WASHINGTON, Jan 5, 2010 (AFP) - US counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan were under scrutiny Tuesday after an Al-Qaeda double agent killed seven CIA officers and a military spy chief slammed intelligence failings in the country.
      
Major General Michael Flynn, the top NATO and US military intelligence chief in Afghanistan, said US-led forces were "so starved" of accurate on-the-ground intelligence "many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling."
      
"I don't want to say we are clueless, but we are. We're no more than a fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment," one operations officer was quoted in the report as saying.
      
Flynn's scathing criticism comes as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigates last week's attack at a base in Khost, eastern Afghanistan, in which seven US agents and a Jordanian officer were killed.
      
Jihadist websites boasted Tuesday that the suicide bomber was an Al-Qaeda double agent who tricked Western intelligence services for months.
      
Jordanian intelligence had brought him to eastern Afghanistan hoping he would help hunt down elusive Al-Qaeda number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the websites and Western intelligence agents cited by US media said.
      
But instead he blew himself up, killing eight including his Jordanian handler, a top intelligence officer and member of the royal family, marking the CIA's worst single loss of life since a Beirut bombing in 1983.
      
Flynn said radical structural changes were needed in Afghanistan to help an intelligence-gathering apparatus which "still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade."
      
While at a local level many agents knew a lot about their districts, such information was rarely collated and disseminated through the intelligence hierarchy.
      
Too often intelligence teams were focused on "reacting to enemy tactics at the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the insurgency."
      
A failure to understand who the local Afghan powerbrokers are and ignorance of local economics and landowners had contributed to "hazy" knowledge, said the report released Monday by the Center for a New American Security.
      
And some officers said they acquired more helpful information on the situation on the ground and the local population from "reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries."
      
Flynn acknowledged the report, entitled "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan" and published on the think tank's website, was unconventional.
      
But he said its recommendations aimed to provide "a shift in emphasis and a departure from the comfort zone of many in the intelligence community."
      
A senior intelligence official, however, told AFP it was aimed at military intelligence not the CIA.
      
"The focus of the report... is military intelligence. That makes sense given the authors and the large US military presence in Afghanistan," he said, adding that he hoped they were "trying to fix the problems they've identified in their own organization."
      
The Khost attack will, however, be a blow to CIA services wiping out years of intelligence work in the notoriously complex Afghan conflict, riven by tribal rivalries.
      
Both jihadist websites and Western intelligence agents cited by US network NBC News identified the bomber as Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi alias Abu Dujana al-Khorasani arrested in late 2007 and recruited as a double agent by the Jordanian intelligence services.
      
But a senior Jordanian official, who asked not to be named, said there was no evidence Balawi was the bomber, adding he had supplied valuable information.
      
Balawi was reportedly taken to the CIA base in Khost because he claimed to have urgent information about Zawahiri, the Ana Muslim website said.
      
He was not searched as he went in because a CIA agent boasted: "He is our man, so there is no need," the website claimed.
      
He then pretended to detail plans for an operation on a piece of paper and asked the agents to gather round to look before blowing himself up, it added.
      
NBC News said his handler in Afghanistan, a captain in the Jordanian intelligence services identified by the Jordanian state news agency Petra as Ali bin Zeid, was killed in the attack along with seven CIA officers.
      
That report has not been confirmed in Jordan.