Maj. Mark Mitchell (right) observes fighting between Northern Alliance troops and Taliban on the second day of a prison uprising at an Afghanistan fortress. During the three-day seige two years ago, a CIA agent was killed and Mitchell earned a top military honor for heroism. (Photo from the Free Republic)More Troops Are Nice, But More Intelligence Needed to Save Afghan War -- CQ Politics
We can pour thousands more troops into Afghanistan, but they are probably not going to make much of a difference if we don’t get the intelligence right, says one of the CIA officers who organized the rout of the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden seven years ago this month.
Regular readers will recall that I’ve written admiringly in the past about Gary Berntsen, who still sounds like a fireman from Queens, N.Y., despite having been a three-time chief of station for the CIA during his 23 years with the spy agency.
His first book, “Jawbreaker: The attack on bin Laden and al-Qaeda,” recounted the ups and downs of the 2001-2002 Afghan mission, from his struggles with timid headquarters bureaucrats, through the exhilaration of organizing a tribal army, to the fiasco at Tora Bora, where bin Laden slipped away through a combination of U.S. ineptitude and Pakistani skullduggery.
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My Comment: An excellent post. A must read.