CIA ramping up in Afghanistan

The deployment of spies, analysts and support staff clearly comes in anticipation of the military surge that General Stanley McChrystal all but requested from President Obama in a report he sent to Defense Secretary Gates last month and which was leaked to Washington Post over the weekend.

Officials told the Times that the CIA build-up is being mirrored by "every major spy service," including the eletronic-surveillance specializing National Security Agency and the military-focused Defense Intelligence Agency.

As we've pointed out, a force surge will not solve all of Afghanistan's problems (though the developing consensus among writers and bloggers seems to be that whoever leaked the McChrystal report intended to establish a dichotomy between "More Forces or 'Mission Failure,'" and apparently succeeded, since that's the headline the Post used.) Yet despite that, Obama is going to face a heated political debate over committing more forces to Afghanistan. This Times report indicates to me that the debate is a forgone conclusion - we're going to be putting more forces into Afghanistan. That, or we're sending hundreds of CIA operatives to the country in an effort doomed to failure.

The Times reports that the CIA will deploy "Crisis Operations Liaison Teams," which will serve as rapid-response units that will be attached to regional military commands. McChrystal, who commanded special forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, used a similar method there:

"He was able to plan during the day and do raids at night, sometimes multiple raids if he could move the information quickly enough," said a former senior U.S. military intelligence official who worked closely with McChrystal in Iraq. "What he's trying to do is get his decision cycle quicker than the bad guys."

It seems like a logical, and unfortunately novel idea: attaching intelligence and military units so that they can function simultaneously. Undoubtedly, American forces will get more kills and better intelligence this way. But if the U.S. is operating on a timeline of 12 to 24 months before public opinion demands we withdraw - a timeline I don't necessarily accept - I don't know if any amount of military or intelligence forces can "win" in Afghanistan. One Defense Department official quoted by the Times said the Taliban is at its strongest since 2001:

The official said the Taliban's geographic gains have slowed only because it has already pushed into almost every area with a significant Pashtun population, the tribal networks that make up the Taliban's home turf.