CIA’s Afghan Pullback Criticized by Military Commanders

CIA to Bring Everyone to Kabul This Summer

The Pentagon’s drawdown in Afghanistan is being accompanied by a CIA redeployment, which isn’t sitting too well with the military. The CIA is planning to abandon forward operating bases entirely and run their whole Afghan operation out of Kabul.

The military sees the CIA’s purpose there as providing intelligence about the situation on the ground, and the move to Kabul means a lot of the communications interception is simply not going to be done anymore.

The CIA has long treated its intelligence sharing with the military as sort of a side-effect in Afghanistan, though, preferring to focus on their own drone strike programs in neighboring Pakistan and increasingly moving out of the business of intelligence gathering entirely.

The CIA is defending the move on safety grounds though, noting that the military is leaving a lot of those forward bases themselves and insisting the CIA doesn’t want to be there without ground troops.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.