Newly
assertive C.I.A. intensifies covert operations in Afghanistan
October
23, 2017
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. is expanding its
covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced
officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban
militants across the country, according to two senior American officials, the
latest sign of the agency’s increasingly integral role in President Trump’s
counterterrorism strategy.
The assignment marks a shift for the C.I.A.
in the country, where it had primarily been focused on defeating Al Qaeda and
helping the Afghan intelligence service. The C.I.A. has traditionally been
resistant to an open-ended campaign against the Taliban, the primary militant
group in Afghanistan, believing it was a waste of the agency’s time and money
and would put officers at greater risk as they embark more frequently on
missions.
Former agency officials assert that the
military, with its vast resources and manpower, is better suited to conducting
large-scale counterinsurgencies. The C.I.A.’s paramilitary division, which is
taking on the assignment, numbers only in the hundreds and is deployed all over
the world. In Afghanistan, the fight against the Islamic State has also
diverted C.I.A. assets.
The expansion reflects the C.I.A.’s assertive
role under its new director, Mike Pompeo, to combat insurgents around the
world. The agency is already poised to broaden its program of covert drone strikes
into Afghanistan; it had largely been centered on the tribal regions of
Pakistan, with occasional strikes in Syria and Yemen.
“We can’t perform our mission if we’re not
aggressive,” Mr. Pompeo said at a security conference this month at the University
of Texas. “This is unforgiving, relentless. You pick the word. Every minute, we
have to be focused on crushing our enemies.”
The C.I.A. declined to comment on its
expanded role in Afghanistan, which will put more lower-level Taliban militants
in its cross hairs. But the mission is a tacit acknowledgment that to bring the
Taliban to the negotiating table — a key component of Mr. Trump’s strategy for
the country — the United States will need to aggressively fight the insurgents.
In outlining his security policies for
Afghanistan and the rest of South Asia this summer, Mr. Trump vowed to loosen
restrictions on hunting terrorists.
“The killers need to know they have nowhere
to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might and American
arms,” Mr. Trump said. “Retribution will be fast and powerful.”
The C.I.A.’s expanded role will augment
missions carried out by military units, meaning more of the United States’
combat role in Afghanistan will be hidden from public view. At the height of
the conflict, American Special Operations troops hunted Taliban bomb makers,
including with night raids. Now, with Afghan commando forces and their Western
partners focused primarily on retaking territory from the Taliban and the
Islamic State, the agency’s teams will concentrate on hunting these types of
threats, according to the officials.
The new effort will be led by small units
known as counterterrorism pursuit teams. They are managed by C.I.A.
paramilitary officers from the agency’s Special Activities Division and
operatives from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s
intelligence arm, and include elite American troops from the Joint Special
Operations Command. The majority of the forces, however, are Afghan militia
members.
For years, the primary job of the C.I.A.’s
paramilitary officers in the country has been training the Afghan militias. The
C.I.A. has also used members of these indigenous militias to develop informant
networks and collect intelligence.
The American commandos — part of the
Pentagon’s Omega program, which lends Special Operations forces to the C.I.A. —
allow the Afghan militias to work together with conventional troops by calling
in airstrikes and medical evacuations.
In the past, the counterterrorism pursuit
teams have operated in Afghanistan’s southern provinces and near its
mountainous border with Pakistan in the northeast, sometimes even undertaking
raids to go after militants across the border. As the American military drew
down its presence in Afghanistan in 2014, the teams continued to conduct
missions in Afghan cities and in the surrounding countryside, and with greater
autonomy. The units have long had a wide run of the battlefield and have been
accused of indiscriminately killing Afghan civilians in raids and with
airstrikes.
“The American people don’t mind if there are
C.I.A. teams waging a covert war there,” said Ken Stiles, a former agency
counterterrorism officer. “They mind if there’s 50,000 U.S. troops there.”
Taliban-made bombs have been a persistent
problem for American and allied forces in Afghanistan. Over 16 years of war,
the Taliban, the affiliated Haqqani network and other militant groups have made
roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices, their weapon of choice. They
serve as a relatively inexpensive and deadly counter to the United States’
overwhelming technological advantage in weaponry and surveillance.
The weapons have maimed thousands, including
American troops, Afghan soldiers and countless civilians. Of the roughly 5,700
attacks in the first three months of the year, more than 900 were from the
crude weapons, according to an American military report released this summer.
In recent months, the Taliban have begun to lean more heavily on suicide
vehicles packed with explosives, much as the Islamic State has in Iraq and
Syria.
One senior American official acknowledged
that the scope of the new directive would require more manpower, and that it
would take time to build up the number of officers and teams to carry out those
missions in Afghanistan. But the official insisted that the agency was
committed to using its new authority to ramp up its strikes in parallel with
increased military air and ground operations.
Mr. Pompeo said in his remarks in Texas that
Mr. Trump had authorized the agency to “take risks” in its efforts to combat
insurgents “as long as they made sense,” with an overall goal “to make the
C.I.A. faster and more aggressive.”
Those risks can be deadly. Since 2001, at
least 18 C.I.A. personnel have died in Afghanistan, a figure nearly on par with
those killed in Vietnam and Laos almost half a century ago. Seven of those
killed in Afghanistan were part of the Special Activities Division, including
three veteran officers who died last year in eastern Afghanistan.
In announcing that the C.I.A. was dispatching
more officers into the field, Mr. Pompeo said, “If we are not out pushing the
envelope, the agency simply will not succeed.”
The change also comes during an increase in
violence in Afghanistan in recent months. Attacks on security forces and the
police, including at least three last week, have taken a heavy toll. A record
number of civilians, 1,662, were killed in the first half of the year, and
another 3,581 were wounded, according to the United Nations.