The U.S. intelligence community is said to have few
assets in a range of states termed as failing.
The Brookings Institution said in a report that the United States has
little information on a range of states that have failed governments and
societies both in and out of the Middle East. The report, which cited the
exceptions as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia and Pakistan, pointed to the
closing of several CIA stations in failed states.
"With the exceptions of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Pakistan and Colombia,
where U.S. forces are deployed, U.S. intelligence collection and analytical
resources devoted to failing states remain woefully inadequate," the report,
authored, by senior fellow Susan Rice, said. "While collection increased
somewhat after the U.S. Embassy bombings in 1998 and, again, presumably,
after September 11, 2001, there is little evidence of sustained efforts to
improve collection and analysis in most parts of Africa."
The report said the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies must focus
on such issues as insurgency movements, smuggling of precious minerals,
weapons proliferation, crime, narcotics flows and disease. Ms. Rice proposed
Sudan as a major intelligence target.
"The administration should engage early and aggressively across the
board when conflict is imminent or persistent Ñ from the Middle East to
South Asia to Africa," the report said. "Sudan has served as a sanctuary and
staging ground for Al Qaida and other global terrorist organizations. Its
radical Islamist government is identified by the U.S. government as a state
sponsor of terrorism."
The report said Al Qaida's presence in Somalia and Sudan in the early
1990s expanded to such North African countries as Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia.
Al Qaida, the report said, has sought chemical weapons
components from Sudan as well as the expertise of renegade nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons scientists coming not only from parts of the former
Soviet Union and South Asia but also from Libya and South Africa.
The United States must also divert more of its counter-terrorism funding
to failed states, the report said. Currently, the money is relayed to more
stable U.S. allies. The Bush administration wants to provide at least $10
billion in assistance by 2006 and thereafter $5 billion a year.
"At the same time, limited and carefully directed additional resources
could be provided to certain failing states that are presently unable to be
effective partners in the war on terrorism, but whose territory is prone to
exploitation by terrorist organizations," the report said. "In selecting
potential recipients, we must take account of their will to work with the
United States, and not just of their weakness. For instance, it makes little
sense to provide such assistance to the government of Sudan until the United
States determines it is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism, or to
Liberia, with which we presently have a hostile bilateral relationship."
