MG Flynn (on intell mainly)

[Steve the Planner]

The AFP story quotes MG Flynn:

"Major General Michael Flynn, the top NATO and US military intelligence chief in Afghanistan, said US-led forces in Afghanistan were "so starved" of accurate intelligence "many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling.""

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...czFC7AtcHP8fnw

This article, more than anything, pounds home the points:

US intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency

said Flynn's report, released by a Washington think-tank.

A failure to understand who the local Afghan powerbrokers are and ignorance of local economics and landowners had contributed to "hazy" knowledge

, said the report on the website of the Center for a New American Security."

What Sadaam had, which made his operation work, was a huge network of intel and controlsinto every aspect of Iraqi life. Between the census data, and and formally adopted political governance structures, nothing got past central view.

One of the key things I was working on was development of a civilian declassified GIS system for Iraqi civ use. In the process, I worked with their internal census data, made based on UN guidelines.Even in 1990s, they knew every bongo truck, camel, irrigation ditch, well and internet cafe in the Country. They had maps of every major business, infrastructure component, and more often than not, the owners and associated details about each. Their land and tax records accounted for everybody and everything.

So, while we were stumbling blindly, it was all there.

What we were trying, and largely succeeded at doing in 2008, was not just pop/pol mapping, but basic infrastructure, industry, value chains, and trade patterns. Answering stupid questions like how much asphalt and cement capacity exists in a regionial critical, too, in determining how much reconstruction (especially for roads and bridges) can occur within available supporting resources. Dumb stuff, but critical.

I sat through a briefing earlier this year where a group had been trying to glean tribal/familial relationships in Iraq. I shook my head: They were trying to read tea leaves and fortunes while the Iraqi land records showed everybody by name, and every piece of property, and we had already digitized most of the cadestral/property records, so it would have just taken a push of a button to reconcile names/families/tribes to actual properties; from their, any kind of regionalized data analysis would have been easy.

The only gap, then, would be to field reckon the changes between pre-and post-occupation (resettlements, refugees), which, of itself was a driving measure of instability... Lots of accurate, easy targeting to do.

In Iraq, they didn't have computerization, so they put everything on maps and hand-written records. The Ottomans had started that, then the Brits refined it, and the UN in the 1990's taught the mastery of it---basic enterprise accounting and management by the numbers.

Afghanistan does, in fact, have a history of UN training, and some systems, like the Afghan Census agency (and UNDP), that follow that field. But, I suspect that for most places, the "shadow" has it all in his head, and doesn't need our technological approaches---but we do, if we are to out-maneuver him.

Fortune-telling will not work in defeating the Shadow.

Steve