong.
The article, in fact, let me say, sorry, Garrett, the article is deferring to Petraeus.
The NIE failed to register Taliban growth.
It's at antiwar.com/Porter.
Right.
I mean, the real point here is that there's a missing piece of the estimate, and that is how much has the Taliban grown or has it grown?
This would be an obvious question to be addressed by an NIE that is talking about the situation in Afghanistan.
How can you have a national intelligence estimate that doesn't address the question, is the Taliban insurgency continuing to grow or has it, in fact, been stopped or even diminished?
As has been suggested by General Petraeus, the commander in the field, and certainly he's implied that he has managed to deal such a blow to the Taliban through these targeted raids against commanders and more general operations against the Taliban that they have actually taken off the battlefield, as they like to say, thousands of Taliban.
And the implication is that that has actually weakened the movement and that the numbers would reflect that.
So, you know, I was asking myself when I obviously knew that there had been a national intelligence estimate published, that is to say circulated within the administration in December of last year, what did it say about the size of the insurgency?
I mean, this is an issue that would normally be addressed in an NIE.
And so I started calling people, trying to find out, you know, in fact, what the estimate was about the Taliban, because this was a critical issue politically in terms of Petraeus' claims of success.
Well, I couldn't seem to find anybody who would say that there had been an estimate.
And the more people I talked to, the more I realized that it wasn't there.
I finally talked to somebody who said, well, there's really a division of labor here in the intelligence on Afghanistan between the intelligence community dealing with those issues that do not deal, do not have directly bearing on the success of the military, the relative success of the military effort, and the military, which is dealing with those issues that have to do with assessing their success.
In other words, the military has been given the power essentially to judge whether it's being successful or not, given the question of whether the Taliban is growing.
This is obviously a highly politicized judgment or decision to divide things up so that the NIE does not deal with the question of whether the Taliban has continued to grow or not.
So I think that's the real story here, that Petraeus has indeed sort of pulled rank as the field commander and said, you know, you can't judge whether I've been successful or not.
That's for us to decide.
And, of course, this harkens back to what happened in the Vietnam War.
This is a very well-known story for historians who followed the course of the Vietnam War about how the military command essentially refused to allow the CIA to issue a national intelligence estimate that increased the size of the communist-led forces in Vietnam.
Because, again, Westmoreland had been arguing that they had been successful in their military operations against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, and they were saying that they would not accept any estimate that increased the size of the enemy's forces above 300,000.
We're going to hold the line.
Of course.
Have you seen these body counts?
We're winning.
Right, exactly.
So, you know, in fact, there was a big standoff between the CIA and the military for months in 1967, where the CIA was insisting that this guy named Sam Adams, who was a young, very able, energetic, and ambitious CIA analyst who had discovered all this evidence, was very clear that the military was just trying to hide the reality that the numbers had increased quite significantly, and particularly the numbers of local Viet Cong militia.
The paramilitary forces of the Viet Cong had grown substantially since the previous estimate.
So he was insisting that the CIA should stand its ground and insist that the numbers were actually closer to 500,000.
And the military insisted on its prerogatives, said they wouldn't budge.
And finally, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA at that point, told Sam Adams that he couldn't keep this up, he couldn't continue to stand up against the military, and the quote was something to the effect that my job is to protect the interests of the agency, that is the CIA, and I can't do that if I'm having a pissing match with the army at a time of war.
All right, well, I think that's a pretty good illustration, a pretty clear illustration of where we are.
We'll pick it back up on the other side of this break with a ton of excellent follow-up questions with Gareth Porter on Anti-War Radio right after this, y'all.
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That's where we keep the archives of Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and author of Perils of Dominance about the politics of the Vietnam War.
This article is called Deferring to Petraeus, N.I.E., Fail to Register Taliban Growth.
It's, again, AntiWar.com/Porter.
And the point basically is that just like in Vietnam, the CIA is unwilling to contradict the military about the strength of the enemy.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And, of course, like Vietnam, what I had not said in the previous segment, which needs to be added here, is that, you know, clearly the Taliban are growing.
They've continued to grow since 2005, 2006, very rapidly.
And last year, 2010, they mounted, according to official statistics issued by the Pentagon, which comes directly from the U.S. command, they mounted some 34,000 kinetic events.
That includes all the IEDs that were laid during the year.
And that compares with 22,000 in 2009.
So that's like a 54% increase in the number of kinetic events that the Taliban were able to carry out, indicating clearly that there was a major increase in their personnel capabilities.
All right.
Now, I'm sure you have more examples, but let me put this to you, because this is what it would say in an AP story.
We're taking the fight to them.
Yeah, there's more casualties.
Yeah, there are more explosions.
That's because we refuse to let up on the bad guys.
And let's face it, I mean, we're talking about the Army and the Marines.
Nobody doubts their ability to kill people.
The Delta Force coming in in the middle of the night, ask the Branch Davidians whether the Delta Force are any good with their machine guns or not.
They ought to be able to take the fight to the enemy and whoop their ass.
Gareth, how could a bunch of tribesmen possibly stand up to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps?
Maybe they're right.
Maybe these generals are right that it's hard work, but we're making progress.
Well said, Scott.
Well done.
Nice summary of the case.
Here's the problem, and you've set me up perfectly to make this point.
The numbers that I cited of 34,000 kinetic events in 2010 are not evenly distributed throughout the year among the 12 months.
In fact, the high point of the 2010 surge, if you will, by the Taliban, comes after the major step-up in the targeted raids against the Taliban, which General Petraeus made so much of in August-September of last year when he made the rounds of the news media to talk about what was happening.
The fact is that it's in August, September, October, and November that you get the highest numbers of kinetic events, not the early part of the year.
And remember that these targeted raids were stepped up, particularly in March, April, and May and into June.
This is the period that you had Petraeus crowing about the numbers of Taliban who were killed and captured.
This was relating to the number of operations that were carried out starting in March and continuing into June.
So despite the killing and the capturing, the fact is that the Taliban continued to be able to mount ever-higher numbers of operations of kinetic events in the latter part of the year.
And what that tells us is that no matter how many were killed or captured, the Taliban were able to increase in a way that transcended that.
In other words, they were actually continuing to mobilize more people than were being taken off the battlefield, more people by far.
So it really doesn't matter how many the Americans might claim they killed or captured.
The fact is that the Taliban were able to mobilize far more people than were taken off the battlefield.
That's the bottom line.
And this is where the failure of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to stand up to Petraeus in the military is a telling point about the politics within the executive branch because just as we saw in the case of Vietnam, it's the military command which has the power primarily, not the intelligence analysts.
The intelligence analysts are always in a weaker position.
They don't have the support at high levels of the administration.
Without that support, they're not going to be able to stand up to the pressure from the military.
It's always going to be the military that prevails.
That should be a given.
It should be taken as the program of investigation.
Well, let me ask you this.
You say that back during Vietnam there was kind of a scandal about a CIA analyst who tried to insist on the truth as opposed to what the military was saying about the strength of, I guess, the VC and the NDA together.
Do you have in this case, I mean, obviously the CIA must know that what you're saying is right, that troop strength is growing and that Petraeus is lying, but do you have an example of the CIA admitting as much or information, like proof that they do know for a fact what you're saying?
There's nothing on the record, and no one has spoken off the record, saying that the CIA did in fact write an estimate as was the case in Vietnam.
There was a draft estimate which was on the table, and the problem was the military refused to accept it.
And then finally Richard Helms simply took it off the table.
So in this case I have no specific evidence that the CIA even went that far, that they in fact drafted an estimate of the size of the Taliban, which the military then sort of again vetoed.
I think that what happened in this case is that there was an understanding before the NIE was even completed or even written that the military would in fact have jurisdiction over that question.
The CIA and the FBI and so forth would not in fact have the privilege or the right to put forward an estimate on that issue.
And here I think the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, General Clapper, the well-known General Clapper who was the one who pronounced in late 2003 that it was absolutely incontrovertible that the weapons of mass destruction, which were missing from Iraq, had in fact been exported from Iraq to Syria and elsewhere.
Nice.
Hey, was he the guy that said that the Russians helped them do it?
I don't know that he did say that.
I mean, it may be.
I don't recall that that was part of it.
It was part of the neocon conspiracy theory back then.
Maybe we should call Frank Gaffney and ask him.
I don't recall seeing that Clapper said that.
But in any case, he clearly went out of his way.
At that point he was head of the National Mapping Agency, Mapping Intelligence Agency, part of the intelligence community, which belonged to the Pentagon.
And clearly he was bowing to Rumsfeld and the neocons in saying that.
He was already making it clear that when the crunch came, he would come down on the side of the military and their Pentagon sponsors, Pentagon allies.
So Clapper undoubtedly played a role in this, in adjudicating the differences between the CIA and the Pentagon over who was going to be able to do what.
Well, there's a lot of different directions we could go with this.
I guess I want to ask you about, you know, how goes the war?
Because McChrystal's been gone.
Petraeus got demoted to be in charge of the war, which, you know, supposedly McChrystal was there to implement David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy.
You know, the whole CNAS crowd, Michel Flournoy and all those people.
And yet all the things that McChrystal was doing to, you know, win hearts and minds and whatever and try to be the good guys to the invaded here, Petraeus has thrown out the window.
There's nothing but increases in airstrikes and, therefore, civilian casualties all over the place, terrorizing people and night raids.
And my best understanding, I guess, Gareth, is that whole, you know, patrol around and try to play good cop, you know, other than special forces.
The rest of the Army is supposed to stand around and play good cop.
That's basically off, right?
The rules of engagement have been loosened again and the whole McChrystal thing.
So is Petraeus not even implementing his own strategy now?
Well, I think his strategy was always the very general framework.
I don't think he was ever committed to, in fact, the sort of soft tactics that he managed to associate himself with, you know, sort of winning hearts and minds.
I really don't think he ever totally believed in that.
I think that it was a political ploy on his part for the most part.
You know, you're right that Petraeus has certainly upped the ante in terms of bombing and night raids and so forth.
But I think that he was always ready to do whatever he had to politically to make it look like he was making progress.
Thanks, Gareth.
My privilege.
Thanks, Scott.
