Russian press article explains why the US supported anti-Assad resistance is a failure

[JohnyCanuck]

American “allies” in Syria: their shameful performance is perfectly explainable
Yevgeny Krutikov, Vzglyad

The scandal around the “30th Divison,” which was prepared by American trainers for war against Assad, and which immediately surrendered to the Islamist An-Nusra Front as soon as it crossed the border from Turkey, is now resounding around the entire planet. There will be many such scandals. They have been predetermined by the methodology of American training of “allies”—in Syria, in Georgia and in the Ukraine.

Let's recall that as a result An-Nusra Front (a branch Al-Qaeda) received weapons, equipment and a few pickup trucks from the USA. The commander of the "30th Division" assured representatives of the Front that he fooled the American military in order to get weapons. The problems which caused this to happen can be split into three uneven categories.

snip

Add to this that the behavior of CIA operatives is very tightly regulated. Just about every eventuality is accounted for by a written instruction, which they are required to know almost by heart. Disagreement with operational instructions brings official sanction. The freedom of action of an operative is limited, and at times they are simply forced to fulfill the letter of the instructions instead of reacting to the situation. This problem plagues many intelligence services, but the American ones are, in addition, built on ideological and, to a lesser extent, on ethnic stereotypes. Generally speaking, any authentic-looking towelhead who is able to intelligibly pronounce the word "democracy" has a chance to receive financing and weapons. But nobody has any control over where he will then go with these weapons. By the way, Soviet intelligence services of the Brezhnev era had the same problem, latching onto any tribal chieftain who knew how to pronounce words like "Marx" and "Lenin."

All of this is directly relevant to the case being described. The "30th Division" and Abd al-Tunisi personally demonstrated their loyalty, entered into Americans' confidence, received weapons and disappeared together with them. Stereotypical and schematic perception of the world is a surprising distinctive quality of the CIA. Of course, this resulted from the "loss of principal adversary," and from perceiving oneself as a “victor” specifically in the ideological rather than the physical sense of this word. The anti-Assad coalition, knocked together using a combination of threats and wishful thinking, fell apart specifically because of bad instructions and consequent mistakes made by the CIA. It is only possible to collect and to process intelligence correctly with the help of specialists who are free of ideological bias in perceiving the world, but Langley has a deficit in this department. The career-building system that has been created there already tends to sideline people with nonstandard ways of thinking, but the massive recruitment effort directed at former Marines has fully predetermined the melt-down of its analytical abilities.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/american-allies-in-syria-their-shameful.html#more

[leveymg]

1. The CIA tried doing things off the books, and 9/11 was the result.

Then there was Iraq WMDs. That didn't turn out so well either. No wonder Langley isn't so great at improvisation anymore.