A Second Hand Conjecture

Michael Yon’s second installment in Desires of the Human Heart is up. Here is where to find part one.

Key points:

There were many family members around, and though the men were happy to see us, they seemed skeptical that we are going to stay, voicing concerns that our soldiers have come there before, but not stuck around. As soon as the Americans leave, the terrorists move back in, which leaves the locals in the middle of what amounts to a gang war, and we are one of the gangs.

LTC Crider, the battalion commander of 1-4, assured the people that the Americans are there to stay until the Iraqis can take over, but I sense that Iraqis are more worldly than we might imagine. Many Iraqis seem to understand that the real decision-makers are Americans at home. Maybe with the 1-4 moving in, some would know they can move back.

Despite so much bad news, much of which I deliver, it’s heartening that most of the Iraqis are not fearful of Americans. What many Iraqis REALLY want—and they say it clearly—is to communicate directly with Americans at home.

Now that the Times has blessed the sea change in Anbar we see plenty of commentary on it. The dam has broken. Rich Lowry makes several key points that resonate with some of what I have been writing about what has worked, counterinsurgency, and cautionary statements:

1) It’s incredible how swiftly the change happened. It wasn’t long ago that Anbar was said to have been lost to al Qaeda (”Situation Called Dire in West Iraq; Anbar is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says,” Washington Post, September 11, 2006). Now all the sudden it’s different:

The new calm is eerie and unsettling, particularly for anyone who knew the city even several months ago.

“The complete change from night to day gives me pause,” said Capt. Brice Cooper, 26, executive officer of Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, which has been stationed in the city and its outskirts since last summer. “A month and a half agowe were getting shot up. Now we’re doing civil affairs work.”

2)It was a political change that made the difference, with the sheiks shifting their allegiance. That made the military picture entirely different:

With the help of the Anbar sheiks, the military equation immediately became simpler for the Americans in
Ramadi. The number of enemies they faced suddenly diminished, American and Iraqi officials said. They were able to move more freely through large areas. With the addition of the tribal recruits, the Americans
had enough troops to build and operate garrisons in areas they cleared, many of which had never seen any government security presence before.

And the Americans were now fighting alongside people with a deep knowledge of the local population and terrain, and with a sense of duty, vengeance and righteousness.

3) If the political piece of the puzzle was crucial, so was the military. The tribes wanted “financial and military” support. We wouldn’t have military support to give unless we were on the ground in Iraq. Clearing operations were important in Ramadi:

Beginning last summer and continuing through March, the American-led joint forces pressed into the city, block by block, and swept the farmlands on its outskirts.

And we still have lots of troops on the ground to hold:

The Ramadi region is essentially a police state now, with some 6,000 American troops, 4,000 Iraqi soldiers and 4,500 Iraqi police officers, including an auxiliary police force of about 2,000, all local tribesmen, known as the Provincial Security Force. The security forces are garrisoned in more than 65 police stations, military bases and joint American-Iraqi combat outposts, up from no more than 10 a year ago.

Anyone who says the tribes could do this without us is living in a fantasy world.

4) In a microcosm, you can see here the kind of political development that the war promised in theory—not the rise of liberal democracy, but of self-governing Arabs who hate al Qaeda and will fight it. There’s this:

“We know this area, we know the best way to talk to the people and get information from them,” said Capt. Hussein Abd Nusaif, a police commander in a neighborhood in western Ramadi, who carries a Kalashnikov with an Al Capone-style “snail drum” magazine. “We are not afraid of Al Qaeda. We will fight them anywhere and anytime.”

And this:

Abd Muhammad Khalaf, 28, a policeman in the Jazeera district on Ramadi’s northern edge, is typical. He joined the police after Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia killed two of his brothers, he said. “I will die when God wills it,” he said. “But before I die, I will support my friends and kill some terrorists.”

If this sentiment is sustained, and if the people who feel this way prevail, it’s a big deal.

5) Brutality usually, but not always, back-fires in insurgencies. When the counter-insurgents use it, it creates more insurgents, and when the insurgents use it, it creates a popular backlash. That’s exactly whatal Qaeda did in Anbar, and it’s the downside risk in its current bombing campaign in Baghdad and elsewhere.

6) So does Anbar hold lessons for the Battle for Baghdad? Maybe, maybe not. This is a useful cautionary note in the Times piece:

Yet the fact that Anbar is almost entirely Sunni and not riven by the same sectarian feuds as other violent places, like Baghdad and Diyala Province, has helped to establish order. Elsewhere, security forces are largely Shiite and are perceived by many Sunnis as part of the problem. In Anbar, however, the new police force reflects the homogeneous face of the province and appears to enjoy the support of the people.

This highlights how important it is to tamp down the civil war in Baghdad and—pace the Democrats—the civil war’s organic connection to the fight against al Qaeda. If the Shia can be prodded by al Qaeda into mass reprisals against the Sunni, the Sunni are going to hate the Shia more than al Qaeda. If, on the other hand, the Shia control themselves and the
central government acts responsibly, the kind of distaste for al Qaeda evident in Anbar has a chance to become paramount among the Sunnis, creating a hugely important political and strategic shift.
Michael Totten has a fantastic interview with Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen of the Kurdish Peshmerga. Amongst other questions he is asked about the wisdom of an American pullout.

If you enjoy the Video go and donate to Michael.

Gateway Pundit has photos and information on the Iraqi Protest in Irbil:

On Sunday in Erbil, Northern Iraq, Kurdish men and women came together to protest against honor killings after the brutal murder of a young woman earlier in the month.

Austin Bay and Phil Carter debate:

Today, Carter and Bay address the question that underlies nearly all foreign policy debates. Later in the week, they’ll debate the state of the armed forces today, mass conscription, the surge, and the leaner/meaner model of warfare.

Fred Kagan has an extensive status report from his trip to Iraq.

Max Boot has an in depth look in his report:
Can Petraeus Pull It Off? A report on the progress of our arms in Baghdad, Baqubah, Ramadi, and Falluja.

He has more on Anbar and its capital Ramadi, but there sign of progress and a reversal of the slide that began after the bombing of the Samarra mosque early last year:

The news from Iraq is, as usual, grim. Bombings, more bombings, and yet more bombings–that’s all the world notices. It’s easy to conclude that all is chaos. That’s not true. Some parts of Iraq are in bad shape, but others are improving. I spent the first two weeks of April in Baghdad, with side trips to Baqubah, Ramadi, and Falluja. Along the way I talked to everyone from privates to generals, both American and Iraqi. I found that, while we may not yet be winning the war, our prospects are at least not deteriorating precipitously, as they were last year. When General David Petraeus took command in February, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today there are some glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest of places.

There are also negative signs as well:

Offsetting these positive trends have been setbacks in Falluja, conquered at great cost by American troops in 2004 and prematurely passed to Iraqi control in 2006. Marines fear it is reverting to insurgent control. The surrounding countryside, where a mere 200 Marines are deployed to cover a population of 130,000, is even worse. In the village of Saqlawiyah near Falluja, which I visited in the company of the local Marine garrison commander, Captain George E. Hasseltine, the city council is afraid to meet in the open and the mayor and a prominent local sheikh have fled to Jordan. There are 21 police officers, but they lack a commander and they seldom venture into the marketplace located next to their station. When they do go out, they wear ski masks to hide their identity–a clear sign that insurgents control the neighborhood.

Still:

Yet, for all the difficulties that remain (and it would be a serious mistake to underestimate them), the overall trend in Anbar is positive. Startlingly so. According to briefings I received at Multi-National Division-West in Camp Falluja, attacks in the province are at a two-year low. More than 13,000 police officers have been deployed, and more are on the way. Tips to Coalition forces are soaring. Whereas U.S. troops used to find only 50 percent of IEDs, they are now defusing 80 percent before they detonate. Al Qaeda in Iraq has responded with chlorine gas bombs, in other words using chemical weapons against Sunni civilians–not a tactic likely to win over the populace.

In Baghdad:

But the situation in the capital is considerably more complex, because the fight is not just between Sunni moderates and Sunni extremists but also between Shiite moderates and extremists as well as between Shiites and Sunnis of all stripes. And, of course, the capital is much bigger. All of Anbar has 1.25 million residents. Baghdad has some 6 million. Each of its security districts has more people than Ramadi. Even when the “surge” is completed in June, U.S. and Iraqi troops will not have as heavy a presence on a per capita basis in Baghdad as they have now in Ramadi.

Nevertheless, with only three of five extra brigade combat teams on the ground, the situation in the capital has already shown signs of improvement since Fardh al-Qanoon started in February. The murder rate fell 75 percent in February. March saw a slight increase, but by the beginning of April the number of murders in the capital was still down 50 percent since the start of the year. Last year it was not uncommon to find dozens of corpses a night dumped in the capital, many of them tortured by Shiite death squads using power tools. This type of ethnic cleansing still goes on but at a much reduced level. Now it is common to find only one or two victims a night. To be sure, some of this decrease in violence is due to the fact that there are fewer mixed neighborhoods–Shiite militias have succeeded in ethnically cleansing most of northern Baghdad, thus reducing areas of conflict. But a large part of the explanation also lies in the fact that there are now more American troops in the city, and they are for the first time in years focused on improving the security situation, not simply on handing off control to the Iraqis.

There is much more, but of course there has been a response:

Sunni and Shiite extremist groups have not taken this challenge to their reign of terror lying down. Although initially cowed by Coalition efforts, they have begun fighting back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda terrorists are suspected of responsibility for the April 12 bombings that killed at least one Iraqi member of parliament and destroyed one of Baghdad’s bridges, as well as the April 18 blast in the Sadriya market that killed more than 100. Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is suspected of responsibility for a series of rocket strikes on the U.S. embassy compound in the Green Zone. (I happened to be inside the embassy during one such attack–talking with a general, ironically enough, about improvements in security. We were interrupted by a loud thump outside and an ominous voice on the public address system telling us to “duck and cover–get away from the windows.” “You were saying . . . ” I said.)

Max agrees with me about the central importance of Baghdad:

But the bulk of terrorist activity has been moving outside the capital. That is not a bad thing: Controlling Baghdad, home to a fourth of the country’s population and to its most important business, media, and cultural entities, is more critical than controlling the hinterland. But instability in the “Baghdad Belt” stretching from Salman Pak and Iskandariyah in the south to Falluja in the west and Baqubah and Taji in the north exacts a heavy toll. The mass-casualty attacks that are happening with greater frequency in these places obscure some of the progress being made in the capital.

Baqubah:

The situation in Baqubah is particularly depressing. When I visited the capital of Diyala province last year, Coalition forces were ramping down their operations in the expectation that Iraqi forces could pick up the slack. When I visited this year I found a hotbed of insurgent activity, with American casualties high, food and fuel deliveries interrupted, and the streets nearly deserted. U.S. generals now say that Baqubah has displaced Ramadi as the worst place in the entire country.

Such reverses are not only demoralizing in their own right but also have the potential to subvert attempts to pacify Baghdad, 35 miles to the south. Insurgent strongholds around the capital can be used as staging areas to export violence back into Baghdad. For this reason, some of the newly arriving American troops are being deployed not to the capital itself but to the “belt” around it. Their goal is not so much to pacify these areas–there are not enough troops to do that–but to disrupt insurgent activities and so keep the heat off Baghdad.

More encouraging is the development of the Iraqi Special Forces:

With more than 2,000 soldiers, ISOF has proven itself to be the most tactically skilled and politically reliable unit in the entire Iraqi Security Forces. I got to meet some of its personnel at their heavily guarded compound near Baghdad airport. Many senior officers live on base with their families for fear of being killed if they go back to their old neighborhoods. Indeed, last year a number of ISOF soldiers were kidnapped and killed while off duty. If this has discouraged the remainder, I saw no sign of it.

The Iraqis showed off their equipment, which is every bit as good as that of their American Special Forces counterparts. They demonstrated their skills in a state-of-the-art “shoot house,” followed by a mock hostage rescue mission in a cavernous training facility. (My ears are still ringing from all the C2 explosives used to blow open a wooden door.) Their American liaisons, all veteran Green Berets, proudly told me that the Iraqis are capable of planning and executing their own missions. The Americans mainly help with intelligence, logistics, and air support. The ISOF soldiers are already the most experienced and probably the most skilled special operators in the entire Arab world. And, although composed primarily of Shiites, these operatives are willing to take down Shiite extremists as well as Sunni ones.

His take on Petraeus:

It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified for this exceedingly difficult assignment–what Petraeus calls “the postgraduate level of warfare.” The 54-year-old four-star has already spent more than two and a half years in Iraq, first as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, then as head of Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, with responsibility for training Iraqi Security Forces. Following these stints, he oversaw the production of Field Manual 3-24, the bible of counterinsurgency warfare for the U.S. armed forces.

Petraeus is that rare combination, a man of intellect who is also a man of action. He looks slight and bookish and has a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton (he wrote his dissertation on how the Vietnam war affected military thinking). But he is also a physical fitness fanatic who is famous for challenging and beating soldiers half his age at push-up contests. His toughness is legendary–he bounced back from a training accident in 1991 when he took an M-16 round right in the chest (his life was saved by surgeon and future senator Bill Frist) and from a sky-diving accident nine years later in which he broke his pelvis.

Having known him since 2003, when I visited him at the 101st Division headquarters in Mosul, I was already impressed by Petraeus. My respect only grew when I got to spend a week by his side, sitting in on his morning Battle Update and Assessment meetings, commuting with him via Blackhawk helicopter from Camp Victory near Baghdad airport to the Green Zone, and visiting troops in the field with him. His low-key manner–he is not given to profane tirades in the Patton tradition–belies a quiet intensity and a driving ambition. A number of officers I spoke with said they were working harder than ever under Petraeus but that they also felt reenergized to tackle the tough tasks ahead.

The strategy is not more of the same, though I keep hearing it characterized as such by both politicians, pundits and bloggers. This shows a serious lack of understanding of military strategy, tactics and history by our chattering classes (see also my last post on Galuba and Iraq):

Petraeus has adopted a fundamentally different strategy from that of his predecessor (and current army chief of staff) General George Casey. Casey’s philosophy, shared by his boss, General John Abizaid, the former Central Command chief, was that U.S. forces were an “antibody” in Iraqi society. The faster we left, the better. That resulted in a pell-mell scramble to turn over responsibility to Iraqi Security Forces that weren’t ready for the challenge. The result was a precipitous increase in violence following the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, bringing the country to the brink of all-out civil war. Petraeus’s priority, by contrast, is to reengage with the population in order to improve security. Only then will it be possible, he reckons, to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis.

Besides pushing more troops out of their Forward Operating Bases (a soldier who never leaves his FOB is known as a fobbit), Petraeus has emphasized information operations. Casey was very much a traditional soldier who shunned publicity and thought that results should speak for themselves. This had the inadvertent result of ceding the”information battlespace” to adversaries like Moktada al-Sadr and the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who proved skillful in exploiting the Internet and satellite television in particular. Petraeus, who has sometimes been derided behind his back as a “glory-seeker,” has tried to fight back by opening up his command to the news media. He often takes journalists along on his regular visits to troops in the field. When he went to Baqubah on April 7, he took a reporter from the San Antonio Express-News (as well as two WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editors, Fred Kagan and me). He is also trying to push authority to conduct “information operations” down to lower levels of his force.

How does Max see the stakes?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. U.S. commanders report that, whatever the case before the war, Iraq has now become the central front of al Qaeda operations, drawing jihadists from all over the world. It is also a central front in Iran’s offensive to become the dominant player in the region. American generals say they have been “shocked” to discover the level of Iranian influence in Iraq. The Iranians are supporting not only the Mahdi Army, Badr Brigades, and other Shiite militias, but also, the generals believe, al Qaeda–the very group killing Shiites en masse.

Petraeus feels that he is making slow, steady progress against the myriad enemies that Coalition forces confront, but he is keenly aware that results may not come fast enough to please antiwar politicians back home who are eager to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, and damn the consequences. “The Washington clock is ticking faster than the Baghdad clock,” Petraeus often says. His goal is to speed up the Baghdad clock by pressing for more reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites, and to slow down the Washington clock by showing gains on the ground that can reverse public pressure to pull U.S. troops out prematurely. The former is hard to do because of the mutual suspicions that grip this country. The latter is equally hard, because a few high-profile insurgent atrocities can obscure the progress being made by Coalition forces in stopping ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, which Petraeus views as his most important immediate goal.

Petraeus’s ultimate objective, he told me over lunch at his embassy office, is to “achieve an outcome sustainable by the Iraqis.” Upon his assessment of Iraqi capabilities will rest his recommendation for when, how far, and how fast to draw down U.S. forces. Under consideration are various plans. The lower the number of American troops, the easier it is to sustain, politically and materially–but the greater the risk that the security situation will once again slide out of control as it did in 2006.

His assessment of Maliki and Petraeus’ relationship with him:

Petraeus and his circle are fairly happy with Maliki. They say he has begun to think and act more like a national, not just a Shiite, leader. “I’ve been hearing a different tone,” says one Arabic-speaking American official who works closely with the prime minister. As evidence, he points to Maliki’s willingness to support an oil law that gives Sunnis a fair share and to agree to bring back some Baathists who had been purged from government. But the limits of Maliki’s power are evident in the fact that neither measure has yet been adopted by parliament. Although he is prime minister, Maliki does not command the loyalty of most members of parliament or even of most of his own cabinet, which was chosen by sectarian party bosses. Some major ministries, such as the Departments of Transportation and Health, had been under the control of Moktada al-Sadr’s allies until they announced their resignation last week. Others have better ministers at the top but are heavily infiltrated by Shiite extremists down below.

Petraeus argues, reasonably enough, that it’s unfair to expect the Shiite-dominated government to make too many concessions too quickly to the Sunnis who had oppressed them for decades. He frequently says that all the legislation being demanded of the Iraqi government–an oil law, a de-Baathification law, a provincial election law, and much else besides–is akin to getting the U.S. government to pass a civil rights act in 1866 or to pass Social Security reform and a comprehensive health care plan today. He hopes that success in pacifying Baghdad, if that is achieved, will provide breathing space for politicians to make the compromises necessary to foster effective governance.

Beyond the question of will lies the equally troubling question of competence. The Iraqis in charge of the government today, primarily exiles who spent years plotting against Saddam Hussein, have little experience of administration, much less of democratic administration. And they have to develop such a capacity in the midst of numbing violence–a challenge some American officers liken to building an airplane in flight. Widespread, corrosive corruption and deep-rooted mutual suspicion stand in the way. Most of the important factions in Iraq are willing to engage in politics but not to forgo the option of achieving their objectives at gunpoint.

There is much more for the hardy.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, war, Petraeus, Ramadi, Anbar, counterinsurgency, al Qaeda, Baghdad

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