Seeker Blog

Michael Gordon coincidentally wrote a NY Times article paralleling some of the points raised in Dave Kilcullen’s Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt. As Gordon is a military journalist, not a counter-insurgency expert like Kilcullen, there is much less depth and breadth. Sill Gordon’s analysis shows that some outsiders are starting to “get it”.

Note that Gordon is not aware of the tribal revolt spreading into the Shia communities of the South.

…This day in early August, however, was to mark a turning point. Just a month earlier, the Americans acquired a new ally: Sheik Ali, a leader of the Dulaimi tribe. In an extraordinary development, a growing number of Sunnis who had sympathized with the insurgency or even fought American forces were now more concerned with removing Al Qaeda from their midst — so much so that they had chosen to ally with their supposed occupiers. Such expedient confederations were emerging across Iraq. They began last year when Sunni tribes and former insurgents in western Anbar Province began cooperating with American forces, cropped up later in the violent Diyala Province and even emerged in the sharply contested Ameriya neighborhood in Baghdad.

The sheik was relatively new to the game. Like many Sunnis, he insisted that Iraq had been more secure under Saddam Hussein. He told me he had no formal military credentials: his father paid a bribe so that he could avoid military service. With his penchant for track suits, the chain-smoking sheik seemed a most unlikely partner for Odom, the cerebral commander of the First Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment. But Ali had a powerful motivation to work with the American troops. Al Qaeda militants had killed his father, kidnapped his cousin, burned his home to the ground and alienated many of his fellow tribesmen by imposing a draconian version of Islamic law that proscribed smoking and required women to shroud themselves in veils.

Ali had already provided valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives and had been recruiting members of his tribe for what was to be a new, American-backed security force. Al Qaeda’s hold on the town had been weakened, and the sheik was one reason why. The trip to Hawr Rajab was to be a further demonstration that the group’s days there were numbered.

Still, a series of broader concerns lingered in the background. Could the Americans’ success with the Sunni tribes in the provinces of Anbar and Diyala be transferred to other areas of the country? Even if the sheik delivered, did he and the Americans share the same long-range vision for Iraq? If they did, would the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad accept the emergence of new Sunni forces just outside the capital? Were the new local Sunni forces the key to stabilizing Iraq — or the prelude to a fiercer civil war?

The American strategy to stabilize Iraq is outlined in a several-inches-thick document called the Joint Campaign Plan. The stated goal is to achieve “localized security” (that is, in Baghdad and other critical parts of Iraq) by the summer of 2008 and to establish “sustainable security” nationwide by the summer of 2009. War critics at home have bemoaned the two-year time line, but meeting the objectives in such a short period would be an extraordinary accomplishment. The mission has been made all the more complex by the fact that the United States’ adversaries in Iraq are well aware that the “surge” of American reinforcements has placed a considerable strain on the Army and Marines and will probably run its course by early 2008. Yet the surge has also provided a chance to forge alliances between American forces and Sunnis who were fed up with Al Qaeda militants and uneasy about the Shiite-dominated government. The additional troops have enabled the United States to push into Sunni areas where American forces had not operated for many months and to stay there rather than sweeping through and leaving.

Once accepted, the recruits would be organized into local neighborhood watches. (American commanders call these Concerned Local Citizens, or C.L.C.’s.) Every member could use the one AK-47 that each Iraqi household is allowed to retain but would not be issued any arms by the American military. The longer-range plan was to run the volunteers through a brief training program and institutionalize the arrangement by securing the Iraqi government’s agreement to transform them into the local police. Recruits would be vetted by the American authorities and the Iraqi government. But having taken up arms against the American-led coalition in the past — or even having American blood on your hands — was not necessarily a barrier.

…The key to squaring the circle is to establish a link between the new Sunni forces in the field and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s risk-averse government. At first, the American effort to work with the tribes in Iraq’s Anbar Province was not much of an issue; Iraqi officials were happy to see them take on Al Qaeda militants and did not seem overly concerned about the role of the tribes in a remote western region that had no valuable resources and few Shiites. But the closer the strategy came to Baghdad, the more anxious the Iraqi government seemed to be about new Sunni groups, and the process has sometimes been a matter of two steps forward, one step back. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province north of Baghdad, where I spent much of June, more than a thousand Sunni locals, including former insurgents, had joined the “Baquba Guardians.” They have not hesitated to challenge Al Qaeda, which, while just one of many insurgent organizations, has been linked to spectacular car bombs and other suicide attacks that have fanned sectarian tensions in Baghdad.

But the project ran into resistance from local Iraqi officials after some Guardians tried to take the next step and join the police. Capt. Ben Richards, the commander of Bronco Troop, First Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, who was the first American officer to organize Sunnis in Baquba, told me that the Shiite provincial police chief had used ammunition as a means of political control. When the province received a large quantity of ammunition from the Interior Ministry, the police chief distributed 40,000 rounds to the predominantly Shiite police force in the nearby town of Khalis. Much of it is believed to have found its way to the Shiite Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr. Richards said the Sunni police in eastern Baquba had received nothing.

To oversee the engagement process, the Maliki government recently established a nine-member committee for national reconciliation. The panel is headed by Safa al-Sheik, the deputy national security adviser and a former Air Force engineer during Hussein’s rule; it includes Bassima al-Jaidri, a Maliki aide with a reputation for sectarianism, along with security and intelligence officials. When I met with Safa in his office in Hussein’s old Military Industrialization Ministry, he insisted that the reconciliation panel had made progress in the month it had been in existence. American officials say it has approved 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as policemen in the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. Still, Safa acknowledged that many Iraqis are worried that the Americans might be inadvertently establishing new Sunni militias that would rise up against the authorities in Baghdad.

Newton, the British officer who was a leader of the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, had the job of bringing the Iraqi government along. “We don’t dress it up,” he told me. “Insurgent groups fear that if they cooperate, they will be targeted by the government of Iraq, and the government fears that the insurgent groups will turn on them after Al Qaeda has been dealt with. So that is the risk. We are not minimizing it. The best way to deal with that risk is to hook these groups close to you. By doing that, you bring them under a degree of control. You have the opportunity to learn how they work, which amounts to an insurance policy of future reasonable behavior.

“In Northern Ireland, reconciliation occurred in 1998, but we probably missed at least two earlier opportunities to resolve that conflict,” Newton added. “In Iraq, there is huge risk, and various people argue against taking those risks. What we are trying to explain to the government of Iraq is that this is one of those moments in a military campaign that it is sometimes difficult to realize it when you see it.”

…The political gridlock at the national level had made the recruiting and organizing of Sunni groups around Iraq all the more important. But what would happen once bands of concerned citizens were organized, trained and equipped? If the Iraqi government embraced the strategy, the effort to work with tribal leaders and local insurgents could lead to a broader political reconciliation. “At the local and national level, it could provide impetus to force some reconciliation,” Odom observed. “In other words, the Sunnis could come to have some sort of legitimacy through us.”