While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes
superb tactical intelligence on al Qaeda in Iraq, our government still
does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the
role of the militias.
A senior commander told us that human intelligence in Iraq has
improved from 10 percent to 30 percent. Clearly, U.S. intelligence
agencies can and must do better. As mentioned above, an essential part
of better intelligence must be improved language and cultural skills.
As an intelligence analyst told us, "We rely too much on others to
bring information to us, and too often don't understand what is
reported back because we do not understand the context of what we are
told."
The Defense Department and the intelligence community have not
invested sufficient people and resources to understand the political
and military threat to American men and women in the armed forces.
Congress has appropriated almost $2 billion this year for
countermeasures to protect our troops in Iraq against improvised
explosive devices, but the administration has not put forward a
request to invest comparable resources in trying to understand the
people who fabricate, plant, and explode those devices.
We were told that there are fewer than 10 analysts on the job at the
Defense Intelligence Agency who have more than two years' experience
in analyzing the insurgency. Capable analysts are rotated to new
assignments, and on-the-job training begins anew. Agencies must have a
better personnel system to keep analytic expertise focused on the
insurgency. They are not doing enough to map the insurgency, dissect
it, and understand it on a national and provincial level. The analytic
community's knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing, and
operations of militias, as well as their relationship to government
security forces, also falls far short of what policy makers need to
know.
In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in
Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep
events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not
necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of
a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A
roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S.
personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there
were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a
careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light
1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when
information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its
discrepancy with policy goals.
RECOMMENDATION 77: The Director of National Intelligence and the
Secretary of Defense should devote significantly greater analytic
resources to the task of understanding the threats and sources of
violence in Iraq.
RECOMMENDATION 78: The Director of National Intelligence and the
Secretary of Defense should also institute immediate changes in the
collection of data about violence and the sources of violence in Iraq
to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground.