Do a double-take if you find that shocking.  This is fine journalism of the editorial sort:

Dirty ‘Game’

WE’RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film “Fair Game” – which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq – deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions…

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth – not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife – the myth endures. We’ll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.

And here is some very bad journalism, also of an editorial sort:

Afstan and Canada’s National Whatever, or, “Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless”

By the way, the Globe reviewer gave “Fair Game” three stars out of four.

Mark
Ottawa

Its analysis side certainly was no great shakes in the case of Iraqi WMDs.  And certain former officers have been very critical of its operational activities, as discussed in this essay in the NY  Times Book Review:

…these new memoirs cannot be shoved aside so easily. The most intriguing come from the case officers, like Jones, who actually meet foreign agents and collect information for the C.I.A. on a daily basis.

In book after book, operatives describe an agency that hires smart, aggressive and patriotic Americans, and then does its best to make sure they fail. Since 2008, two memoirs, Jones’s “Human Factor” and Charles S. Faddis’s “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the C.I.A.,” have gone so far as to call for the agency to be abolished and replaced.

While not the best written of the recent books, Jones’s paints the fullest picture of the agency’s troubles. He claims he served under “nonofficial cover” — that is, overseas and without diplomatic protection — for more than a decade. The agency never publicly discloses how many similar operatives are working, but Jones’s account makes clear that the number is tiny, at most a couple of hundred worldwide. A vast majority of employees work either at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or under diplomatic cover in American embassies.

Jones regards this breakdown of resources as worse than shameful. Employees under diplomatic cover are generally known to the intelligence services of the countries where they work and can operate only with the tacit approval of their host nations. Only nonofficial operatives can recruit agents in true secrecy. Only nonofficial operatives have a real chance of meeting or infiltrating terrorist groups. But these operatives face much higher risks than those under diplomatic cover, and the C.I.A. fears using them…

Charles Faddis, a case officer for 20 years, argues in “Beyond Repair.” Faddis describes the agency as rife with incompetence at every level and compares its leadership training unfavorably with that of the military. “Sixty years after its founding,” he writes, the agency “has never developed any system for the selection, training and cultivation of leaders.” Even the Sept. 11 attacks did not produce meaningful change. Faddis argues that adding a director of national intelligence to oversee the agency simply imposed another layer of bureaucracy. Of the 4,000 new employees in the director’s office, “not a single one of them runs operations. Not a single one of them recruits assets or produces intelligence. What they do produce, however, is process, lots of it.”..

The two books are also discussed at this earlier post,

9 to 5: The spies not in the cold…

where I write that…

…
I have little confidence that any newly-created Canadian foreign intelligence agency would be any different and I doubt the need for one.  From an earlier post:

…I do not think a separate Canadian foreign intelligence agency (i.e. HUMINT) should be formed; the Conservatives thankfully dropped their 2006 election promise to create one.  Early in the campaign they had pledged to “Expand the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency”–then they realized one didn’t exist (see “Securing our borders…The plan” at link).

Mark
Ottawa

…may not be achieving too much, according to former CIA clandestine service officers:

Memoirs, mistakes converge as CIA promises reform
…
When CIA Director Leon Panetta gathered reporters recently to discuss mistakes that allowed a suicide bomber to kill seven personnel in Afghanistan, he didn’t mention a separate disclosure the agency made that day: that it had sued a retired officer who wrote an unapproved memoir…

…now, as it promises reforms in the wake of the bombing at an agency base in the eastern Khowst province [more here], he CIA is seeking to punish a former agent for violating his secrecy agreement, which he says he did to blow the whistle on waste and incompetence.

The author of the 2008 book “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” writes under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. A former Marine who served 15 years spying overseas under non-official cover before resigning in 2006, Jones describes a diminished agency that, even after 9/11, is stymied by a culture of careerism and lethargy. He argues that experienced spies in the field are routinely undercut and second-guessed by agency bureaucrats.

Jones’ book has drawn relatively little attention. The same is true of two other books by former case officers, whose memoirs also portray the agency as inept and bureaucratic. The CIA’s acknowledgement of failures in Khowst lends currency to these accounts.

“Khowst is not an aberration. It is a symptom of what is wrong with the CIA today,” says Charles Faddis, a former Middle East station chief and author of “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA,” published last year. Both Jones and Faddis spent time in Iraq during the war.

Faddis argues the Khowst tragedy was a result of the “deprofessionalization” of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s operations arm. The spy cadre is no longer comprised mostly of seasoned overseas operators as much as “new hires, former support personnel and headquarters-based desk officers,” Faddis says.

Jones concurs. Ninety percent of CIA employees are stationed in the U.S., he says, embedded in a “Soviet-style bureaucracy” that relies on contracts with private firms run by former CIA officials.

The agency is “stiff, risk-averse and increasingly filled with individuals who see the CIA as simply another federal job,” Faddis adds. His book mentions one support officer overseas who refused to work after 5 p.m…

I have little confidence that any newly-created Canadian foreign intelligence agency would be any different and I doubt the need for one.  From an earlier post:

…I do not think a separate Canadian foreign intelligence agency (i.e. HUMINT) should be formed; the Conservatives thankfully dropped their 2006 election promise to create one.  Early in the campaign they had pledged to “Expand the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency”–then they realized one didn’t exist (see “Securing our borders…The plan” at link).

More on US intelligence:

One way of looking at restructuring the UN Security Council

Mark
Ottawa

Tom Ricks puts things in, er, perspective at The Best Defense:

U.S. spying: The 61st largest country
…
Maybe the CIA and NSA should demand their own U.N. seats, like Stalin did for certain Soviet republics after World War II. But then the DIA would want one…

And what about the NGA, eh? Very mildly related Cancon from Coyne:

“A diplomatic game worth losing”

Mark
Ottawa

Your UAV fix for today, and other things:

Drones Target Terror Plot
CIA Strikes Intensify in Pakistan Amid Heightened Threats in Europe [see also "shocker" below]

C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks in Pakistan to Thwart Taliban

Pakistani government condemns NATO airstrikes

Petraeus Says Taliban Have Reached Out to Karzai

I wonder if the “shocker” related in this post might just have a connection to the first headline above:

Afstan: Just say “no” to NATO/CIA Great Gaming, Canadian terrorist “shocker” Update/US AfPak docs Upperdate

Update: More from Paul at Celestial Junk on the reaping:

Predators Gone Wild

Obama is getting one thing right as he allows the predator and air war to expand…

Grim?

…

STAFF SGT. BRIAN FERGUSON / AIR FORCE
An MQ-9 Reaper taxis down a runway in Afghanistan…

Earlier:

Drone porn?

And see the Update thought here.  Canadian UAVs in Afstan are, of course, not weaponized; imagine the shock, the horror, the uproar if one of our “drones” accidentally killed one civilian, eh?

Mark
Ottawa

That would seem to be this government’s likely answer, unless the Liberals (odd it should have come to that) take some sort of initiative themselves to encourage the extension in some form of our Afghan mission.  By the way, Canada is saying “no” to the UN too, nice eh?  From a story by Matthew Fisher of Postmedia News:

NATO official to press feds for post-2011 help training Afghans

KABUL — NATO’s ambassador to Afghanistan is flying 11,000 kilometres to Ottawa late next week to try to convince the Harper government that the alliance badly needs military trainers to school Afghan security forces and that Canada is ideally suited to provide them after its combat mission in Kandahar ends on July 1, 2011.

“I will speak to Canada about the overall progress of the campaign and where we think the shortfalls are and where we need additional resources and rebalancing,” Mark Sedwill said in an interview Wednesday at NATO’s fortress-like headquarters in the Afghan capital.

“Any decision that Canada makes now or in the future to continue to provide input on the military or civilian side would be tremendously welcome and not only because of the political importance of Canada.

“Canada has a first-rate army and with the experience of combat on the ground in Kandahar that army has been tested and tempered in the most difficult circumstances. Canada’s skills in training, as in every other area of military competence are first rate.”

The visit to Parliament Hill by Sedwill, who has served in the region for many years as a senior British diplomat, is part of a concentrated, multi-pronged strategy by NATO and its biggest players to persuade Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the crucial importance they attach to Canada maintaining some kind of military role in Afghanistan, which is slated to drop from nearly 3,000 troops to zero next year.

In a clear sign of the high importance that NATO and the U.S. attach to recruiting more trainers from across the alliance, U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen considered ways to tackle the training shortfalls when they met last week in Washington [interview with Mr Rasmussen here, plus more on other NATO members and trainers here]…

While NATO was acutely aware of the political “sensitivity” in Ottawa of what Sedwill referred to as this “delicate issue,” he said that “I don’t regard the door closed with Canada or any other country.”..

A resolution passed by Parliament [actually just the Commons] early in 2008 stated that Canada’s military mission in Kandahar must end next summer. However, the motion left open the possibility that troops could be deployed elsewhere in Afghanistan after that date [whereas the government lies and maintains the motion requires a complete withdrawal from the whole country, more on that at the middle of this post]. The House’s defence committee has called for a debate this fall on Canada’s military role after the Kandahar mission closes.

The Liberal party formally decided several months ago that it backed Canadian troops staying on in a training role here after next year. Many Conservatives are known to be of a like mind as the Liberals, but until now the prime minister has insisted that all the troops must come home.

NATO would not make a specific demand for troops when he visits Canada’s capital, Sedwill said. But it is an open secret that NATO would like Ottawa to contribute at least several hundred military trainers to teach in Afghan army and police academies.

Such an assignment would not involve the far more dangerous work of mentoring Afghan forces in the field [emphasis added]. It would also cost a tiny fraction of the current combat mission…

…the number of Canadian casualties has dipped sharply this year [emphasis added, how come that has not been more widely reported?] as its task force’s area of operations has shrunk to two, still very dangerous districts to the west of Kandahar City, after a huge influx of U.S. troops into the south of the country [more on current American operations here].

One wonders whether Prime Minister will have the political courage to stand up for Afghanistan–and Canada. Earlier:

Afstan: Even the Toronto Star seems open to keeping some Canadian troops

Afstan flash: One and half cheers for Peter MacKay/Dipper Update

Meanwhile back at the front in Afstan:

Afghanistan security ‘deteriorating:’ Feds

OTTAWA — Afghanistan’s security situation is “deteriorating,” with a rise in insurgent violence and intimidation of civilians, according to a new report on the war by the Harper government [report available here].

The latest quarterly report by the government, which covers the period from April 1 to June 30, also notes the assassination of several Afghan officials and an “early escalation of the fighting season.”

“This quarter was marked by a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, with increasing insurgent violence and intimidation targeting civilians, the assassination of several officials from Afghan government institutions and civil society, and an early escalation of the fighting season,” states the report, referring to the security situation as “increasingly volatile.”..

Despite the increasing violence, the report notes that Canada has made progress on a number of fronts. For example, the report notes that Afghan National Army forces have doubled in the dangerous Zhari district of Kandahar province, although the ANA’s overall capacity remained “unchanged,” according to the report.

Among other signs of progress, workers cleared 52,000 cubic metres of silt as part of the refurbishment of the Dahla Dam in Kandahar province, one of Canada’s “signature” reconstruction projects.

Three schools were refurbished with the help of Canadian Forces, bringing the number of refurbished schools to 19. More than 390,000 children in Kandahar received vaccinations for polio through a Canadian program…

Update: While on the covert front the CIA is even more active than generally thought (and doing some Great Gaming):

Paramilitary force is key for CIA

On an Afghan ridge 7,800 feet above sea level, about four miles from Pakistan, stands a mud-brick fortress nicknamed the Alamo. It is officially dubbed Firebase Lilley, and it is a nerve center in the covert war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The CIA has relied on Lilley, part of a constellation of agency bases across Afghanistan, as a hub to train and deploy a well-armed 3,000-member Afghan paramilitary force collectively known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. In addition to being used for surveillance, raids and combat operations in Afghanistan, the teams are crucial to the United States’ secret war in Pakistan, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The existence of the teams is disclosed in “Obama’s Wars,” a forthcoming book by longtime Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward [more here]…

A U.S. official familiar with the operations, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the teams as “one of the best Afghan fighting forces,” adding that they have made “major contributions to stability and security.”

The official said that the teams’ primary mission is to improve security in Afghanistan and that they do not engage in “lethal action” when crossing into Pakistan. Their cross-border missions are “designed exclusively for intelligence collection,” the official said…

Then there’s this from Norman Spector (keep up the good work, a weekly must-read on Fridays), wonder what details the CIA has today–and is sharing with us:

A shocker for Canadians in Bob Woodward’s book

…we can expect pressure to leave some troops in Afghanistan to increase significantly between now and the NATO meeting in November. But, for Canadians, there’s also, according to the New York Times, a real shocker in the Woodward book – one that should be factored into the debate on Afghanistan as well as other national debates:

“A 2009 President’s Daily Brief and another highly restricted report, Mr. Woodward writes, ‘said that at least 20 al-Qaeda converts with American, Canadian or European passports were being trained in Pakistani safe havens to return to their homelands to commit high-profile acts of terrorism.’

‘They included half a dozen from the United Kingdom, several Canadians, some Germans and three Americans,’ the book continues. ‘None of their names was known’.”

Upperdate: Some very interesting US diplomatic documents from 2001-6 relating to the Pakistani role and situation are quoted in this article at Foreign Policy’s “AfPak Channel”:

Taliban strategy comes full circle

Mark
Ottawa

1)  Canadian troops’ current focus of activity, with help from the last US Army unit remaining under their command, plus US Marines planning on a pretty long haul next door at Helmand.

2) The Washington Post and NY Times seem shocked, shocked that the CIA has likely corrupt senior Afghan officials on its payroll–and the Gray Lady names a name.

Earlier, with further relevant links:

The last command…/”political cowardice” Update

Mark
Ottawa

George Will on simple, if inconventient, truths:

When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years…

Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged “disproportionate.” Israel knows this as it watches Iran. [See the first part of this post by Terry Glavin on "fashionable demonization of Israel".]

Last year was Barack Obama’s wasted year of “engaging” Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly “isolated.” The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change…

…[Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu] says that CIA Director Leon Panetta is “about right” in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says that 1948 meant this: “For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack.” And he says: “The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense.” If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.

Somewhat related:

How the CIA Got It Wrong on Iran’s Nukes
In 2007, U.S. intelligence said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. Analyst policy bias and disinformation from Iranian double agents may explain the mistake.

Mark
Ottawa

Don’t get your nukes in knot, says Robert Kagan in the Washington Post:

New START: Too modest to merit partisan bickering

It’s hard to believe that ratification of the New START treaty is turning into a pitched battle between some Republicans and the White House. It’s even harder to believe that advocates for and against the treaty are trying to turn it into a stand-in for some imagined ideological contest over arms control and nonproliferation. It’s not. This treaty is simply too unexceptional to carry such heavy freight.

The proposed cuts in nuclear arsenals are modest. The START I agreement cut deployed strategic nuclear weapons on both sides roughly 50 percent, from between 10,000 and 12,000 down to 6,000. The never-ratified (but generally abided-by) START II Treaty cut forces by another 50 percent, down to between 3,000 and 3,500. The 2002 Moscow Treaty made further deep cuts, bringing each side down to between 1,700 and 2,200. And New START? It would bring the number on both sides down to 1,550.

This is hardly the revolution that either side claims. Take the favorite argument of many New START proponents. They insist the treaty represents a critical commitment by the nuclear superpowers to abide by the grand bargain of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: The nuclear states move toward zero in exchange for the non-nuclear states forgoing the weapons altogether. Ratification is essential, they claim, to gaining greater worldwide support for nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

Really? If this causal logic existed, why wasn’t this the happy result of the massive cuts in superpower arsenals from 1989 to 2002? Instead, throughout those years, Iran and North Korea, as well as Iraq, worked determinedly to build nuclear weapons, and neither India nor Pakistan felt constrained from testing their nuclear devices. It’s hard to see why the smaller cuts proposed in New START should suddenly produce a global commitment to nonproliferation.

But it’s equally hard for the treaty’s critics to argue that these cuts represent a great leap toward zero and the end of the American nuclear deterrent. The three previous arms control treaties, all negotiated by Republican presidents, and two of which were ratified with full Republican Party support, cut deployed nuclear weapons from near 12,000 down to around 2,000 — about 80 percent. If anyone deserves credit, or blame, for moving the United States in the direction of zero, the two Bushes deserve a lot more than President Obama…

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Somewhat related:

How the CIA Got It Wrong on Iran’s Nukes
In 2007, U.S. intelligence said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. Analyst policy bias and disinformation from Iranian double agents may explain the mistake.

Mark
Ottawa

Wikileaks has published a CIA Red Cell document that indicates they are trying to shore up support in Europe to keep the NATO alliance alive in Afghanistan. The allies of the United States have been fighting strong anti-mission sentiment in Germany and France, showing a level of pessimism that is at times in contradiction to the progress being made. Now that Holland has dropped out of Afghanistan, the U.S. is afraid of winding up fighting a war on its own.

Ironically, German and French citizens are so disengaged from the mission that the French government was able to quietly increase troop support in 2008 without too much of a public backlash. That could change, the document reports, if the summer produces the expected casualty surge with greater engagement with the Taliban.

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR] conducted a poll in the fall of 2009 that indicates that 0.1% to 1.3% of French and German respondents identify Afghanistan as the most urgent issue facing their nation. Both countries ranked the stabilization of Afghanistan as among the lowest possible priorities for American and European leaders. The INR found that the most common reason for opposing ISAF troop increases is that Afghanistan is “not our problem” and a waste of resources.

Nicholas Sarkozy was recently rebuked in regional elections in France that handed the Socialists and other leftwing parties 53% of the vote. Although the backlash is almost all based on the economy, the left is staunchly a “troops out” voice in the Afghanistan debate.

Germany is also on slippery ground, the CIA report suggests, because of the political fallout from civilian deaths on German airstrikes. The government is also facing regional elections in May, and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union will also be unlikely to make any unpopular moves that might destabilize its own power.

A notable entry in the CIA document:

Highlighting Afghans’ broad support for ISAF could underscore the mission’s positive impact on civilians. About two-thirds of Afghans support the presence of ISAF forces in Afghanistan, according to a reliable ABC/BBC/ADR poll conducted in December 2009. According to INR polling in fall 2009, those French and German respondents who believed that the Afghan people oppose ISAF—48 percent and 52 percent, respectively—were more likely than others to oppose participation in the mission.

This is something that doesn’t get repeated enough in the western media. Afghanistan support for ISAF underscores the contradiction of the pessimism felt by the troops-out crowd. In other words, much of the opposition to the mission relies on the fundamentally flawed belief that Afghans don’t want us there, a complete falsehood.

The way forward might be to leverage the potential adverse consequences of ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians, the report indicates, with the prospect of the Taliban brutality on women and girls becoming a “rallying point” for France’s secular population.

Lastly, appeals by President Obama and Afghan women might be met with receptive ears in Europe. The American President is still relatively popular outside of his own country. Meanwhile, Afghan women could serve as “ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role”, according to the CIA report, because of the ability of women to impart credible personal stories of brutality under the Taliban. Unfortunately, it will require intense media scrutiny in order to overcome the pervasive skepticism in Europe, and win over sympathy for women and human rights in Afghanistan.