Thread by @JABell27

Breaking both my Twitter fast and my silence about Afghanistan briefly this morning, now that we are officially "out" of the wars that have defined our foreign policy for two decades. And now that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is approaching us. 1/

I had a 20-year career in military intelligence. It grieved me after 9/11 to hear the terrorist attack on the US described as an "intelligence failure," and to hear that same description applied to events at the end of our operations in Afghanistan in recent weeks. 2/

The failures did not begin in the intelligence community. Both 9/11 and the ending of our Afghanistan operations began with a failure of the vision that should guide intelligence operations, & a failure of honesty on the part of senior US government officials. 3/

If we as a nation do not fix these points of failure going forward, we're going to find ourselves right back where we were in the early years of the 2000s—and the results might well be worse the next time. 4/

The US had spent the decades after WWII thinking of the world, & our national security, in binary terms: there were good superpower nations, and evil ones. Nobody else mattered. Maybe my perspective on this is off, b/c I was just a junior officer w/o even a ringside seat, but— 5/

it seemed to me that our national security apparatus lost vision & direction when our main adversary weakened as a nation and as a military "superpower." Russia, no longer the Soviet Union, was no longer a sexy intel problem set. 6/

Non-state actors, especially in the Middle East & Central Asia, weren't a sexy problem set either. They were underestimated b/c we were arrogant & condescending: we didn't see them as sophisticated or capable. We weren't investing funds or personnel, or using 7/

the amazing intel capabilities we'd developed against the Soviet Union effectively against them. There was no clear vision of the world w/o the US-Soviet competition, & thus no clear direction for the intel community. We put a lot of time & money into IT "architectures," 8/

not all of which was well spent. If you had access to the morning intel briefs at military HQs in the decade before 9/11 & analyzed them, I think that hindsight would be pretty clear: we'd lost our way. We didn't really know what the next serious threat would be, & 9/

a lot of folks who were senior spent a lot of time & energy chasing after whatever they thought the next "sexy" problem set might be. And never getting it right. The US can't afford another decade of 1990s-style fumbling around in the dark. 10/

That's how we missed the I&W for 9/11. Had there been a clear vision of the next threat, & the will to throw the might of our intelligence collection & analysis capability against that threat, we might have avoided 9/11. Maybe. 11/

That same fumbling in the dark led to many of the problems we ran up against when we sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001. It had essentially been a closed country since the Taliban arrived, & we'd thought the country was too poor & too backward to pose any serious threat. 12/

Intel assets on the ground before we sent troops in? Too few, if any. An adequate number of Dari & Pashto linguists? Please. Any analysts who had a deeper understanding of the history, culture, & society of Afghanistan than James Michener did when he wrote Caravans? 13/

The fancy tech collection systems we had weren't going to get us that stuff, in that environment. And how do you do effective HUMINT without that base knowledge & capability? W/o intelligence "theory of mind"—understanding how a potential adversary sees YOU? 14/

W/o knowing how to collect effectively in that culture, how to get locals to trust you enough to answer critical questions candidly, how to convince them that our self-interest was also theirs? W/o knowing how to evaluate credibility of our HUMINT sources—who was telling us 15/

the truth? Good HUMINT is time-intensive, labor-intensive, money-intensive. It requires deep knowledge & historical continuity in analysis, which you don't get if you rotate people in & out after months or even a few years of deployment. 16/

Clearly, in the case of Afghanistan, it required more than 20 years of deep knowledge & historical continuity. The sum of whatever short-term intel successes we might've had there were not only "not greater than the sum of the parts," they were LESS than the sum of the parts. 17/

And a lot of smarter people than I have written about the failure of military & other government officials to assess this all honestly, & to speak truth to power, about our efforts in Afghanistan. Good people—both Americans & Afghans—suffered as a result. 18/

So what now? How do we prevent a repeat of the last two decades? Somebody—not me, clearly I'm not smart enough—has first got to develop a realistic vision of what the threats are to our national security. That doesn't mean not arguing about it: 19/

Threat assessment and I&W work better when analysts' pet assumptions are challenged. One of the strengths of the Cold War intel community was that if you were in a service intel component, there was some asshole at DIA or NSA or CIA who thought he knew more— 20/

& that would challenge you to think harder, work smarter, be better. When we went down to single analysts working on problem sets w/o challenges, we inevitably got more things wrong. Good intel requires investment not just in technology, but in human capital. 21/

We need to drop the condescension, the idea that less wealthy & more poorly equipped adversaries are not worthy of that investment. (If we'd listened to the infantry & Marines who fought in Vietnam, REALLY listened, we might've been less arrogant about that.) 22/

When our vision is clear, when we drop the condescension, we need to make a serious investment. We need to grow civilian analysts who've worked a problem set a long time for continuity, & MI analysts who rotate & challenge them w/fresh ideas. 23/

We need students of history, of culture, of society, of common & obscure foreign languages working in the intel community: shift some of the balance from tech innovation (still important) back to content knowledge. Make it sexy again to know a foreign language & the history 24/

of countries & regions. To understand the culture, the customs, the relationships, the religious beliefs, the ethics & philosophies of People Who Are Not Like Us. The US is a pretty diverse place: we're uniquely able to draw on our immigrant communities to help. 25/

We need experts on order of battle & its uses—not just fancy databases. We need a real understanding of asymmetric capabilities & C4I, nonstate actors & potential insurgents. 26/

Above all: we need respect for other countries and groups. And we need honesty about ourselves.

I'm not gonna argue w/anyone about this here. I've said what I said. Go forth & do better, national security apparatus. Our children deserve a better world, better outcomes. 27/end

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