A Bad Day For The CIA

Joby Warrick at WaPo:

A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency’s history, U.S. officials said.

The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted — Forward Operating Base Chapman — is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda’s home base.

U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.

Marc Ambinder:

The death of eight CIA officers would be the agency’s worst toll since the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, when at least six officers were killed. Robert Baer, the now ubiquitous former CIA officer who spend years hunting down the Beirut bombers, has written that the agency never recovered from the loss of life that day. In an environment where the CIA is under extreme pressure from all corners, the Afghanistan massacre begins history as a tragedy that even under ordinary conditions the agency would find it hard to bear.  Leon Panetta, the CIA director, must now add, to the mountain of pressing concerns, the grief counseling for thousands of employees.

The CIA’s semi-covert Predator drone strike program, targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives who cross back and forth from Pakistan, has killed hundreds  – a  number of which were most likely innocent civilians by any definition.

This is not to suggest an equivalence — just to say that the agency’s American operatives are most definitely combatants in this war, which is also to say that the rules of war and the legal understandings that the CIA is using to fight terrorism in Pakistan are not clear and not easily explicable to the American people. With the CIA’s massive footprint in Afghanistan, some sort of tragedy was probably inevitable.  (In 2001, officer Johnny Spann, a member of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, was killed in action in Afghanistan.)

Bobby Ghosh at Time:

It’s unclear how the bomber gained access to the base, but reports say the CIA has used it to recruit Afghans. “It is important to remember that the mission of the CIA in Afghanistan is to work closely with Afghans,” says Robert Grenier, a former CIA stationchief in Pakistan. “That mission necessarily carries a high degree of risk, especially given the prevalence of suicide bombers.”

Supposedly secure Western fortifications have been attacked before in Afghanistan. In October, five British soldiers were killed when an Afghan policeman fired on a U.K. training team inside a checkpoint in Helmand Province. But Grenier says that given the breadth and depth of the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, the death toll among employees has been “almost miraculously light.” He adds: “Fate may have caught up with us today.” The Khost death toll matched the previous record of the number of CIA staffers killed in a single day. On April 18 1983, eight members of the Agency were killed when the US Embassy in Beirut was blown up by a Hizballah suicide bomb. A retired officer who was then in active service says the Agency “was in shock for about one day… and then we got mad.”

Khost is just across the border from North Waziristan, the lawless Pakistani tribal area from where al-Qaeda and the Taliban routinely launch attacks on U.S. and NATO positions in Afghanistan. The Taliban has already claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, but U.S. authorities have released few details. “We mourn the loss of life in this attack,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. Hank Crumpton, who headed the CIA’s counterterror ops in Afghanistan after 9/11: “This horrible attack underscores the risk that CIA officers, men and women, undertake every day in Afghanistan and around the world. They are America’s most important resource in this war, and this is a tragic blow.”

Siun at Firedoglake:

While everyone’s focus has been on Yemen – with reports that targets are being examined for possible retaliation attacks by the US – the US war in Afghanistan continues to go bad.

Yesterday, 10 Afghans were killed by US forces. The UN Observer writes:

Afghan investigators today accused US-led troops of dragging ten civilians from their beds and shooting them dead during a night raid.
Officials said that eight children and teenagers were among the dead and all but one of the victims were from the same family.

With demonstrations in at least two major cities calling for an end to such civilian killings, President Karzai pointed out that eight of the victims were “school students in grades six, nine and 10.”

Today, a suicide bomber entered FOB Chapman in Khost, a base “used by the CIA.” At least 8 (and later reports say 9) CIA operatives were killed as was an Afghan civilian:

The bomber managed to slip past security at Forward Operating Base Chapman in the eastern province of Khost before detonating an explosive belt in what one U.S. official described as a room used as a fitness center. The blast also wounded eight people, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.

It was not immediately clear how the assailant was able to infiltrate the U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians, adding that most of them were probably CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian was also killed, the sources said.

Also today, an IED also killed 4 Canadian soldiers and a journalist from the Calgary Herald while an Afghan soldier opened fire and killed on US soldier and 2 Italians.

UPDATE: Benjamin Carlson at The Atlantic with the round-up

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