Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. HUNTER. Madam Chair, my amendment is pretty simple. It requests that the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense, 120 days after the passage of this bill, submit a plan and execute the plan to develop a coordinated strategy between our intelligence communities and our Department of Defense to go after IED manufacturers and IED transporters between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The majority of improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan come from Pakistan. We know where a lot of those IED manufacturers are, but our DOD is not able to execute the strategy of going after those IED manufacturers and the people that transport them across the border on their own. They need the intelligence community and the 16 agencies which make up that community to be on their side.

More than 80 percent of the explosive devices used against our U.S. troops in Afghanistan have homemade explosives as the main charge and are almost exclusively derived from calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer produced in Pakistan. Homemade explosives are also called HMEs.

The vast majority of IED components, including commercial explosives, radio-control triggers, and HME precursors are sourced from and/or transmitted through Pakistan. The continued uncontrolled availability of ammonium nitrate and other HME precursor materials smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan is the most significant factor contributing to the Afghan IED problem. Over 70 percent of our casualties in Afghanistan come from these homemade IEDs.

IEDs are also a problem in Pakistan and to the Pakistani people. Since January of 2011, more than 500 people have been killed and over 14,000 people have been injured by IEDs in Pakistan.

The Afghanistan IED threat cannot be defeated without addressing the networks and precursors in Pakistan. To defeat the Pakistan-produced HME-fueled IEDs in Afghanistan, the solution requires integrated efforts and leveraging of the combined authorities, policies, and capabilities of many agencies of our government, coalition partners, and especially the intelligence community.

We need to identify the key facilitators of raw materials supplying the HME pipeline into Afghanistan. We also need to identify specific financial networks and funding streams for these HME networks, as well as identify these key financiers.

That's what my amendment does. It makes the intelligence community and the defense community get together, submit a plan, and execute that plan to work on the same page, because right now there is a severe gap between what the DOD considers its number 1 priority, our defense guys over there, our soldiers and marines on the ground; their number 1 priority is different from the intelligence community's number one priority.

The intelligence community right now goes after high-value targets. They go after the bad guys wherever they may be found, but they need to work together on these IEDs coming over from Pakistan. It's the only way we can defeat them.

With that, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to accept my amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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