President Obama may think he played it smart by choosing
CIA Director Leon Panetta to replace Defense Secretary Robert Gates
and Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus to take Panetta’s job
at CIA. Both men have superb reputations and each is a shoo-in for
confirmation.
What comes after won’t be so easy. Both Panetta and
Petraeus are being air-dropped into unfamiliar roles at a time when
the agencies they’re taking over are under enormous stress both
politically and substantively.
Gen. Petraeus has, for the past decade, been one of our
nation’s principal intelligence consumers. He has had to make
decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of a dearth of
actionable intelligence. By now he knows in detail the major
weaknesses of our intelligence community, and especially the CIA,
in penetrating adversary nations and non-state actors such as al
Qaeda and Hezbollah.
Now he’s going to have to look through the other end of
the telescope, and what he’ll see isn’t pretty.
As Petraeus will discover quickly, the CIA has more
fractious tribes than Iraq, each with its own political agenda and
media/congressional constituency. It is encumbered with a
supervisory bureaucracy that adds no value (the Director of
National Intelligence) and has suffered so many attacks from
congressional Democrats that Petraeus’ predecessor, Panetta, was
forced to spend so much of his time defending the agency that the
mission of the CIA — to gather intelligence — was further
eroded.
Because it was unable to gather essential intelligence,
under Panetta the CIA turned to its “lethal authorities,” the
employment of paramilitary operatives and its own fleet of Predator
(and other) unmanned aircraft. These assets have been engaged in a
global game of “whack-a-mole.” Though they have managed to kill a
great many terrorists and some minor terrorist leaders, they have
not succeeded in crippling — for example — the three major terror
networks in Afghanistan, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Haqqani
network in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Before he can get to those issues, Petraeus will face the
first challenge encountered by every retiring military officer (or
senior industry executive) taking a high-ranking civilian position
in government. When a general or a CEO gives an order, his
subordinates — if they don’t want to get fired — move out smartly
to accomplish it. In the civilian side of government, when the boss
issues an order, it’s the start of a debate, not the end of
one.
(I e-mailed a friend of mine who works for General
Petraeus asking if he’d be coming to Langley with the boss. His
answer was, “DC is too much of a war zone for me. MUCH
safer here in Afghanistan.”)
When the general enters his new office, he will discover
proofs of what he suspects. We are unable to obtain reliable
current information about the sources of the greatest threats our
nation faces. Iran is a “denied area” in which we have almost no
ability to gather intelligence. China is embarked on the most
penetrating espionage effort against us since the Soviet era and
terrorists are still able to hide, obtain financing and weapons,
and mount attacks against the U.S. and its troops abroad with too
great a frequency. The attempts by the Christmas Day airline bomber
and the Times Square car bomber failed only because of their
ineptness, not our measures to interdict them.
Petraeus undoubtedly has a lot of ideas on how to improve
the CIA’s gathering and analysis of intelligence. And he will try
to implement them, only to have the CIA’s tribal culture and its
congressional/media supporters thwart him. He won’t get the active
presidential support necessary to reform the intelligence community
because Obama has himself been at war with the CIA, alleging in his
2008 campaign that it tortured terrorist detainees. Obama backed
Eric Holder’s 2009 appointment of a special prosecutor to
investigate torture allegations. That special prosecutor’s work
continues to this day, a doomsday cloud still hanging over the
agency.
Whether Obama is re-elected or not Petraeus will, like
James Woolsey before him, probably leave in frustration after a
short term at CIA.
Petraeus will be frustrated at CIA. But what is
politically worse for Obama, Panetta’s term as defense secretary
will be disputatious and rocky from the start.
Panetta — former House Budget Committee chairman, White
House Budget Director and Clinton Chief of Staff before coming to
CIA — has been picked because his political credentials seem to
make him a good candidate to wield Obama’s machete in slashing the
defense budget. But during his term at CIA, his relationship with
many senior House Democrats was poisoned by their unremitting
attacks on the CIA over the issue of terrorist
interrogations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s war on our spies never ended.
As ranking Dem on the House Intelligence Committee, Pelosi was
briefed on September 4, 2002 on the fact that al Qaeda detainee Abu
Zubayda had been waterboarded, but denied it repeatedly. When the
Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified summary
of the briefings (a story I broke
on May 7, 2009), Pelosi accused the CIA of lying.
Panetta, to his credit, stuck up for the agency he headed,
releasing a statement on May 15, 2009 that the CIA’s policy was to
not mislead Congress. Eleven days later, Pelosi and six other House
Dems sent him a letter demanding that he recant that
statement.
Relations between Panetta and congressional Dems sank to
such a bad level that, in an unprecedented August 2, 2009 op-ed in
the Washington Post, Panetta
wrote, “It is worth remembering that the CIA implements
presidential decisions; we do not make them. Yet my agency
continues to pay a price for enduring disputes over policies that
no longer exist. Those conflicts fuel a climate of suspicion and
partisanship on Capitol Hill that our intelligence officers — and
our country — would be better off without. My goal as director is
to do everything I can to build the kind of dialogue and trust with
Congress that is essential to our intelligence mission.”
Whatever ill will still exists between Panetta and
congressional Democrats, Republicans won’t march to his support
when he tries to sell $800 billion in cuts to the defense budget
over the next decade, as Obama wants. House Armed Services
Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon is very dubious about the
cuts made by Obama and Robert Gates, and isn’t going to go along
with the additional cuts Panetta will try to sell.
Panetta will also have to confront the soured relationship
between our professional military and the White House. Not only is
there a problem with distrust of the president over Libya, the
repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and a host of other issues,
National Security Adviser Tom Donilon is distrusted by many of our
military leaders. When Donilon was being considered for the post,
according to a Bob Woodward book, then-National Security Adviser
Gen. Jim Jones said that Donilon had no credibility with the
military.
It’s understandable why Obama would pick Petraeus and
Panetta for their new roles. But the dangers our nation faces will
not — cannot — be solved by these men. The problems they face
aren’t made insoluble by the terrorist groups and nations that mean
us harm. The obstacle to solving them is the president they
serve.
