Thank you for the question, sir.
First of all, in any counter-insurgency campaign where there's a rudimentary infrastructure—that is to say, in terms of telephone communications and Internet-based communications—and a large number of people such as the huge number who live in southern Afghanistan, it is incredibly difficult to know what is occurring in many of the little villages and towns and the locations of valleys around Kandahar itself.
With respect to the Sarposa prison, for example, we work not by ourselves but with our allies within NATO and the Afghans themselves to build a fairly complex, robust intelligence collection system. We do the analysis of all the information we get, working with all those different partners, and we try to predict exactly where people are going to be so we can proactively conduct our operations and not be caught by surprise. But when you have that rudimentary infrastructure and when you have a Taliban that can actually move in from an area and execute an operation without talking on cellphones or without telling folks around them that they're going to do that, occasionally they will achieve surprise. You cannot know everything all the time, and it is an extremely difficult culture in which to get information.
We get information all the time. Every hour of every day of every week we get thousands of pieces of information, and we try to balance that each against the other to see if there's a picture emerging. But sometimes there are just thousands of pieces of information and they're meaningless to us, or they're lies, or they've been deliberately injected by the Taliban, or something happens where they've decided to do something and the information gets to us and then they can't do it.
I'll give you the example of how some of these things work. When I was there myself as commander of ISAF, we were out on an operation, and we found ourselves in the middle of a city in the most godawful traffic jam with my small security convoy. We were absolutely tied up, could not move, with literally hundreds of vehicles, trucks and cars, mules and camels, and all those three-wheel bikes and motorcycles around us, and we were actually stationary. Over our secure radio we got a warning that there was a suicide bomber in that city, that it was directed at the commander of ISAF, that this was the target, and that we should be aware of the suicide bomber. Further, the intelligence was that the suicide bomber was in a yellow taxicab. We looked around and counted 72 yellow taxicabs within our field of view, and so the intelligence automatically became meaningless. But at the same time, if I'd been blown up with my convoy, I'm sure somebody would have walked backwards from there and said, “Well, you should have known, because somebody said it was a yellow taxi.”
It is extremely difficult to parse out from the huge amount of information we get, the huge number of facts we receive, and put that together and get a very clear picture and not be surprised. Most of the time we get it right, and we proactively then take action to preempt something or to go after their leaders, or to achieve certain things that we believe are right. So the vast majority of the time we get it right, but occasionally, over a period of time, with enough of that information floating around and enough of it hidden from us, and with good operational security on the Taliban side—and they do have good operational security, which is how some of their leaders have survived for years without being targeted or without being taken out either by NATO or by other forces here—sometimes they can achieve surprise. In the case of the Sarposa prison, they did.