An NGO wanting to build a water well in a village
may learn, as we recently did, about some of the
surprising risks encountered by others who have
attempted the same project. For instance, a foreignfunded
well constructed in the center of a village in
southern Afghanistan was destroyed – not by the
Taliban – but by the village’s women. Before, the
women had to walk a long distance to draw water
from a river, but this was exactly what they wanted.
The establishment of a village well deprived them of
their only opportunity to gather socially with other
women.13
An NGO representative or a civil affairs soldier should be able to contact an Information Center and receive valuable information about topics such as digging wells, the cost of building one kilometer of gravel road, or the best way to administer polio vaccines.14 Currently, information this basic to a coordinating a successful counterinsurgency literally is inaccessible to the people who need it most. This failure not only jeopardizes an operation, but also exposes international efforts to ridicule for their ineptitude. The demoralizing ripples of a needless failure, like the buoying ripples of a well-earned success, travel far and wide.
The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.”16
The format of intelligence products matters. Commanders who think PowerPoint storyboards and color-coded spreadsheets are adequate for describing the Afghan conflict and its complexities have some soul searching to do. Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip. Commanders must demand substantive written narratives and analyses from their intel shops and make the time to read them. There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, ratherthan PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.
An NGO representative or a civil affairs soldier should be able to contact an Information Center and receive valuable information about topics such as digging wells, the cost of building one kilometer of gravel road, or the best way to administer polio vaccines.14 Currently, information this basic to a coordinating a successful counterinsurgency literally is inaccessible to the people who need it most. This failure not only jeopardizes an operation, but also exposes international efforts to ridicule for their ineptitude. The demoralizing ripples of a needless failure, like the buoying ripples of a well-earned success, travel far and wide.
The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond.”16
The format of intelligence products matters. Commanders who think PowerPoint storyboards and color-coded spreadsheets are adequate for describing the Afghan conflict and its complexities have some soul searching to do. Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip. Commanders must demand substantive written narratives and analyses from their intel shops and make the time to read them. There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, ratherthan PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.
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