The top U.S. and allied intelligence commander in Afghanistan wants to establish district-level “Stability Operations Information Centers” to provide political decision makers with the kind of highly localized information he says is critical for waging a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Forcing civilian leaders and military personnel to rely almost exclusively on newspapers for information about public works projects, governance, and local attitudes “needlessly jeopardizes the successful prosecution of the Afghanistan war,” writes Army Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn and two co-authors in a Jan. 4 report, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan.”

Flynn is deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The report was published online by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank co-founded in 2007 by Michele Flournoy, now the undersecretary of defense for policy.

The report quotes Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, as saying: “The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers.”

Staff at the new information centers would research and write “meaty, comprehensive descriptions of pivotal districts throughout the country,” according to the report. In some cases, the centers will replace traditional intelligence fusion centers.

The intelligence community is focused too narrowly on using “aerial drones” to scan for insurgents “burying bombs” or “setting up ambushes,” according to the report. The authors argue that shifting intelligence resources toward answering questions such as whether a “local contractor actually [is] implementing the irrigation project” will help win the cooperation of local people “who are far better than outsiders at spotting insurgents and their bombs.”

Flynn writes that commanders agree with this assessment: “Officers in the field believe that the emphasis on force protection missions by spy planes and other non-HUMINT platforms should be balanced with collection and analysis of population-centric information,” according to the report.

At the moment, only a “minuscule fraction” of analysts study “governance, development and location populations,” according to the report.

The report is available for downloading at http://www.cnas.org/node/3924