Kabul attacks illustrate intelligence failures in Afghanistan

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 April 2012 13.56 EDT

Jon Boone in Islamabad

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/15/kabul-attacks-escalating-stalemate-afghanistan

Dozens, possibly hundreds of people would have been involved in training, equipping and then infiltrating into the heart of Kabul the large number of insurgents who were prepared to fight to a certain death in the Afghan capital on Sunday.

And yet neither Afghan nor foreign intelligence operatives appeared to have any idea that an unprecedented wave of attacks was about to engulf both Kabul and several other key locations around the country.

"It is very difficult to collect intelligence in the Taliban's sanctuaries but they should damn well be able to pick up the networks inside Kabul who do the target-finding," said Michael Semple, a Harvard academic and expert on the Taliban movement. "Even if they were unable to find all the militant teams, this was a large enough attack that well-functioning intelligence should have prevented it."

The intelligence failure is the most alarming aspect of the latest round of "spectacular" attacks in Afghanistan – far more so than any damage they might do to efforts to start a peace process with the Taliban.

Afghanistan's spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most effective organs of the Afghan state, albeit one of the most brutal.

But the NDS and CIA informers in Pakistan's tribal belt may have been no match for Lashkar-e-Khorasan the Taliban's brutal counter-intelligence team responsible for sniffing out and executing spies.

The Afghan security forces are also increasingly competent and, according to Nato's top commander in Afghanistan, responded to Sunday's chaos without any help from foreign forces.

In particular, Afghanistan's elite counter-terror teams have come through a baptism of fire after dealing with a series of ever more dangerous and complicated attacks on Kabul in the last year. They now receive high praise from their British and New Zealand SAS mentors.

A striking aspect of Sunday's attacks were how very few civilians appear to have been hurt or killed in the fighting, a sign both of the attackers' targeting of high-profile targets such as embassies and ministries, as well as the growing capability of the Afghan security forces.

However, the insurgency continually seems to match the growing strength of the security forces – a phenomenon the Afghanistan NGO Security Office has dubbed a "perpetually escalating stalemate".

That is nowhere more obvious than with the Haqqani Network, the Taliban allied group based in Pakistan's lawless Waziristan, which was most likely to have been involved in planning Sunday's attacks.

After last June's attack by a team of suicide attackers on Kabul's landmark Inter-Continental hotel, the Haqqani Network released an hour-long video to commemorate the assault.

In one scene a Haqqani operative is seen conducting surveillance on the hotel itself. An unidentified commander is shown poring over Google Earth images of the terrain in west Kabul.

Scale models of the hotel are even built to help with pre-operation briefings.

For all that, Semple says, what he calls the "Waziristan militant complex" will always eventually be outgunned by the Afghan security forces.

But the insurgency retains an undimmed ability to grab worldwide headlines and fuel unease among Afghan politicians already suspicious of efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.

"When you think about how conflicts end one of the things you have to do is not get distracted by these spectacular attacks," Semple said.