Fearing as many as 85,000 Afghan army and police recruits may sympathize with the Taliban and aim to murder their American mentors, the Pentagon has deployed dozens more counterintelligence agents to Afghanistan to test the loyalty of recruits with lie detectors.
The “CI surge,” as one US intelligence official called it, casts further doubt on the safety of the training partnership and the entire Afghanistan exit strategy that hinges on it.
Under pressure from President Obama, the military rushed to recruit local Afghans to stand up a national army and police ahead of his announced 2014 troop withdrawal. To process some 7,000 new recruits each month, corners were cut on background checks, allowing insurgents and terrorists to fill the ranks of the now-350,000-member security force.
The massive infiltration has put American and other Western troops at risk of insider attacks by Afghans they’re training and mentoring.
So far this year, uniformed Afghans have carried out 36 insider, or “green on blue,” attacks — more than the previous two years combined — killing 51 American and NATO soldiers. Over the past three years, they’ve murdered a total of 106 foreign soldiers. Most have been shot at close range, many in the back of the head.
I’ve learned that, in response to the escalating attacks, orders have gone out to the Army’s intelligence headquarters at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., for deployment next month of an additional 60 counterintelligence officers to Afghanistan to help administer a form of polygraph test to Afghan security forces.
They will join the roughly 400 CI agents already in the field. But I’m told this new group is skilled at interrogation and working the so-called PKASS lie-detector machines.
Of course, “they can’t do polygraphs on everybody, so they’re limiting it to whoever has the most direct access to Americans,” the official told me.
Using language interpreters, agents will ask recruits, among other things, if they sympathize with the Taliban or intend to harm Americans.
The military earlier this month suspended training and joint patrols with Afghans in part to conduct more thorough background checks on recruits, who have been selected by village elders, not by Americans.
Even though the Karzai administration recently ID’d and sacked more than 400 Taliban infiltrators whose sole aim was murdering Western troops, the Pentagon does not trust it to thoroughly vet the national army and police.
US military intelligence now believes as much as 25% of the some 350,000 Afghan security force members are Taliban or al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers.
At that infiltration rate, there could be as many as 87,500 bad guys posing as our partners.
One of the core functions of an American soldier in Afghanistan now is working alongside these armed recruits to train and mentor them in combat and protection techniques. They also live with them inside our bases over there, where they’re not always armed but their Afghan counterparts are.
That’s because Afghans are helping guard our bases. Not surprisingly, many of them have turned their guns on our troops as well.
The private contractors who hired them are now under the control of the Afghan Ministry of Interior — which US intelligence believes has even worse security screening standards than the private contractors. The ministry, which runs the national police, has turned a blind eye to infiltration of its own security forces. In fact, two unarmed senior US officers earlier this year were shot in the back of the head inside ministry headquarters.
To guard against rogue Afghan guards, US commanders have had to place heavily armed “guardian angel” soldiers on duty at bases to protect fellow soldiers as they eat, work out and sleep. Think of the insanity: We have had to double guard our troops because our allies assigned to guard them are actually killing them!
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration.”