Long before Michael Flynn led a chant demanding the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton, and before he came to view an entire religion as responsible for terrorism, he issued a public plea for nuance in intelligence.



In 2009, Flynn followed his longtime friend from the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Stanley McChrystal, to Afghanistan. Their partnership had transformed JSOC into an apparatus that collected and disseminated intelligence as rapidly as it killed people, and then fed that intelligence back into its internal systems to accelerate the lethal process.

As with JSOC, McChrystal would command the war and Flynn would run its intelligence shop. But Flynn soon considered the entire US intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan to be focusing on the wrong targets.

The trouble, in Flynn’s estimation, was that US intelligence focused too much on the Taliban insurgency. It gave comparatively little emphasis on granular data about trends among Afghans themselves, which at the time the coterie of counterinsurgents around McChrystal considered decisive. Win the people, the thinking went, and the insurgency would lose the base of support necessary to survive.

In a rare move for a serving intelligence officer, Flynn took his critique public.

“The most salient problems [in Afghanistan] are attitudinal, cultural and human,” he wrote in a January 2010 paper for the Center for a New American Security, at that point the ascendant defense thinktank and a job pipeline into the Obama Pentagon. “[M]erely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them.”

Commanders, Flynn and his co-authors wrote, needed information including “census data and patrol debriefs; minutes from shuras with local farmers and tribal leaders … polling data and atmospherics reports from psychological operations and female engagement teams.”

Refocusing on “population-centric information”, the authors wrote, was crucial to victory. It would admittedly offer “few clues about where to find insurgents”, but it would “provide elements of even greater strategic importance – a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself”.

The 2010 paper, which took many in intelligence circles by surprise, was the first time most outside the military had encountered Flynn. It made his career in Washington.

Flynn was instantly considered sagacious, even courageous, for his public criticism, which was in keeping with Washington’s now-faded enthusiasm for counterinsurgency over what would come to be called “targeted killing”.

James Clapper, who would soon become the US intelligence chief – and a major antagonist of Flynn – called him a “superstar in intelligence”. After McChrystal flamed out when his staff derided the Obama White House in a Rolling Stone interview, replacement David Petraeus kept Flynn.

Nearly seven years and two presidential elections later, some of those who worked with Flynn throughout his military career profess bewilderment at what they consider his changes in temperament and focus.

Flynn was intense while in uniform, old colleagues say, but not angry, and his intensity served their mission. Nor did he exhibit an ego – let alone paint millions of people with a broad brush.

Flynn, who did not reply to a request for comment ahead of his announcement as Trump’s national security adviser, is now more liable to claim that the US ought to “fear” Islam itself as a “rational” response to terrorism.

Despite the insistence among Trump’s adherents that “radical Islam” is the problem, Flynn does not scrupulously distinguish between versions of a faith practiced by approximately one fifth of the world. In July, Flynn tweeted: “In next 24 hours, I dare Arab & Persian world ‘leaders’ to step up to the plate and declare their Islamic ideology sick and must [be] healed.”

It is a far cry from the Flynn of 2010, who described Afghans – overwhelmingly Muslim – as “the people we are trying to protect and persuade”. Then, partnerships with locals were a component of victory.

“If relations suddenly were to sour between US troops and an influential tribe on the outskirts of Kandahar,” Flynn wrote in his CNAS paper, “public confidence in the government’s ability to hold the entire city might easily, and predictably, falter.”

In Afghanistan, counterinsurgency underperformed. Petraeus quietly shifted to a more confrontational and violent strategy and Obama, never sold on the premise, was eager to draw down a ground war he himself escalated. Flynn was rewarded with a promotion to a third star and the leadership of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

By some accounts, Flynn’s DIA experience embittered him. He grew angry at what he saw as Obama’s lassitude against the increasing strength of what would become the Islamic State. His efforts at institutional reform got him fired, Clapper removing the former “superstar”. Flynn would come to believe “the stand I took on radical Islam” was responsible for his downfall.

Flynn’s book, The Field of Fight, elaborates on that stand. He praises the secular strongman Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who led a military coup to overthrow Egypt’s only democratically elected government, “as one who should be internationally admired and respected for his courage in [his] call for a reformation of the Islamic religion”. The other Muslim country Flynn identifies in his book for partnership is officially secular Jordan.

Elsewhere, he endorses regime change in Iran and confronting Russia, a policy at odds with the warmth the president-elect extends to Vladimir Putin.

“New leadership in Washington,” Flynn writes, “will have to craft a winning strategy that will bring freedom to Iran, thwart Putin’s ambitious undertakings in the Middle East and Europe, and break the worldwide enemy alliance.”

As national security adviser, Flynn will have unmediated access to Trump, unlike the cabinet secretaries. Those secretaries will also have to run the gauntlet of Senate confirmation and oversight, unlike White House staff. It is for those reasons that successive presidents of both parties have preferred to consolidate power for national-security decision-making at the White House.

Several of Flynn’s allies from his military career have stayed silent as their ex-colleague has risen in influence. University of Texas president William McRaven, the retired admiral who designed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, declined comment on Flynn. Asked if he might join the Trump administration, McRaven said: “[I] love my job at the University of Texas system.”

Flynn’s critics are hardly as reticent. The civil rights group Muslim Advocates said it was “deeply disturbed” by Flynn’s elevation to national security adviser, considering it an indication that the “hateful rhetoric” of the presidential campaign will be a feature of government.

“His role in the Trump administration signals support for anti-Muslim policies and sentiment that will undermine our nation’s security and exacerbate an already unsafe climate for Muslims and all Americans,” the group said in a statement.

Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian, called Flynn’s statements about Muslims “profoundly un-American as well as damaging to the fight against terrorism and national security”.