Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid Read Free Book Online

June 2009.
    U.S. Army intelligence officers now admit that they failed to fully comprehend the enemy they were fighting because they were never able to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding what the Taliban were up to in the valley. Unmanned drones were not of much use except when the Taliban came out into the open to slug it out with an American patrol. SIGINT was a vitally important tool to warn American commanders of impending attacks but next to worthless on high-level Taliban plans and intentions because the Korengalis usually sent this type of information by a sophisticated courier network that ran down the full length of the valley, which of course the SIGINT intercept operators could not access.
    Four former or current-serving army intelligence officers who served in the valley confirm that they never got any viable intelligence information about the Taliban from the valley’s inhabitants because, as it turned out, the Korengali villagers were the Taliban. A series of classified reports written in 2008 and 2009 by army intelligence officers at Forward Operating Base Blessing, the headquarters of the U.S. Army battalion responsible for guarding the Korengal Valley, revealed that virtually every family in the valley was involved with the Taliban to one degree or another.
    Entire villages in the Korengal were known to be completely “bad.” Sergeant Major Dwight Utley, a Green Beret who served four tours of duty in Afghanistan with the 3rd Special Forces Group, recalled a particular sweep that his “A team” conducted in the village of Korengal at the southern end of the valley. Utley’s team searched all the houses in the village, only to discover that all the men had mysteriously disappeared. As the Green Berets were leaving the village on the only road through the valley, they were ambushed by Taliban guerrillas. It was the villagers showing what they thought of the U.S. Army. According to Utley, “ We now knew where all of the males in the village were , 400 meters away from us on the other side of the valley engaging us with machine guns and RPGs.”
    And those Korengali elders who were not active Talibs steadfastly refused to provide any intelligence information to the Americans, abiding by a strict code of silence that would have impressed even the fiercest of American Mafia dons. According to Captain Mike Moretti, who commanded a company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment in the Korengal Valley in 2009–10, “ The people here have an incestuous relationship with the Taliban . I may be speaking to an elder whose brother or son is a fighter. He’s not going to give me information that is going to enable me to kill his family member.”
    The experience in the Korengal raises a fundamental question for American commanders and intelligence officers. The problem was succinctly put by Matthew Hoh, a former State Department political adviser in Zabul Province: “How do you separate the insurgency from the population, when the population is the insurgency?” The short answer is: you can’t. That fact, more than anything else, explains why the U.S. military failed to subjugate the Korengal over a span of six years. As it turns out, the people we were trying to save did not want to be saved. They just wanted us to go away.
    With virtually all of the valley’s inhabitants actively or passively assisting the Taliban, it should come as no surprise that the Taliban had a better intelligence network in the Korengal than the U.S. military did. The Taliban had spies everywhere, including many of the villagers who did manual labor on the four American bases in the valley, who routinely provided insurgent commanders with advance notice of all U.S. Army patrols and combat sweeps through the valley.
    This became apparent in 2008, when the army low-level voice intercept team at the Korengal Combat Outpost at the head of the valley intercepted Taliban