2
2
1
Instead of requesting an NIE, Ambassador Eikenberry suggests
that the White House appoint "a panel of civilian and military experts to
examine the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and the full range of options."
The list of issues he says this panel "should examine" reads very much
like what the intelligence community calls "Terms of Reference" for an
NIE. (As a CIA analyst and manger I contributed to many NIEs and
chaired some myself.)
When the White House gave Eikenberry short shrift, he should
have resigned, rather than support the misbegotten strategy Obama chose.
Leakophobia
Part of Obama's motivation in not ordering the customary NIE
was to avoid any chance that its conclusions might leak, according to a source
with good access. Assuming that intelligence community estimators
have not regressed to the Bush/Cheney days of cooking estimates to order, such a
leak would certainly have made it more difficult for the President to render
unflinching support to Petraeus and McChrystal.
Pity Obama. It is hard to believe he could be
so naive to the ways of Washington and so dismissive of the possibility that
there could still be some courageous patriots among the senior officials
dismayed at his remarkable retreat from the "transparency" he promised.
The New York Times reports, "An American official
provided a copy of the cables to The Times after a reporter requested
them." Well, good for that patriotic truth-teller.
And good, as well, for the New York Times for publishing the
cables. I am permitting myself to hope that still more
truth-tellers will emerge from the woodwork, and even that The Times
might begin to play the kind of key role it did 40 years ago, once it finally
brought itself to concede that Vietnam was a fool's errand.
NODIS
It may be that one needs to have worked at senior levels on
the "inside" to understand the twinge that I felt after downloading the NODIS
cables made available by The Times. NODIS cables on my desk
at home!
As the cover sheet indicates, "NODIS" means no dissemination
beyond the named "addressee and, if not expressly precluded, by those officials
under his authority whom he considers to have a clear-cut "need to
know.'" (Emphasis added. It is not entirely clear, but I assume
that exceptions can now be made for the current Secretary of State and other
senior officials of her gender.)
In my day we had to go to the CIA Director's office, sign
for, and read NODIS cables right there. No doubt there are similar
controls today. So, in this case the whistleblower took
considerable risk in taking it upon him/herself to make "transparency" real, not
just Obaman rhetoric.
The irony? If, as I have been told, the
President put the kibosh on preparation of an NIE for fear it would leak, we now
have an even more instructive kind of leak. Thanks to The
Times and its courageous source, we now know not only that President Obama
elected to forgo an honest NIE, but that he did so in the face of very strong
urging from Ambassador Eikenberry to "widen the scope" of analysis, and not
simply kowtow to the Army brass.
I imagine that in years to come, Eikenberry will proudly show
his cables to his grandchildren. Or maybe he won't, out of fear
that one of them might ask why he didn't have the guts to quit and let the rest
of the country know what he really thought of this latest March of Folly.
This article originally appeared at Consortiumnews.com.
