Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Philadelphia Inquirer
July 7, 2008 By Benjamin E. Schwartz
The last of the five "surge" brigades are scheduled to redeploy from Iraq this month. The counterinsurgency strategy launched in 2007 has coincided with a dramatic decrease in violence, the strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and most recently, the disbandment of the Mahdi Army.
A year ago, the most compelling critique of the surge was that even with the additional brigades the American military didn't have enough troops to implement a strategy aimed at protecting Iraq's major population centers. While counterintuitive, the success of the surge doesn't invalidate this critique.
The surge was only one of three major developments that created the conditions for the recent progress. Indeed, the chief lesson of the last year is not that the surge is a universal model for successful counterinsurgency, but rather that in war, timing is everything.
Gen. David H. Petraeus and his teams abandoned a failing strategy when they took charge of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They broke with the previous campaign plan that set the primary objective of American forces as "transitioning to Iraqi self-reliance" and made protecting the population the coalition's central mission.
The military couldn't stabilize Iraq by operating out of large bases isolated from the Iraqi population, while militias offered the only source of protection for average citizens. Deploying the surge brigades into Baghdad where they could interact with the population allowed the coalition to cultivate lasting relationships with Iraqi informants. In turn, American soldiers gained the intelligence needed to effectively target the insurgency.
The second crucial development had very little to do with American initiatives and everything to do with inter-Sunni politics. As brilliantly documented by David Kilcullen in Autonomy of a Tribal Revolt, al-Qaeda's brutality, its foreign leadership, and its recklessness wounded the pride, offended the honor, and emptied the pockets of the inhabitants of Anbar province. This sparked the "Anbar Awakening" that fractured the Sunni insurgency and prompted thousands of "volunteers" to ally with American forces.
When 10,000 Iraqis ally with coalition forces this creates an effective net gain of 20,000 because it takes 10,000 from the ranks of the insurgency. In contrast, when America deploys 10,000 U.S. troops it effectively gains less than half that number because the majority of the troops are needed to perform force protection and logistical tasks.
The ratio between U.S. forces and the Iraqi population that Americans were charged with protecting was never very high (in fact the architects of the surge requested more troops than were actually deployed), but the schism within the Sunni community created a tremendous multiplier effect.
The third development that set the stage for progress was one that the American military actively resisted - the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad's Sunni population.
It is important to recall that in 2003 the dominant forces in Iraq's Sunni Arab community launched a war aimed at restoring a Sunni dictatorship. For decades Sunni supremacists had pacified "uppity" Shiites and Kurds through murder and intimidation. This is how a small minority dominated a majority. In the post-Hussein era, car bombs were their principal instrument: murder a few Shiites and the rest would submit.
But in 2005, after two years of constant massacres against Shiite weddings, funerals, schools, large numbers of Shia joined the Mahdi Army and their agents infiltrated the Ministry of the Interior. When the Samara mosque was bombed in 2006, they responded with a vengeance. Only after the Mahdi Army gave Baghdad's Sunnis the choice between death and expulsion did the dominant forces in that community embrace American forces and come to an accommodation with the democratic, and demographic, reality of the new Iraqi state.
Placing the surge in the context of these internal Iraqi developments highlights the critical importance of timing. What if the surge had been implemented prior to the Anbar Awakening and the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad? Would the additional five brigades have introduced enough troops to protect the population, cultivate informants, and target insurgents at a time when the vast majority of Sunnis saw America as their primary enemy?
If the answer is "no," then we must recognize that internal developments, of which America played little role, proved to be as decisive as the change in strategy.
This conclusion in no way diminishes the accomplishments of America's military under Petraeus, but it does caution against accepting the surge as a model of success. The lesson America should take to other theaters of war, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan, is not that additional troops offer a panacea, but that native populations - rather than solely American soldiers and strategists - play a decisive role in shaping events.
Benjamin E. Schwartz is a Presidential Management Fellow who was assigned to the State Department.
July 7, 2008 By Benjamin E. Schwartz
The last of the five "surge" brigades are scheduled to redeploy from Iraq this month. The counterinsurgency strategy launched in 2007 has coincided with a dramatic decrease in violence, the strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and most recently, the disbandment of the Mahdi Army.
A year ago, the most compelling critique of the surge was that even with the additional brigades the American military didn't have enough troops to implement a strategy aimed at protecting Iraq's major population centers. While counterintuitive, the success of the surge doesn't invalidate this critique.
The surge was only one of three major developments that created the conditions for the recent progress. Indeed, the chief lesson of the last year is not that the surge is a universal model for successful counterinsurgency, but rather that in war, timing is everything.
Gen. David H. Petraeus and his teams abandoned a failing strategy when they took charge of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They broke with the previous campaign plan that set the primary objective of American forces as "transitioning to Iraqi self-reliance" and made protecting the population the coalition's central mission.
The military couldn't stabilize Iraq by operating out of large bases isolated from the Iraqi population, while militias offered the only source of protection for average citizens. Deploying the surge brigades into Baghdad where they could interact with the population allowed the coalition to cultivate lasting relationships with Iraqi informants. In turn, American soldiers gained the intelligence needed to effectively target the insurgency.
The second crucial development had very little to do with American initiatives and everything to do with inter-Sunni politics. As brilliantly documented by David Kilcullen in Autonomy of a Tribal Revolt, al-Qaeda's brutality, its foreign leadership, and its recklessness wounded the pride, offended the honor, and emptied the pockets of the inhabitants of Anbar province. This sparked the "Anbar Awakening" that fractured the Sunni insurgency and prompted thousands of "volunteers" to ally with American forces.
When 10,000 Iraqis ally with coalition forces this creates an effective net gain of 20,000 because it takes 10,000 from the ranks of the insurgency. In contrast, when America deploys 10,000 U.S. troops it effectively gains less than half that number because the majority of the troops are needed to perform force protection and logistical tasks.
The ratio between U.S. forces and the Iraqi population that Americans were charged with protecting was never very high (in fact the architects of the surge requested more troops than were actually deployed), but the schism within the Sunni community created a tremendous multiplier effect.
The third development that set the stage for progress was one that the American military actively resisted - the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad's Sunni population.
It is important to recall that in 2003 the dominant forces in Iraq's Sunni Arab community launched a war aimed at restoring a Sunni dictatorship. For decades Sunni supremacists had pacified "uppity" Shiites and Kurds through murder and intimidation. This is how a small minority dominated a majority. In the post-Hussein era, car bombs were their principal instrument: murder a few Shiites and the rest would submit.
But in 2005, after two years of constant massacres against Shiite weddings, funerals, schools, large numbers of Shia joined the Mahdi Army and their agents infiltrated the Ministry of the Interior. When the Samara mosque was bombed in 2006, they responded with a vengeance. Only after the Mahdi Army gave Baghdad's Sunnis the choice between death and expulsion did the dominant forces in that community embrace American forces and come to an accommodation with the democratic, and demographic, reality of the new Iraqi state.
Placing the surge in the context of these internal Iraqi developments highlights the critical importance of timing. What if the surge had been implemented prior to the Anbar Awakening and the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad? Would the additional five brigades have introduced enough troops to protect the population, cultivate informants, and target insurgents at a time when the vast majority of Sunnis saw America as their primary enemy?
If the answer is "no," then we must recognize that internal developments, of which America played little role, proved to be as decisive as the change in strategy.
This conclusion in no way diminishes the accomplishments of America's military under Petraeus, but it does caution against accepting the surge as a model of success. The lesson America should take to other theaters of war, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan, is not that additional troops offer a panacea, but that native populations - rather than solely American soldiers and strategists - play a decisive role in shaping events.
Benjamin E. Schwartz is a Presidential Management Fellow who was assigned to the State Department.