How the Afghanistan withdrawal helps the CIA

How the Afghanistan withdrawal helps the CIA

A need to return to an old mission

The logo of the Central Intelligence Agency in the lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

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The dust continues to settle on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as emotions are acknowledged and processed. Perhaps it is now possible to consider what President Biden’s strategic choice will mean for U.S. foreign policy.

Biden’s overarching goal in withdrawing was to reorient scarce American resources and attention away from peripheral conflicts to core U.S. interests. Biden’s national security team wants to focus on areas of possible “strategic competition” — the Indo-Pacific region in particular. At the time, many skeptics of the withdrawal voiced criticism of its execution, warning that America’s reputation was permanently tarnished. Those criticisms do not seem to have held up for even a month.

Other critics pointed out this and the AUKUS deal highlighted the damage wreaked on America’s long-standing allies. This line of attack carries greater weight, and it is good to see the Biden administration attempting to mend fences. Even here, however, it neglects arenas where Biden has cultivated allies and partners, such as the Quad.

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While U.S. policymakers can now pivot to strategic priorities, a less-noticed upside of the withdrawal is that it might allow some national security bureaucracies to get back to doing what they are supposed to be doing. And by “national security bureaucracies,” I mean the Central Intelligence Agency.

To understand where this is coming from, it is worth reading Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman’s latest story in the New York Times. Their opening paragraph is pretty disturbing: “Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

The story makes clear that the killing and/or capturing of U.S. informants has been going on for quite some time. There appears to be two not-mutually-exclusive explanations for why it is happening. The first is that foreign intelligence services are getting more sophisticated: “Artificial intelligence, biometric scans, facial recognition and other technology has made it far easier for governments to track American intelligence officers operating in their country.”

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The second explanation comes from a former CIA agent and is Afghanistan-related: “The C.I.A.’s shift toward covert action and paramilitary operations undermined traditional espionage that relies on securely recruiting and handling agents.”

As someone who has written about organizational cultures in the past, this makes a great deal of sense. No matter what the Marvel Cinematic Universe tries to make you believe, the skill set for cultivating human intelligence during peacetime is different from excelling at paramilitary operations. And ever since the CIA was tasked with Afghanistan 20 years ago, it has migrated toward the paramilitary side of its job portfolio.

The global war on terror acted like a vacuum cleaner for the foreign policy agencies. Scarce resources at State, Treasury, Defense and other bureaucracies made counterterrorism their first priority. Maybe that was the right allocation of resources in 2001, but 20 years later it feels dated. These agencies need to revamp their organizational cultures and missions to focus on emerging threats and concerns. This certainly applies to the intelligence community, which is not seeing a reduction in espionage attempts.

Afghanistan will leave a scar. If it enables the CIA and other agencies to better prioritize what they do, however, then it will be a scar worth suffering.