Editor's Note: Intelligence estimates on enemy strength have long been a delicate issue for powerful military commanders who want to present their war strategies as succeeding, not faltering, a problem that arose in Vietnam in the 1960s and is emerging in Afghanistan now.
Like Gen. William Westmoreland before him, Gen. David Petraeus appears to have won out in an internal struggle over measuring the size of enemy forces, as Gareth Porter reports in this article which was first published by Inter Press Services:
Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.
That unusual decision was in deference to Gen. David Petraeus,
commander of U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan, who did not want any
official estimate of the insurgency's strength that would contradict
his claims of success by Special Operations Forces in reducing
the capabilities of the Taliban in 2010.
In late 2009, the intelligence community adopted an estimate
of 20,000 to 30,000 full-time insurgents, as reported by McClatchy
newspapers in November and confirmed in a press briefing by Brig. Gen.
Eric
Tremblay, a spokesman for the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF), on Dec. 3, 2009.
But in 2010, the Taliban and their allies increased the total
number of attacks to 34,000, compared with 22,000 in 2009, according to
official ISAF data -- a whopping 54-percent rise.
That major step-up in operations suggested that the Taliban
had grown substantially between 2009 and 2010. Yet no revised
intelligence estimate of Taliban strength appeared in late 2010, even
though the
National Intelligence Council produced a National Intelligence
Estimate on Afghanistan in December.
Such an NIE would normally be expected to include an updated estimate of insurgent strength.
Last month, officials of NATO and Petraeus's command suggested
that the number of insurgents had not grown in 2010 and then dismissed
the very idea of an intelligence estimate of the size of the forces
fighting against ISAF.
On Jan 3, an unnamed NATO official in Brussels said there were
"up to 25,000" Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, according to a Jan. 6
story by Associated Press reporter Slobodan Lekic. The same 25,000
figure -- the mid-point in the 2009 estimate -- had been
provided earlier by "several military officers and diplomats,"
according to the Lekic story.
That figure would imply that the number of full-time Taliban
had not grown since 2009, and might even have shrunk -- thus supporting
Petraeus's claims of success.
But in a Jan. 9 response to a query from Associated Press,
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu clearly disparaged the idea that there
could be an official estimate of the Taliban strength.
"There has never been a single
reliable source for the size of the insurgency," said Lungescu, adding
that all estimates of the insurgents are "highly unreliable."
Lungescu sought to divert attention away from a focus on the
numerical strength of the Taliban, suggesting that it "misrepresents
gains made by alliance forces in the past year." But it is logically
impossible for a numerical estimate of insurgent strength to
"misrepresent" the results of military operations.
Lungescu was implying that an estimate of Taliban numerical
strength would interfere with ISAF's claims of having weakened the
Taliban.
In an obvious effort to suggest that the insurgency had been
reduced in size, Lungescu said,"[T]housands of insurgent leaders have
been killed or captured and several thousand fighters have been taken
off the battlefield."
In response to an IPS query to ISAF about the estimated
strength of the Afghan armed insurgency, an ISAF spokesman, U.S. Navy
Lt. Fernando Rivero, did not respond except to refer to the Jan. 9
statement by Lungescu.
An Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman said Feb. 9 that the
ministry estimates the number of Taliban insurgents at between 25,000
and 35,000, although he said it was "just a guess."
The failure of the intelligence community to adopt a revised
estimate in the NIE last year was shaped by a highly politicized
relationship between the intelligence community and the most powerful
field commander in modern U.S. warfare.
The NIE reflected an agreement on what one intelligence source
called a "division of labor" between the NIE and the military under
which the NIE would not deal with issues bearing on the success of the
U.S.
military effort in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials
understood that such issues were "outside our lane," the source said.
An estimate of Taliban strength in the NIE would have obvious
bearing on the success of U.S. military operations, since it would show
whether the Taliban had been able to continue to grow despite losses
inflicted by Special Operations Forces raids.
The decision to forego a formal estimate of insurgent forces
may have been authorized by the director of national intelligence,
James Clapper, who has oversight of any national intelligence product,
and adjudicates any major differences of view that can't be negotiated.
Clapper, who took over as DNI last
August, has a reputation for sacrificing truth to support existing war
policies. He is best known for having claimed in October 2003, when he
was director of the Defense Department's National Imagery and Mapping
Agency, that the missing WMD in Iraq "unquestionably" had been
transferred to Syria and other countries before the March 2003 U.S.
invasion of Iraq.
Dr. Antonio Giustozzi of the London School of Economics, a
widely-published specialist on the conflict in Afghanistan, told IPS
the Afghan National Army had provided him with an estimate in April
2010 of 36,000 full-time insurgents -- roughly a 50 percent increase
over the 2009 estimate.
Giustozzi provided IPS with his detailed estimate of insurgent
forces as of January 2011. The estimate includes 36,000 full-time
fighters and nearly 50,000 part-time local fighters. The Taliban only
mobilize that much larger local pool of manpower occasionally,
according to Giustozzi.
That a revised estimate of the insurgency's strength is
missing from the latest NIE recalls the political struggle between the
CIA and the U.S. military command over the estimate of Vietnamese
Communist-led military forces.
In late 1966, a CIA analyst, Sam Adams, found that the
military's estimate of less than 300,000 Communist-led forces in
Vietnam did not reflect the evidence of continued growth in those
forces -- and
particularly of "irregular" local paramilitary forces.
The CIA came up with a new estimate of Communist-led forces to
431,000 to 491,000, which was presented in a draft national
intelligence estimate in spring 1967. But the military command
continued to
stonewall, flatly refusing to accept any increase in the
overall Viet Cong "order of battle" above 300,000.
Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
wrote to Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam,
on March 9, 1967, "If these figures should reach the public domain they
would literally blow the lid off Washington."
Wheeler urged Westmoreland to "do whatever is necessary to
insure [sic] that these figures are not repeat not released to news
media or otherwise exposed to the public."
Westmoreland agreed. According to his intelligence chief, Gen.
Joseph A. McChristian, Westmoreland said such an estimate would be a
"political bombshell" if it got out to the public.
CIA Director Richard Helms finally caved in to military
pressure in September 1967 and ordered the CIA to agree to an estimate
of exactly 299,000.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told IPS he recalls Sam Adams
quoting in a conversation with him the explanation Helms had given to
Adams: "My job is to protect the Agency, and there is no way I can do
that if I get into a pissing match with the Army when it's at war."
Like Westmoreland, Petraeus appears to have invoked the
privilege of the military commander to avert the potential "political
bombshell" of an estimate that would almost certainly have shown a
large increase in the number of armed insurgents in Afghanistan.
