I have to completely disagree with your framing here, specifically your reliance on “publicly available evidence.” Judging an intelligence agency strictly by what becomes public is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the espionage and security world actually operates.
By definition, intelligence successes remain classified, while intelligence failures become public. When an agency successfully intercepts a threat, turns an enemy asset, or secures a quiet strategic backchannel, nothing happens. It does not make the news, there are no press conferences, and the public is never “privy to it” because revealing it would burn sources and methods. But when an agency fails, a bomb goes off, a proxy goes rogue, or a political scandal leaks.
If you apply your exact “public evidence only” standard to the CIA, their public record is missing 9/11, claiming there were WMDs in Iraq, the Bay of Pigs, letting the Taliban walk back into Kabul, and getting their entire informant network in China executed. Does that mean the CIA has ceased to be an effective agency? No. It just means that when you only measure a covert organization by the things that blow up in its face, you are looking at a curated highlight reel of its worst mistakes.
Saying “we aren’t privy to their successes, so we’ll just judge them by their visible failures” is textbook confirmation bias. It is like judging a cybersecurity firewall only by the three viruses that got through, while completely dismissing the three million attacks it blocked in the background just because you couldn’t see them. You can criticize their policy choices, but using public visibility as your metric for operational competence is a deeply flawed way to analyze any intelligence service in the world.
tribune.com.pk
