CIA agent discusses covert ops

By Jaclyn Youngblood     1/21/10 6:00pm

For the 150 people in the Kelly International Conference Facility Tuesday night, the unassuming man in a modest brown suit standing behind the podium might not have appeared to have been one of the key players in the CIA's largest covert operation, that of aiding the mujahideen of Afghanistan against the 1979 Soviet invasion. But Milton Bearden, a former agent in the CIA's clandestine services and the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan from 1986-89, has been used to being covert for years, so don't feel fooled.

During a lecture at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Bearden discussed the current quandary of Afghanistan, the country's complex military history and what lessons America has learned over the last three decades.

Events Chair of the Baker Institute Student Forum Ruchir Shah said he thought Bearden offered the audience insight that was both incredible and candid.

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"It's really cool to hear from someone who is no longer in government," Shah, a Brown College sophomore, said. "Someone who no longer has to be politically correct can be as frank as possible."

Bearden said the situation in Afghanistan, one of the prominent hot-button foreign policy issues during the previous and current presidential administrations, needs a new solution that does not include weapons.

"We don't need 30,000 more gunfighters to get in 30,000 more gunfights," he said, referencing President Barack Obama's December decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Shah said he agrees with this viewpoint, citing economist Thomas Friedman's editorials in The New York Times, which also offered non-military suggestions.

"You can do all you want with the military, but unless you create education and infrastructure ... nothing's really going to happen," Shah said.

Throughout the lecture, Bearden stressed the importance of finding a solution that does not rely on kinetic options, which he defined as military- and weapons-centric strategies. He revealed what he deemed to be the "dirty secret" of foreign politics.

"Almost everything we plan for never happens and almost everything that happens was never planned for," he said.

He added that he believes General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force, could be the right person to suture America's Afghanistan wound, but only if McChrystal tries something new.

Martel College sophomore Marielle Schweickart said she thought Bearden shared his extensive knowledge about Afghanistan in an intelligent, engaging fashion and found hope in Bearden's suggestion for a new strategy.

"Clearly, we've used military [strategies] for the past eight years, and that is not working," Schweickart said.

This new strategy might include extracting Afghanistan's abundant natural resources, broadening its agricultural environment beyond fields of poppy and coaxing foreign investment in industrial programs that follow the National Security Council's Strategy for Victory in Iraq: clear, hold, build. Bearden said another non-kinetic option might be encouraging a different approach to the education of young Afghan men.

Schweickart saw this new paradigm favorably, especially its condition of encouraging more broad-based education.

"[The people of Afghanistan] need to go industrial and boost the economy which, in worldly matters, tends to solve problems: boost the economy, which helps education, which helps the people," Schweickart said. "It's like a waterfall."

Bearden said the youngest son in an Afghan family is likely to attend an Islamic religious school where he will become a man very quickly, often by having a weapon thrust into his hands.

"Afghan boys go from childhood to adulthood; they don't go through the iPod stage," he said.

Bearden also gave the audience a quick recap of the attempted military conquests of Afghanistan: Alexander the Great's blunders in 330 BCE; the Moghuls' mistakes in the early 16th century; the British Empire's botched campaign from 1878-80; Afghanistan's rout of the Soviet Union after a decade of occupation; and the coalition's invasion of the country following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Bearden said one common theme runs through this timeline.

"Everybody gets in easily - the British, the Russians and later on we would as well," he said. "Everybody also uses the playbook of the guy that went in before him ... but the little secret is there's only one playbook, and the Afghans wrote it, so we always end up in there fighting on their terms."

This concept of fighting on Afghanistan's terms may hold another piece of the solution, Bearden said.

"We have for the last several years been training police, but I think we always end up trying to train men who look like Mississippi cops, and that hasn't worked out," Bearden said, noting that the U.S. should attempt to train police forces to be more compatible with Afghanistan's cultural norms instead of America's standards.

Until the U.S. can postulate in terms of the Afghan thought process, similar to the attempts by Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense to build the Afghan National Army from the bottom up, Bearden said American efforts may be fruitless.

Before America attempted to defeat the Pashtun people of Afghanistan in October 2001, the CIA waged its largest covert operation ever to aid the mujahideen in their quest to retake their country from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Millions of American dollars went into purchasing weapons, training the mujahideen and ultimately building the force that would defeat the Soviet Union's 40th Army, Bearden said. He said the introduction of the Stinger missile in 1986 proved to be the silver bullet that changed the game in favor of the mujahideen.

Almost a quarter-century later, the Obama administration is searching for its own catalyst.

"This game is not going well, but there is a potential game-changer," Bearden said. "If you give an Afghan an option ... to do something other than carry a Kalashnikov for $10-a-day, [then] any job you could create ... would probably be a $20-a-day job. They would have a stake in something and it might turn [the war] around.

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