Ever since the British pulled out of Musa Qala, Afghanistan, in October of 2007, the Taliban have committed atrocities against the population and subjugated them to Taliban rule, and with forces more powerful than the Afghan police in Musa Qala, the agreement between British forces and the tribal leaders to prevent the Taliban from entering Musa Qala was rendered powerless and irrelevant.

Almost immediately after the British pullout from Musa Qala, the Taliban rolled in.  British officials believed the Taliban to be too deeply rooted to be eradicated by military means, and heretofore had intended to court the alleged more “moderate” members of the Taliban to attempt to divide their organization.

But the brutality of the Taliban occupation, along with the direct refusal of the Taliban ever to negotiate with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, apparently convinced NATO that negotiations would have redounded to no positive results.  So NATO planned operations against the Taliban that months ago was billed as Afghanistan’s Fallujah.  A series of air attacks killed various Taliban leaders over the intervening months, but this didn’t weaken the Taliban hold on the area.

The assault on Musa Qala began on December 7, with Afghan forces in the lead.  Heavy arial bombardment  preceded the advance of Afghan forces from the South, while U.S. forces were flown in by helicopter just North of the city.  Approximately seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were wounded after being air assaulted in about 14 kilometers North of Musa Qala and engaging in a five or six hour gun fight with Taliban forces.  Two NATO soldiers perished as a result of the operations against the Taliban.  Several significant Taliban leaders were killed or captured during operations.

British forces have said that they wouldn’t take something they have no plan to hold, and at the moment NATO and Afghan forces, in anticipation of Taliban counterattacks, are digging in and fortifying their positions.  But while U.S. forces battled some of the Taliban as the fled North, most fighters simply melted away into the terrain.  These fighters will live to fight another day, under cover of darkness, in the shadows, planting roadside bombs, and shooting innocent Afghanis.  Afghanistan’s “battle of Fallujah” didn’t occur, as the forces necessary to encircle the Taliban forces and chase them until captured or killed didn’t exist.  While the Taliban lost some fighters and indeed some significant local leaders, they know better than to engage NATO forces in kinetic operations for any protracted period of time.

Australian Army Colonel Don Roach has argued for a larger force size in Afghanistan.

… NATO-backed International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan army allies are stretched too thinly in Oruzgan province, home to the 370-strong Australian Reconstruction Task Force, which is facing a growing threat from resurgent Taliban militants … “One of the fundamental principles of a counter-insurgency is you can always do with more forces,” said Colonel Roach, who is on the headquarters staff of the ISAF, serving as its senior liaison officer with the Afghan army and police in Regional Command South. “You can go into an area and leave and Taliban will come back and chop peoples heads off.”

At The Captain’s Journal, we agree with Colonel Roach’s axiom, but it should be noted that this is not a given in COIN doctrine.  In fact, Military transition teams in Afghanistan are designed with exactly the opposite idea in mind.

MiTT training is a major part of the Pentagon’s new approach to counterinsurgency. A MiTT embeds with an Iraqi or Afghan unit. The team itself is small–10-15 soldiers, usually of more advanced rank, from staff sergeant to colonel–but designed to work with almost any size unit from battalion to division. Their goal is to make the local troops self-sustaining: tactically, operationally, and logistically. Aside from providing training and expertise, MiTTs also provide a huge morale boost to their foreign counterparts as they have the power to call in air support and reinforcements otherwise not at the disposal of the local police and military. The MiTT should encourage the locals to go on the offensive and gain the confidence needed to later fight on their own: a necessary component of our we-stand-down-as-they-stand-up exit strategy. Transition teams also leave a small footprint in hostile areas that might be stirred up by a larger U.S. presence. Such small groups remain in the shadows and emphasize the achievement of Iraqi and Afghan forces–something that greatly reduces the political fallout of U.S. operations.

But this may be more pedantic than wise.  The Anbar Province in Iraq has also seen its share of tribal leaders and concerned citizens stepping up to be counted, but in order for this to obtain, a tank had to be parked outside the home of Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the most powerful figure in Anbar, to protect him from al Qaeda attacks.  There is no replacement for force projection.  The British reaction to the Taliban re-entry into Masu Qala is befuddling given the nature of power in this region.  Agreements come and go, but without the means to enforce the agreements, it seems odd that the British would have relied on this “gentleman’s understanding” with the tribes in the area.

The British want other NATO forces to shoulder more of the burden in Afghanistan, the Canadians are there only because the U.S. says they have to be there (according to a recent poll), and there are roads through Afghanistan that, in a less dangerous situation, might force competition against the poppy trade.  Yet this road is too dangerous because of bombs, shootings and Taliban influence to be relied upon for commerce.

The ruined Afghan police truck smoldered on the highway in the village bazaar, flames rising from its cargo bed. The village was silent. Its residents had hidden themselves ahead of a U.S. patrol.

The remains of a second truck, a tanker, sat on its wheel rims 100 yards to the north. To the south, another patrol was removing two other freshly burned tankers from the highway, clearing the lanes so traffic might pass.

The Americans examined the police truck. Holes marked where bullets had passed through. The front passenger door was gone; a rocket-propelled grenade had struck and exploded there.

This vehicle graveyard on Highway 1, roughly 50 miles south of Kabul, the Afghan capital, symbolizes both the ambitions and frustrations in Afghanistan six years after the Taliban were chased from power.

Highway 1 is the country’s main road, the route between Kabul and Kandahar, the country’s second largest city. It lies atop an ancient trade route that, in theory, could connect Central Asia and Afghanistan with ports in Pakistan, restoring Afghanistan’s place as a transit hub for something besides heroin.

The highway, which has been rebuilt with $250 million from the United States and other nations, accommodates a daily flow of automobiles, buses and ornately decorated cargo carriers, which the soldiers call “jingle trucks.”

The Afghan and U.S. governments say the road’s restored condition is a tangible step toward a self-sufficient Afghanistan.

But Highway 1 remains bedeviled by danger, extortion and treachery. Police corruption and insurgent attacks sow fear and make traveling many sections of the road a lottery. The risks limit its contribution to the economy and underscore the government’s weakness beyond Kabul.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has ordered Marines to stay in the Anbar Province (rather than deploy to Afghanistan) where they will likely be conducting public relations missions and handing out food bags to the Anbaris, but force projection is needed in Afghanistan.  Yet as long as the small footprint counterinsurgency advocates hold sway, the campaign appears to be proceeding apace in Afghanistan.  Doctrine can indeed color the lenses through which we see the world.

Concerning the poorly named ‘National Intelligence Estimate’ on the state of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a leading Iraqi newspaper Azzaman has an interesting editorial response.

U.S. President George W. Bush’s statements on dangers of Iran’s nuclear program have become almost meaningless and are made solely for rhetorical parade purposes indicating that Iran is about to reap yet another victory.

This means that war is a possibility only in the imagination of those betting that Iran is no longer a crucial player in the big powers’ geopolitics of the Gulf and Iraq.

As for the Arabs, they now look like simple-minded people who the U.S. administration could drag to the conference in Annapolis to sit down side by side with the Israelis in the belief that a war with Iran was imminent.

Washington has no more option left from now on but to appease Iran with regard to Iraq file. Washington needs Iran’s protection when the hour for withdrawal strikes.

Iran is not naïve and stupid. It has longstanding strategic interests in Iraq with a bearing on developing the country’s oil riches. It wants to link Iraq’s economy intricately with its own so that no government will be in a position in the future to shun Iran’s hegemony.

Washington was late in giving Iran the clean bill of nuclear health. But as arrangements for U.S. withdrawal are being made, it had no choice but to pursue the path of appeasement.

The U.S. should have signed a memorandum of understanding with the government in Tehran rather than Baghdad for plans calling for long-term military presence in the country.

It is not the first time the U.S. dupes the oil-rich Gulf states. The U.S. has deceived these countries several times in the past on fears of external threats.

But belatedly the countries have discovered the U.S. deceit. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allayed these fears by appealing to them to enter into security partnership to protect themselves against ‘external dangers’ much far beyond the Gulf’s borders.

The Arab Gulf states have come to realize that Iran as a neighbor is the country to stay while America which has been using them has created the Iranian scourge for its own narrow political interests.

This is a scathing rebuke of the NIE and its conclusions.  There is obvious hatred of Persian hegemony in these words, but they are valuable if for no other reason than as a display of what Arab Sunnis think about the U.S. and its “appeasement” of Iran.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired at Iran soon after the release of the NIE, saying:

“Astonishingly, the revolutionary government of Iran has, for the first time, embraced as valid an assessment of the United States intelligence community — on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And since that government now acknowledges the quality of American intelligence assessments, I assume that it will also embrace as valid American intelligence assessments of:

— Its funding and training of militia groups in Iraq;

— Its deployment of lethal weapons and technology to both Iraq and Afghanistan;

— Its ongoing support of terrorist organizations — like Hezbollah and Hamas — that have murdered thousands of innocent civilians; and

— Its continued research on development of medium-range ballistic missiles that are not particularly cost-effective unless equipped with warheads carrying weapons of mass destruction.”

But like those who went before him with Middle Eastern concerns and issues, Gates wrongly ascribes Aristotelian logic to the situation.  The radical Mullahs in Iran care not one bit about their inconsistency, and know all of the things that Gates discusses, while at the same time revelling in the release of the thinking of the U.S. ‘intelligence’ community.  So the damage has been done.

We have pointed out that the U.S. will be in Iraq for years, and possibly decades, due to the inability of Iraq to field armed forces capable of border security and conventional operations.  That day of reckoning to which Azzaman refers when the U.S. withdraws may not be coming for quite some time, and the dancing and celebrating of the Iranian elite may be a tad too soon.  Even U.S. field grade officers recognize the evolving mission for what it is: containment of Iran.

Behind a maze of concrete blast walls rising from a desolate desert landscape that once was the scene of pitched battles between the armies of Iran and Iraq, a new American base is springing to life.

Located 4 miles from the Iranian border near the Iraqi town of Badrah, Patrol Base Shocker has been home to 240 soldiers and contractors, including 55 U.S. troops, a handful of Department of Homeland Security officers and a contingent of soldiers from the Eastern European nation of Georgia since the base became operational in mid-November.

The base lacks the comforts of many of the larger U.S. bases in Iraq, but it is luxurious compared to some of the dozens of small patrol bases that have sprung up around Iraq as part of the new counterinsurgency strategy, most of which are intended to be temporary. Here there are trailers for soldiers to live in, hot showers, a dining facility and a cavernous gym complete with new running and rowing machines.

And though the U.S. troops here were deployed as part of the surge of U.S. brigades dispatched to Iraq earlier this year, they will not be withdrawn when the surge brigades are drawn down, something U.S. commanders have said will happen by the middle of next year.

Instead, the intention is to maintain “a continuous presence” in the border area, training Iraqi border guards, looking for smuggled weapons and monitoring the flow of goods and people from Iran, according to Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch of the 3rd Infantry Division, under whose command the base falls.

The new base along the Iranian border illustrates another shift in the U.S. military’s Iraq mission. From toppling Saddam Hussein to searching for weapons of mass destruction to defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq, checking Iran’s expansive influence within the new Iraq has emerged as a key U.S. goal.

Containing Iran “is now clearly part of our mission,” Lynch said in an interview during a tour of the base.

Clearly Secretary Gates and the leadership at the Pentagon is aware of the Iranian issue, and while we at the Captain’s Journal would like to have seen more done to “persuade” Iran to behave, the wheels are in motion.  But one lesson from the story must be that there is no valid reason and no legitimate excuse for divulging operational security.

In an atmosphere where the Department of Defense crafts regulations concerning military bloggers because they are concerned about OPSEC, it is strange that the national intelligence infrastructure would be so eager to release information that cannot be helpful to U.S. interests, and cannot help but be helpful to the enemy.  Regardless of the information communicated, it was a profoundly bad idea to issue the NIE.  Nothing good came from it.  As a result of the decision to do so, the Iranians are celebrating, and the Sunni Arabs are fearful and angry over being taken for fools once again.

Ralph Peters has an interesting analysis in the Armed Forces Journal of the campaign as it is currently being waged in Iraq, entitled Dishonest Doctrine: A Selective Use of History Taints the COIN Manual.

A year after its publication, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual remains deeply disturbing, both for the practical dangers it creates and for the dishonest approach employed to craft it.

The most immediate indication of the manual’s limitations has been Army Gen. David Petraeus’ approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq. The manual envisions COIN operations by that Age of Aquarius troubadour, Donovan, wearing his love like heaven as he proceeds to lead terrorists, insurgents and militiamen to a jamboree at Atlantis. Although the finalized document did, ultimately, allow that deadly force might sometimes be required, it preached — beware doctrine that preaches — understanding, engagement and chat. It was a politically correct document for a politically correct age.

Entrusted with the mission of turning Iraq around, Petraeus turned out to be a marvelously focused and methodical killer, able to set aside the dysfunctional aspects of the doctrine he had signed off on. Given the responsibility of command, he recognized that, when all the frills are stripped away, counterinsurgency warfare is about killing those who need killing, helping those who need help — and knowing the difference between the two (we spent our first four years in Iraq striking out on all three counts). Although Petraeus has, indeed, concentrated many assets on helping those who need help, he grasped that, without providing durable security — which requires killing those who need killing — none of the reconstruction or reconciliation was going to stick. On the ground, Petraeus has supplied the missing kinetic half of the manual.

The entire article is worth the study.  Dave Dilegge at the Small Wars Journal has a response to this article by Peters (among other things), which is also well worth the study time.  Dave makes several powerful points, among them the lack of understanding Paul Bremer brought to the political scene in Iraq.  I will not weigh in with detail concerning these articles, but I will provide several thoughts.

First, I am not convinced that this is an “either-or” choice.  Rather, I still see things as a “both-and” relationship.  Heavy kinetic kinetic operations to kill or capture the insurgents was and is still necessary, along with settling with the (presumed and erstwhile) enemy with broad, sweeping programs and negotiations.  I have from the very beginning supported the idea of payment for concerned citizens as my articles show (see Concerning the Tribes, Are we Bribing the Sheikhs?, and Payment to Concerned Citizens: Strategy of Genius or Shame?).

Next thought.  I know that this tactic has been referred to as “renting hearts and minds.”  I am not naive concerning exactly what we are accomplishing with this approach.  We have killed those who would not reconcile with us in Anbar, while giving work and money to those who would.  This situation cannot last forever, and real political and economic progress must be eventually made in Iraq for this temporary solution to bear fruit.

Third thought.  There is a robust belief that the campaign as currently constituted doesn’t bear any relationship whatsoever to the one envisioned by FM 3-24.  This quote I am providing is straight from Iraq from a field grade officer: “Petraeus  is directing a counterinsurgency strategy, which is good, but the “Petraeus” counterinsurgency plan that was rolled out last winter is dead and buried, and that is also good.”

Fourth thought.  I am aware that robust force protection is being practiced as part of the campaign, as well as the fact that hundreds of combat outposts throughout urban and other areas of Iraq presented a logistical nightmare of mammoth proportions.  Combat outposts were merely a means to an end, and to the degree that they are helpful they should be used and to the degree that they are harmful or unnecessary or even impossible given the boundary conditions of force protection, then they should be jettisoned.

But they should be engaged or jettisoned within the correct context and after being applied the same way they were in Anbar.  Among the hundreds of things that are not generally understood about the Anbar campaign (which is why I began the category The Anbar Narrative), is the issue of combat outposts.  The Marines do seven month deployments rather than twelve or sixteen month deployments, and so the notion of sixteen months at a combat outpost seems ludicrous.  Further, the Marines never stayed at combat outposts for the full deployment.  Combat outposts (in combination with Iraqi Police Precincts later in the campaign) were a duty rotation, along with FOB security, patrols, kinetic operations, etc.  Marines are rotated through combat outposts, and carry all necessary supplies and ordnance with them on the rotation, causing much less logistical problems than the idea of deploying Soldiers for more than a year at a single location with logistics being relied upon to deploy all supplies to location.  Marines were never at a combat outpost for more than a couple of weeks at a time — just the right amount of time to carry all provisions in a backpack.  It is an austere lifestyle, to be sure.

The point is that acceptance or rejection of a tactic should be based on a sound understanding of how that tactic has and has not been employed in the past rather than theoretical  doctrine.  As one final thought for today, sadly, the Afghanistan campaign continues to unravel.  I have just seen an account over Fox News of the desire of the population in Afghanistan to negotiate and bring the Taliban into the ranks of the government in order to stop the violence (the Taliban are checking off military win after gruesome slaughter of innocents after successful intimidation of the locals, and so on, while also asserting that they will never negotiate with Karzai, regardless of what the populations of America and Afghanistan wish to believe).  Secretary of Defense Gates has denied the request of the Marine Commandant to deploy Marines to Afghanistan.

So be it.  He is in charge.  But if I read the signs correctly, even if we have rejected (at least part of) FM 3-24 in Iraq, the campaign in Afghanistan has used the small footprint model to the extreme.  And we are about to lose Afghanistan.  For lack of kinetic operations against the enemy, it will soon turn into a magnificent, remarkable loss that American history will be unable to avoid.  While settling with the Taliban is far different from settling with Anbaris who were fighting for nationalistic reasons rather than religious fanaticism should be obvious, it will be the subject of future articles.  But suffice it to say at the moment that our loss in Afghanistan will be a painful subject for the history books – and a topic in war college classrooms for decades.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as inadvertently divulged in the recent statement by Omar al Baghdadi (or Abu Ayyub al-Masri), has become a flat organization.  Baghdadi has in large measure lost command and control of the lowest ranks of his organization. 

Background

Omar al Baghdadi is the name given to the leader of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  In February of 2007, Nibras Kazimi constructed a time line and description of the emergence of Baghdadi at the New York Sun, and followed this up in March of 2007 at his own blog, Talisman Gate, with further description of his identify and lineage.  In July of 2007, the Multinational Force captured a terrorist named Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, also known as Abu Shahid.  This man divulged a number of significant details about the al Qaeda organization, including the fact that al Baghdadi was a fictitious character and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadist, was still the commander of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Mashhadani was a leader in the Ansar al-Sunna terrorist group before joining al Qaeda in Iraq two and a half years ago.  He served   as the al Qaeda media emir for Baghdad and then was appointed the media emir for all of Iraq, and served as an intermediary between AQI leader al-Masri, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In fact, communication between senior al Qaeda leadership and al-Masri frequently went through Mashhadani.  Along with al-Masri, Mashhadani co-founded a virtual organization in cyberspace called the Islamic State of Iraq, in 2006, as a new Iraqi pseudonym for AQI.  The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest effort by al Qaeda to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people.  This is what we have learned or confirmed from Mashhadani’s capture.  In his words, “The Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al Qaeda in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq.”  To further this myth, al-Masri created a fictional political head of the Islamic State of Iraq known as Omar al-Baghdadi.  Al-Baghdadi, who has never been seen, is actually an actor named Abu Abdullah al- Naima.  Al-Masri maintains exclusive control over al-Naima as he acts the part of the fictitious al-Baghdadi character.  To make al-Baghdadi appear credible, al-Masri swore allegiance to al-Baghdadi and pledged to obey him, which was essentially swearing allegiance to himself since he knew that Baghdadi was fictitious and a creation of his own. Al-Zawahiri has repeatedly referred to al-Baghdadi in video and Internet statements, further deceiving Iraqi followers and perpetuating the myth of al-Baghdadi.  Mashhadani confirms that al-Masri and the foreign leaders with whom he surrounds himself, not Iraqis, make the operational decisions for al Qaeda in Iraq, and to be clear, al Qaeda in Iraq is run by foreigners, not Iraqis.  According to Mashhadani, in fact, al-Masri increasingly relies only on foreigners, who make up the majority of the leadership of AQI.  He does not seek nor trust the advice of Iraqis in the organization.  This highlights the significance of the operation our forces conducted a few weeks back to kill Khalil, Khaled and Khatab al-Turki, three foreign al Qaeda leaders who had been sent into Iraq to help al- Masri shore up the organization in northern Iraq.  And finally, according to Mashhadani, al Qaeda in Iraq leader al- Masri has increasingly become more isolated and paranoid, especially of the Iraqis within al Qaeda in Iraq, as operations have killed or captured additional AQI leaders.  Mashhadani, in his own words, says, “The idea of al-Baghdadi is very weak now because other insurgent groups have realized that the concept of al-Baghdadi is controlled by the al Qaeda foreign fighters in Iraq.”  Al-Masri started — he also says:  Al-Masri started overpowering us and acted on his own accord by controlling the distribution of funding.  Al-Masri also controlled the content of these publications attributed to al-Baghdadi.  The capture of Mashhadani and his statements give us a more complete picture of al Qaeda in Iraq.  And although the rank and file are largely Iraqi, the senior leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq, as we have previously stated, is mostly foreign.

To this information, Kazimi quickly responded that it wasn’t likely that al Qaeda could pull off such a stunt, and then he followed this up with a reaffirmation of the existence of al Baghdadi.

-‘Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’, the ‘Prince of the Faithful’ in Al-Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq, is not a fictitious character as he’s been repeatedly characterized by US officials and military officers.

-‘Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’ is the pseudonym used by Khalid Khalil Ibrahim al-Mashhadani, who should not to be confused with Khalid Abdel-Fattah Daoud al-Mashhadani, who allegedly told American interrogators that ‘Al-Baghdadi’ is a fictitious character after he was arrested on July 4.

-Khalid Abdel-Fattah Daoud al-Mashhadani, ‘Abu Shehed’, is not as senior in the hierarchy of the Islamic State of Iraq as claimed by US officials. He should not be confused with ‘Abu Muhammad al-Mashhadani’ who is the ‘Minister of Information’ for the Islamic State of Iraq. Abu Shehed’s first cousin, Adel al-Mashhadani, is more senior, for he leads Al-Qaeda’s battalions in the Fadel neighborhood.

Recent Statement / Press Release by al Qaeda

On behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq (a.k.a. al Qaeda), Omar al Baghdadi recently issued a message entitled “As for the Scum – It Disappears like Froth (Koran 13:17).” Al-Baghdadi announces the launch of a new raid against the Awakening, the U.S.-backed tribal movement aimed at expelling Al-Qaeda from Iraq.

In the first part of his message, Al-Baghdadi criticizes the mujahideen of the Awakening movement for taking a nationalist approach, which entails embracing “unbelievers” who are Iraqi citizens (e.g., Shi’ites) and rejecting pious Muslims who are not Iraqi citizens (i.e. the non-Iraqi mujahideen affiliated with the ISI). Elaborating on this point, he rebukes the Awakening movement for adopting a political platform in which rapprochement among Iraqis takes priority over defensive jihad, which, he says, is the personal obligation of every Muslim in Iraq today.

Al-Baghdadi then announces the formation of a force called the Al-Sadiq Brigades, which specializes in “killing every apostate and unbeliever,” and has already killed some “apostates” who were involved with the Awakening movement, such as tribal leader Abu Al-Rishawi of the Al-Anbar province. He also announces the launch of a new raid on the Awakening movement, which he says will continue until the end of the 20th of the month of Muharram (about two months from now).

Al-Baghdadi states that the raid, named after Al-Qaeda explosives expert Abu ‘Omar Al-Kurdi (reportedly killed in 2006), will target anyone involved with the Awakening movement:

“…I call upon every mujahid in Iraq who yearns for Allah and for the world to come… especially the mujahideen of the ISI, to attack [the Awakening movement] using three [methods involving] explosives… with hand grenades, with IEDs… and [by carrying out] martyrdom operations.

“Those who have [already] decided… to undertake a martyrdom operation should do so during the days [of the raid]. If anyone is still hesitating… we urge him… to hurry up [and carry out] a martyrdom operation, which is most harmful to our enemies and has the greatest impact [on them]. Thus you shall tear out [their] hearts… and put an end to their greed. As they have already [admitted], they are unable to stop [a fighter] who wishes to die for the sake of Allah. Their [military] apparatuses and authorities… are unable to deal with this [threat]. He who cannot carry out an attack by means of explosives… should at least kill three apostates during the raid in [some other] manner of his choice…”

Analysis & Observations

There have been heavy political ramifications surrounding the issue of how the insurgency is constituted.  The point must be made, it has been believed, that we are fighting al Qaeda in order to prevent the waning of support for the campaign in Iraq.  But as we have discussed before, the term “al Qaeda” had been used as a surrogate for the broader insurgency.  The insurgency was originally constituted by foreign (al Qaeda) leadership, and supplemented mainly by Iraqis (Bill Ardolino also weighed in with respect to the idea of local versus foreign fighters).  Just today, MEMRI carried an account by two Saudi jihadists who were surprised to be combined with so many Iraqis upon arrival in Baghdad, Iraqis who didn’t trust them and took their participation to be meddling in their affairs.

But true to their professionalism, U.S. forces in Iraq have not gotten caught up in political debates, and have waged a smart campaign to take advantage of information and intelligence concerning the makeup of the insurgency.  Operation Alljah in Fallujah involved heavy kinetic operations to kill or capture many insurgents, among them Africans, Chechens and men of Far Eastern descent.  There was no shortage of foreign fighters allied with al Qaeda in the recent operations of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, but there were also indigenous fighters, and separating the two groups was pivotal to campaign.

Payment for concerned citizens, a tactic we have strongly advocated, was successfully used in Fallujah to bring work to heads of household.  This, combined with robust security (gated communities and biometrics), caused some indigenous fighters to begin to return home from Fallujah to al-Qaim where they could be carefully reintegrated into society.

The reason it is important to know the makeup of the enemy is that the strategy for defeating them is a function of how they are constituted.  Fortunately, U.S. forces have been wise in their choices, and the combination of tribal negotiations, payments, kinetic operations and reconstruction have caused the support for the insurgency to dissipate at the lowest levels – the fighters.  The indigenous Iraqis have gone home in large part, and while the Strategy Page recently discussed al Qaeda fighters moving back to Afghanistan, we were discussing this more than a month ago in Regional Flux and the Long War.  The foreigners have been killed or captured, have left Iraq, or have headed North to Mosul and Kirkuk, as we discussed in Operations in Northern Iraq: Hard Times for the Terrorists.

Al Qaeda is increasingly left with fewer fighters to do the work.  But what is more interesting than what was intended to be communicated in this most recent statement was what was not intended to be, but slipped out anyway.  Al Baghdadi, or al Masri, has divulged al Qaeda operational security, of course, without this intention.  Carefully note what has been said: “Those who have [already] decided… to undertake a martyrdom operation should do so during the days [of the raid]. If anyone is still hesitating… we urge him… to hurry up [and carry out] a martyrdom operation, which is most harmful to our enemies and has the greatest impact [on them] … He who cannot carry out an attack by means of explosives… should at least kill three apostates during the raid in [some other] manner of his choice…”

We have known for some time now that due to actionable intelligence the Multinational Force has increasingly targeted senior and mid-level al Qaeda leadership, and many have been captured or killed.  But al Baghdadi’s statement is the most stark admission to date that the organization has gone flat.  Note what happened.  The most senior al Qaeda in Iraq leader used a press release to issue tactical level orders to the lowest level ground troops.  The statement is not a rehearsal of what he has told his emirs, but rather, is spoken in the present tense imperative.  He is issuing orders.  The formation of the so-called Al-Sidiq Brigades is a media ploy, as this group includes whatever foreign fighters he has left in his organization.  He isn’t bifurcating his forces, he is temporarily renaming them for purposes of morale.

Whether al Qaeda in Iraq has an Iraqi face and Omar al Baghdadi actually exists, or al-Masri is still playing a shell game with a fictitious character, is quite irrelevant.  U.S. forces are fully engaged in knowledge of the insurgency and are using the appropriate tactics to address each part of it.  Whoever is in charge of al Qaeda has no command and control.  He has lost his officers.  The only analogue for us would be to ponder the idea of a Battalion of Marines being sent to Iraq, told to find their way there, split up, their NCOs taken away from them, and orders issued by their commanding officer to go find some enemy and kill them, with each individual Marine working alone and having a quota.

As good as the U.S. Marines are, this experiment is not likely to turn out very well, and yet this is the state of al Qaeda in Iraq.  Petraeus has said that no one should be ready to do end zone dances yet, and we have discussed the existence of some hard line Ba’athists and Fedayeen Saddam in Mosul that must be dealt with.  Yet when the most dangerous enemy lacks command and control, the situation is very favorable and the advancements undeniable.

F-22: Air Superiority

Marc Lynch and Nibras Kazimi are in a bit of a tiff – I suppose – over some extremely detailed and nuanced views concerning the replacement for the now deceased sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha, his brother Ahmed Abu Reesha, now leader of the so-called “awakening” in Anbar.  I won’t dive into Marc’s discussion, and I recommend that both articles be studied by the reader.  I am fond of Kazimi’s analyses and believe him to be a smart and savvy Iraq analyst.  But there is one issue I want briefly to tackle that keeps coming up in articles, discussion threads here and elsewhere, comments here and elsewhere, and verbal debates.  It is the issue of the tribes.

Kazimi clearly is jealous for the idea that the tribes must be considered ad hoc societal building blocks, and are a throwback to medieval times.  In this most recent article he says concerning Ahmed Reesha that his:

… primary point was that the tribes were not a substitute for the state, rather their goal in the Awakening Council was to fortify the institutions of the state. The tribal role aims to nominate young men for the Iraqi Army and the security services, much like a pillar of civil society augmenting the performance of the state. But rather than dwell on military bluster and how they managed to fight Al-Qaeda in Anbar Province, Sheikh Abu Risha was more interested in talking about economics: he wanted the state’s help in creating jobs, in re-invigorating the province’s industries and in re-building what had been destroyed.

This echoes his earlier observation that “Sunnis should be encouraged to throw in their lot with the New Iraq, rather than falling back into the tribal identities of Iraq’s past.”  Kazimi has taken issue with the Multinational Force handling of the tribes, saying that the planning:

 … gives tribes too much authority over the individual, and apparently uses outlandish claims from tribal leaders themselves keen on promoting their own importance. It is one thing to be proud of one’s tribe—I take pride in being a Nakha’i—but it’s a whole different matter to take orders from one’s nominal tribal sheikh. These social structures have been fraying under the myriad forces of sedentarization, urbanization, nation states, sectarianism, land reform and dictatorship to the point where tribal sheikhs are now rendered a quaint, “savage” aristocracy that the men in power—now wearing Western suits—would tolerate and do small favors for.

This is not too dissimilar from the rebuttal of my position of strong advocacy of payment to the “concerned citizens,” including tribal leaders, for community security.  The charge is made that this approach will ultimately lead to the arming of the Sunnis to engage in civil war once U.S. forces begin to stand down in earnest.  I have responded in brief to this, saying:

The argument makes no sense to me that goes thusly: “Since our strategy cannot assure national success and is therefore imperfect, we should not pursue it.” Under this argument, no strategy could ever be pursued under any circumstances. We live in an imperfect world, so our COIN strategy will be imperfect.

Or another way of saying it would be this. Before we had indigenous Sunnis allied with foreigners, all fighting ISF and the U.S. Now we have the foreigners having been essentially defeated, with the Sunnis providing their own security and allied with the U.S. I cannot see any circumstances where we would want to return to the former conditions in lieu of the latter.

The U.S. hasn’t ‘armed’ the Sunnis so that they can now be a destabilizing force for the nation-state any more than they were previously. They were armed before, they are now. They were a destabilizing force to the nation-state before, they are less so now.

I have been entirely pragmatic in my advocacy of tactics, inasmuch as I supported the notion of dealing with the muktars in Fallujah, a throwback to the Saddam era.  Whether tribal leaders, muktars, families or whatever, the issue is one of the best and in fact only remaining viable strategy to be pursued.  If we fail to deal with the societal building block that best suits the ends of the counterinsurgency, then the only remaining option is to lay waste to the country and a people.  This, of course, we will not do.  We must work with the Sunnis, and this option presents itself as the best available at the time.

The notion that the government can be trusted by Sunnis at this juncture seems preposterous.  Kazimi’s advocacy of the administration as the identity for the Sunnis would ring true if Maliki didn’t have a pathetic, boyish devotion to Ali al Sistani, a fear of Moqtada al Sadr and his voting bloc, and trepidation of, combined with brotherhood with, the barbaric Shi’a in Iran.  In short, if the Maliki administration had displayed anything but ineptitude as a governing body, the argument has bite.  But in light of the current situation, it seems to me that no one can blame the Sunnis for reversion to the most basic building block of society.

What disturbs me more than anything else is that the family unit is not the most basic building block rather than the tribe.  Any society which has as its most basic building block anything but the family – whether tribe, city-state, nation – cannot long survive (although I suppose that families – even large ones – need a larger constituency within which to operate, as well as the fact that they might consider their tribe “family”).  Concerning the Sunnis, Kazimi knows that the ball is not in their court.  They have made their wishes known.  They want their tribesmen incorporated into the ISF and police.  They can do no more than they have already done.

The United States managed to find ways to protect the minority: the electoral college, two Senators from every state regardless of population, and the rule of law, among other things.  The governing Shi’a will find ways to do the same for the Sunnis and Kurds, or there will not be peace in Iraq.  The burden is with the administration, not the Sunnis.

” … the evidence indicates that the Iraqi Security Forces will not be able to secure Iraqi borders against conventional military threats in the near term … the ISF will be unable to fulfil their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months,” Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq [1].

“Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade.  For that alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade …”  John Pike, Globalsecurity.org [2].

If only the issues with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) could be summed up by saying that they needed to learn to do calisthenics better or target with their rifles, training the ISF would take several months.  Undoubtedly, this is what the uninitiated think when the administration talks of “standing down when the Iraqis stand up.”  How long can it take to train a soldier?  Even if one includes consideration beyond individual training to unit level tactics such as satellite patrols, squads rushes, flanking maneuvers, room clearing, and so forth, this would add months – maybe a year at the most.

But the almost insurmountable problems with the ISF present themselves under three rubrics.  The first has to do with the nation-state of Iraq, and the degree to which it can function without the sectarian divides that have hindered the progress of the government thus far.  After all, the military is not immune from society’s ills any more than other institutions.

These sectarian divides have actually evolved not only to sectarian taunts but to shooting between various units in the ISF.  In summer of 2006, Kurdish fighters who had joined the ISF were targets of Shi’a members of the ISF.

Early this year, a 700-strong Kurdish Iraqi army battalion, originally from the northern city of Sulaymaniyah, deployed to Balad, 50 miles northwest of Baghdad, to bolster a single Shi’ite battalion mustered from local residents.

The large Sunni minority living around Balad protested the Kurdish unit’s presence, according to U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Coffey, a member of an ad-hoc Military Transition Team that was helping train the Kurdish battalion. Residents including some Iraqi military personnel fired at patrolling Kurdish troops, and on at least one occasion, the Kurds fired back — one of the few recorded incidents of fighting within Iraqi Army ranks.

Yet by the summer of 2007 this had all been turned on this head.  Kurdish fighters were seen as savior for at least one Sunni family.

Bristling with weapons, the men arrived on the back of three pick-up trucks, then surrounded the modest house in the once “mixed” suburb of al-Amel, in western Baghdad. A black-clad gunman jumped down and hammered on the thin metal gate. There were “bad people” on the loose, he shouted to the residents cowering inside. They should pack up and go and live “among your own people—for your own protection”. He and his men would helpfully put their belongings on the back of the trucks. For safety’s sake, the family should go immediately. As this ultimatum was being given to the terrified Sunni Arab family by the Shia gunmen, a group of Iraqi policemen, also Shias, leant on a police car and idly puffed away on their cigarettes, just 50 yards up the street, indifferent to the crime of sectarian cleansing being perpetrated under their noses.

That scene has become all too common in al-Amel—and in many other mixed districts. Since the bombing of the Shias’ shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, in February last year, many mixed and middle-class areas have become either mostly Shia or mostly Sunni, depending on which side of the main road you live.

Yet on the occasion described above the Sunni family managed to sit tight, in the house they had built some 30 years ago in what was then a palm grove. They were saved by the arrival, in the nick of time, of a contingent of about 100 Kurdish soldiers, some of the 3,000-odd former Peshmerga fighters (literally, “those who face death”) who have joined Iraq’s national army and have been controversially deployed in Baghdad as part of the “surge” of troops, mainly American ones, to beef up security in the bloody capital.

As they neared the besieged house, the Kurdish soldiers shot over the heads of the Shia gunmen, identified by locals as members of the Mahdi militia loyal to a Shia firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr, and told them to leave the area. They swiftly complied. There was no American soldier in sight.

The Shi’a within the ISF have increasingly caused problems with the Sunni population, failing to engender trust.  The surge also allowed U.S. troops to provide adequate coverage when this had been missing from earlier in the campaign.  U.S. troops are now also seen as protectors against Shi’a ISF members in areas in which they previously didn’t have the manpower to patrol.

As the Americans patrol the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Azamiyah, people keep turning to them for help. One man asks them to bring in a fuel truck stopped by Iraqi troops. Another complains that Iraqi soldiers just beat up his brother.

The Americans used to be loathed in Azamiyah, a longtime stronghold of insurgents and the last place where Saddam Hussein appeared in public. Now the animosity has given way to a grudging acceptance, because the people of this northern neighborhood want American protection from a foe they hate and fear even more: the mainly Shiite Iraqi army.

“We feel safe when the Americans are around,” says a computer engineer who gave his name only as Abu Fahd. He stopped going to work because of his fear of militiamen at the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry and now makes a living selling clothes.

“When we see the Iraqi army, we just stay home or close our shops.”

The altercations and lack of trust doesn’t just affect the population.  In Western Iraq – Sunni territory between Baghdad and Fallujah, the ISF have had altercations with not only the Sunni “awakening” (e.g., 1920s Brigade), but U.S. forces as well.  Lt. Col. Kurt Pinkerton, a 41-year-old California native who has spent the previous months cultivating his relationship with Abu Azzam (an “awakening” leader), managed to de-escalate just such an encounter in June of 2007 between his friend the Sunni leader and an ISF Brigade.

… the Iraqi brigade, which is predominantly Shiite, was assigned a new area and instructed to stay away from Nasr Wa Salam, Colonel Pinkerton said. But he said he believed that the Iraqi soldiers remain intent on preventing Sunni Arabs, a majority here, from controlling the area. He cites a pattern of aggression by Iraqi troops toward Abu Azzam’s men and other Sunnis, who he believes are often detained for no reason.

Recently, and without warning, Colonel Pinkerton said, 80 Iraqi soldiers in armored vehicles charged out of their sector toward Nasr Wa Salam but were blocked by an American platoon. The Iraqis refused to say where they were going and threatened to drive right through the American soldiers, whom they greatly outnumbered.

Eventually, with Apache helicopter gunships circling overhead and American gunners aiming their weapons at them, the Iraqi soldiers retreated. “It hasn’t come to firing bullets yet,” Colonel Pinkerton said … Pinkerton’s experiences here, he said, have inverted the usual American instincts born of years of hard fighting against Sunni insurgents.

“I could stand among 1,800 Sunnis in Abu Ghraib,” he said, “and feel more comfortable than standing in a formation of Iraqi soldiers.”

The second problematic area has to do with broad, general corruption across the entire ISF.  Earlier in the 2007, “American units that patrolled with Iraqi forces in west and east Baghdad found that Iraqi officers sold new uniforms meant for their troops, and that their soldiers wore plastic shower sandals while manning checkpoints, abused prisoners and solicited bribes to free suspects they’d captured.”

Interviews with U.S. soldiers, and reporting from accompanying them on patrols, made it clear that there are profound problems with the Iraqi troops, ranging from worries that they’re operating on behalf of Shiite death squads to aggravation with their refusal to carry out basic tasks such as wearing flak vests.

In a west Baghdad neighborhood where bodies often turn up beside the road, facedown on the pavement with bullets in their heads, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Brendan Griswold looked on last week as Iraqi soldiers patted down three men at a checkpoint and thumbed through their documents. The Iraqi soldiers found a fake Iraqi passport on one of the men, whom they suspected was Jordanian and possibly an insurgent.

Griswold didn’t stir, determined to let the Iraqis conduct the search on their own.

“I like going out with some of them. But some of the others are hard to control; they run away when things happen,” said the 24-year-old 1st Cavalry Division platoon commander from Leavenworth, Kan.

An Iraqi soldier approached him. “Where do we put them?” he asked.

Griswold pointed to the Iraqi army Humvees in front of him. Iraqi soldiers grabbed the three men, opened the back trunks of their Humvees and started to stuff them inside.

“No, not in there,” Griswold yelled, as he cussed under his breath and walked over to supervise.

After he made sure the detainees were seated in the Humvees, the convoy drove to an Iraqi army intelligence office. The Iraqi troops led the three men into what looked like a darkened closet. Griswold asked the Iraqis not to abuse the detainees, then shook hands and said goodbye. As he left the intelligence building, he asked his interpreter what the Iraqi troops would do to the detainees.

“They were asking them how much they would pay to be released,” the interpreter replied with a grin.

The third problematic area has to do with Middle Eastern culture and what it brings (and doesn’t bring) to its armed forces.  Norvell B. De Atkine has written an analysis entitled “Why Arabs Lose Wars” that should be required reading for every field grade officer who deploys to Iraq, and perhaps Non-commissioned officers as well [3].  The problems are numerous, but De Atkine focuses in on officers and the cultural tendency for over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level.  Stepping down in the chain of command, De Atkine then focuses in on one major difference that separates Western armed forces from the rest of the world.

The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men’s sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military’s effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective.

De Atkine summarizes the perceptive analysis with this sobering comment.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to — the culture of their own armies in their own countries — defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors. Arab officers are not concerned about the welfare and safety of their men. The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.

An interesting and more personal account of the nature of the society and how it impacts the ISF is given to us by David J. Danelo [4].

When jundis sign up to serve in the Iraqi Army, they do not enlist for any length of time. There’s no such thing as a one-, two- or four-year commitment, because it would be both impractical and unenforceable, given the current state of Iraq … An accurate count of Iraqi soldiers is almost impossible. “When they go home on leave, we have no idea how many are going to come back,” says one U.S. military adviser to the Iraqi Army. “Some are kidnapped or killed. Some just run away” … Lieutenant Muhammad: “I Haven’t Been Paid In 10 Months” … Warrant Officer Omar: “No One in My Family Knows I’m in the Army” …

And so the story goes, from corruption, to desertion, to lack of family support for ISF members, to poor or no pay, to sectarian differences, to poor training, to the lack of an NCO corps.  The story is about cultural differences and sectarian divides rather than the ability to perform with a firearm.  The project in which the United States is engaged with respect to the ISF is no less than one of cultural transition – a change of paradigm.

Going forward, it is in the interest of the United States to have an “enduring strategic partnership … one of the follow-up items that both the Iraqis and the Americans need to work on to make sure that we can have a presence there that helps continue to support the region and helps the burgeoning democracy in the heart of the Middle East,” as stated in the White House press release.  But the Iraqi government is prepared to allow the US a long-term troop presence in the country and preferential treatment for American investments in return for a guarantee of security including defence against internal coups.  Due in no small part to the state of the ISF, a strategic relationship is in the interests of the Iraqi people as well.

References:

1. The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, General James L. Jones, USMC (Ret.), Chairman.
2. Experts Say Iraqi Forces Not Ready, Military.com.
3. Why Arabs Lose Wars, Norvell B. De Atkine, Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2
4. Is the Iraqi Army Ready?, Parade.com, David J. Danelo.