SeekerBlog

I continues to surprise me that in all the cacophony of criticism of the Bush plan, none of the critics seem to have studied the plan. Not even the executive summary.

As did president Bush in his Jan 10th speech, the authors of the AEI study that is the genesis of the Bush strategy defined the primary mission as “providing security for the people” [Fred Kagan and General Jack Keane]. See Iraq: A Turning Point for the key resource links. That mission is a major change from the previous Coalition strategy, whose primary mission was standing up the ISF, with the secondary mission of capturing/killing the ex-Saddam forces and Al Qaeda.

Securing the population is Priority #1 of most counterinsurgency bibles. As the Kagan/Keane report stated it:

The recently released military doctrinal manual on counterinsurgency operations declares, “The cornerstone of any [counterinsurgency] effort is establishing security for the civilian populace. Without a secure environment, no permanent reforms can be implemented and disorder spreads.”

Returning to the caption of this post, I ask “what is your definition of success?” and have to answer “The “surge” is successful when Baghdad civilians can have normal lives free of intimidation by assassination; and can thus focus on the economy and the political process of creating the first free government in the Middle East [other than Israel].”

Success does not mean that all the enemy have been eliminated, nor that there is no more terror/intimidation anywhere in Iraq.

It’s really important to focus on what is the mission and thus what is success. For example, on my first read of the Kagan/Keane plan I thought “the bad guys are just going to leave the target neighborhoods.” That in fact has already started. Is it a bad thing if almost all of the enemy leave Baghdad before US and ISF forces even get into position to clear?

No – if the enemy runs it will make it much easier and less bloody to achieve the mission – which is civilian security. Enemy flight would also allow a more rapid achievement of the next phase – securing the balance of Baghdad [recall that the initial phase of the plan is to only attempt to clear & hold the eight neighborhoods where most of the violence and ethnic tension is centered.]

If the “surge” is successful does that mean the Iraq mission is successful? No – it means only that a necessary condition is in place – one that should have been achieved in 2003 but was not.

There are many things that can go wrong with the “surge” plan and with the overall Iraq strategy. The Kagan/Keane presentation slides highlight many of these issues – none of which have I seen even discussed in the Congressional complaining-pit. But what can eliminate any possibility for success is the Pelosi, Reid, Murtha chorus — telling the Iraqis they cannot count on the Coalition and the enemy that they will win if they just hang on.

A reader commented:

This troop surge will simply not work. Going after Sadr’s thugs is a move in the right direction, but announcing they’re going to do it is idiotic. The Mehdi army has already melted into the public. The U.S. will not be able to find them. In six months, Bush will realize that everyone else was right.

I hope I’ve addressed the “will simply not work” above. As to going after Sadr’s thugs/Mehdi army — that is explicitly not a part of the early phases of the Kagan/Keane plan. The shortest explanation for the two-step strategy is to avoid uniting the two main Shia militias against us. The more complete explanation is to reread the published plan documents, or to read or listen to General Keane’s commentary in the original AEI Dec 14th presentation, quoted here:

…Now you may ask me what about Sadr City, and what about the Jaish al Mahdi, the Mahdi army, that is supposedly under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr? What about the Shia Badr corps? What about the Shia militias? Well, I would recommend, and every expert that we spoke to recommended, not going after the Jaish al-Mahdi to begin this struggle. And to do that… and you will find this in the slides which are posted on the website. I should mention if you want to get these slides you can get them off the AEI website.

One of the things that we did was to go carefully through the various groups that we are fighting in Iraq right now and evaluate their goals, their intentions, how they interacted with one another, and paid a lot of attention to the courses of action that they might take in response to the plan that we are laying out here. And I want to take a moment to emphasize that, because I do not think we see that quite often enough, looking at the enemy in a lot of detail and even understanding that there is an enemy.

One of the problems with this war is that we have been reporting it in the passive voice, and we will say, “Bombs went off in Baghdad, killed 53 people.” Well, bombs do not go off. Bombs are placed by an enemy who is trying to do something. And I think we are too easily seduced into seeing the violence in Iraq as an elemental force of nature which is not guided by anything and which is, therefore, so much harder to control. That is not in any way the truth.

There are a number of distinct groups who are conducting violence for their own purposes and those are the groups that we need to deal with. But we must not lump them all together because some of them, they have different purposes from one another. The Shia groups in Iraq largely believe that they are winning, will win and have almost already won. And in fact, a lot of these guys are about ready to do their “victory dance” because they think that we are leaving and that we are on the way out and that they will get the country.

But there is a rivalry between the two principal Shia groups and their armed forces; the Mahdi army and the Badr corps are very interested in conserving their fighters so that they will have leverage against one another in determining who will run the country after the war. For that reason, we think that they are very unlikely to want to seek a full-up confrontation with the US military. Remember what happened to them the last time they did that in Karbala and Najaf in 2004 – we killed a lot of them. They were not able to inflict a lot of damage and they were not able to control territory. That memory seems to be “green” in their minds. These guys are not going to come out and fight us in force if we do not invade their territory, Sadr City.

Obviously, down the road we will have to deal with this. We will have to make sure that these militias are disarmed and reintegrated, but that is not the thing to do right now. What we can do and what we should do is focus on the mixed neighborhoods where the sectarian cleansing is going on, where the violence is intolerable, and secure those. Most of the attacks that you see in Sadr City are not generated by people from Sadr City; they are generated by insurgents who are living in the areas where the other violence is occurring. [Indiscernible] basing in those areas. If we control those areas, a lot of those attacks in Sadr City will not be happening.

Some of the attacks in Sadr City are coming from Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is based up the Diyala River. We will probably have to interdict some of those routes into and out of the city as well, but all of this is a manageable problem without going into Sadr City and uniting two Shia groups that right now are rivals in battle against us; that is the worst thing that we could do right now, in my view. Using this approach allows us to look at the problem in a way that generates realistic force requirements. We looked through here; we identified about 23 of these districts that we think we would need to clear and hold in the first instance.

And we looked at what the force requirements would be generously. We did not try to figure out what is the minimum level with which we might be able to do this. What do we think we need to do – are we going to add more in the plan? And we are going to add a little more over that, and we are going to have a theater reserve as well, because the purpose is not to use just exactly the right amount of force, as Rumsfeld tried to do over the years. The purpose is to go in with enough force that you can be confident that even if things do not break your way, you can make it work out.