Here's another passage from Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. Having worked in the federal government for the last 24 years, I felt a shock of recognition.
Once again, CIA's career management saw my proposal to aid the Northern Alliance as a risk to CIA. For those who had spent fifteen, twenty, or more years in CIA, there was a clear pattern: Whoever was in the White House would get worked up over the cause du jour. He would be unable to get the rest of the government to produce results, so he would turn to the CIA. He would push the CIA to do risky, potentially controversial things. Later, after things went badly, the White House people would be gone and CIA would get the blame. It was through this template that the Agency saw the Northern Alliance: Sure, Massoud was a good guy now, but later the Congress, or the media, or some other White House staff would focus on the fact that he sold opium, abused human rights, and had killed civilians. They would blame CIA. Audits of the CIA assistance would undoubtedly show that some funds had gone for questionable purposes. In the final analysis, the CIA proclaimed the Northern Alliance was feckless and no match for the Taliban.Posted by jt at April 11, 2004 02:35 PM
Although CIA staff would admit their Agency's bias to me in private, in official meetings they nodded and said they would prepare to help Massoud and his Northern Alliance. Of course, they first needed their internal legal review. The money to help Massoud, apart from token aid that the CIA called "trinkets," would have to be given to the Agency over and above all funds already available to them.
This reluctance to fund the Northern alliance without "found money" caused me to wonder exactly what CIA was doing with all of the counterterrorism budget increases that the White House had given them through several Emergency Supplemental budgets. Working with the Office of Management and Budget and CIA's own auditors, we discovered that almost all of the Agency's activities against al Qaeda were being paid for by the Emergency Supplementals. There were almost no baseline CIA funds going into the effort. In 2000 and in 2001 we asked CIA to identify some funds, any money, earmarked for other activities that were less important than the fight against al Qaeda, so that those funds could be transferred to the higher priority of countering bin Laden. The formal, official CIA response was that there were none. Another way to say that was that everything they were doing was more important than fighting al Qaeda.