USA trekker alle soldater ut av Irak, og CIA får ikke operere sammen med spesialsoldater. Forholdet til irakiske myndigheter har kjølnet.
USA fikk ikke egne baser, ikke immunitet for sine soldater, og irakerne hevder de greier seg selv. CIA velger følgelig å halvere staben, og får ikke drive counterinsurgency i landet. Det er et alvorlig tilbakeskritt for USA, både med tanke på hva man ofret i blod og ressurser, og i forhold til hva som skjer i Iran og Syria.
The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to cut its presence in Iraq to less than half of wartime levels, according to U.S. officials familiar with the planning, a move that is largely a result of challenges the CIA faces operating in a country that no longer welcomes a major U.S. presence.
Under the plans being considered, the CIA’s presence in Iraq would be reduced to 40% of wartime levels, when Baghdad was the largest CIA station in the world with more than 700 agency personnel, officials said.
The CIA had already begun to pull back in Iraq since the height of the war, officials said. But the drawdown, coming six months after the departure of American military forces, would be significant. The officials declined to provide exact numbers, give a breakdown of levels of analysts versus covert operators or say where agency workers would be redeployed, all of which are classified.
Når CIA ikke lenger har en samarbeidspartner, er tilbaketrekkingen eneste alternativ.
The spy drawdown is part of a broader shift in U.S.-Iraq relations, with Washington moving to scale back diplomatic and training missions in the country. But it illustrates the limits of the Obama administration’s national-security strategy, as it steers away from ground wars and toward smaller operations that combine intelligence and special-operations capabilities.
Such a strategy relies heavily on cooperation from host governments, and as the CIA’s Iraq experience shows, cooperation can wane even where the U.S. has invested billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives.
The Iraqi government, including Iraq’s intelligence service, has scaled back its counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S. as it asserts its sovereignty, U.S. officials say.
“If you don’t have that cooperation, you are probably wasting the resources you are allocating there and not accomplishing much,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Near East analyst.
Det har vært et økende antall terrorangrep den senere tid, og det er frykt for at al Qaida igjen gjør seg gjeldende. Da vil ikke USA ha samme mulighet til å følge med, mye av kapasitet en er borte.
Al Qaida har vist vilje til å delta i det syriske opprøret. Det er et svært grumsete farvann, og USA skulle gjerne hatt større muligheter. Det svekkende nærværet i Irak er en svært liten return på en stor investering.
CIA Prepares Iraq Pullback
U.S. Presence Has Grown Contentious; Backers Favor Focus on Terror Hot Spots
