Intelligence bodies in dark on insurgents

December 08, 2006

WASHINGTON: US intelligence has failed to understand Iraq's Sunni insurgents and Shia militias because of a lack of resources, language skills and experienced staff.
The Iraq Study Group said in its report that agencies, including the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency, had not done enough to map and dissect the insurgency, or to understand it on a national and provincial level.

The group also said the intelligence community's knowledge of the organisation, leadership, financing and operations of Shia militias, and their relationship to Iraqi government security forces, had fallen short of what US policy-makers needed to know.

"While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on al-Qa'ida in Iraq, our Government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias," the report concluded.

The bipartisan group, which called on the Bush administration to devote "significantly greater" intelligence resources to understanding Iraq's violence, cited a senior commander's estimate that US spying capabilities in Iraq had improved "from 10 per cent to 30per cent". The group also quoted an intelligence analyst as saying that US officials often lacked sufficient cultural and language skills to understand what they were told about the violence by native Iraqis.

The Defence Intelligence Agency has fewer than 10 analysts with more than two years' experience in analysing the insurgency.

The study group's report noted that the US Congress had appropriated almost $US2 billion ($2.5billion) this year for counter-measures to protect US troops in Iraq against improvised explosive devices. "But the administration has not put forward a request to invest comparable resources in trying to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode those devices," it said.

The group said the CIA should expand its presence in Iraq to train Iraqi intelligence agents.

Reuters

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