Word: afghanistanism
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...Mulal al-Balawi in Khost. Under more favorable circumstances, the CIA's field officers always prefer to meet with informants one on one and in carefully scouted, out-of-the-way places chosen to protect the anonymity of the informant. But things have to be done differently in Afghanistan, where the CIA has a well-grounded fear that its operatives will be kidnapped or killed - a risk that applies to all Westerners in that country. As a result, informants, none of whom can be completely trusted, either have to be met by agents accompanied by security personnel or brought onto...
Last week's suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan, underscores just how difficult a mission the agency - and the U.S. as a whole - faces in the country. Given the size of the CIA, the loss it suffered when a Jordanian assumed to have been an asset penetrating al-Qaeda instead detonated an explosives belt at a gathering of agency personnel, was the equivalent of the Army losing a battalion. It was a major setback for the CIA after eight years at war, not to mention the fact that it coincided with a moment when the Agency...
...that once al-Balawi set himself up in Pakistan's border region and sent out feelers to jihadi militants, "he was very helpful, and the CIA were grateful to him." This source tells TIME that al-Balawi pinpointed several al-Qaeda targets, which were attacked by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and that "al-Balawi was extremely well paid." (See pictures from the July 2009 U.S. offensive in Afghanistan...
...Zawahiri was deemed important enough for the local CIA station to alert top officials at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and in the White House. Al-Balawi was taken seriously, and trusted enough to warrant a trip to Khost by the CIA's second-in-command in Afghanistan, an unidentified mother of three, to attend the spy's debriefing at a U.S. base. But al-Balawi, who was allowed onto Forward Operating Base Chapman without a body search, was wearing a suicide belt and blew himself up as soon as he encountered his CIA and Jordanian spymasters...
...Afghanistan, the U.S. military may have few other options. On Jan. 4, Major General Michael T. Flynn, the country's top U.S. intelligence officer, issued a grim assessment of the U.S.-led coalition forces' ability to gather actionable data on its elusive enemy. Analysts, according to the report, are "starved for information from the field," to the point that their jobs feel more like "fortune-telling than serious detective work." Despite misgivings after al-Balawi's lethal betrayal, the CIA's attempts - with Jordan's help - to recruit another spy to infiltrate al-Qaeda may still be their best...