-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 22, 2007 5:50:54 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: What's the Strategy Behind the "Surge"? Sorry, We Lied
(AGAIN)
Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy
By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers, April 19, 2007
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17104704.htm
WASHINGTON - Military planners have abandoned the idea that
standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start
coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to
defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush
administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority,
officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary
Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding
another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater
U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq
will undertake.
But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi
troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials
said they know of no new training resources that have been included
in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The
officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they
aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense
Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi
troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.
In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon
decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army
tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid
speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David
Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into
2008.
U.S. officials don't say that the training formula - championed by
Gen. John Abizaid when he was the commander of U.S. forces in the
Middle East and by Gen. George Casey when he was the top U.S.
general in Iraq - was doomed from the start. But they said that
rising sectarian violence and the inability of Prime Minister Nouri
al Maliki to unite the country changed the conditions. They say
they now must establish security while training Iraqi forces
because ultimately, "they are our ticket out of Iraq," as one
senior Pentagon official put it.
Casey's "mandate was transition. General Petraeus' mandate is
security. It is a change based on conditions. Certain conditions
have to be met for the transition to be successful. Security is
part of that. And General Petraeus recognizes that," said Brig.
Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in charge
of supporting trained Iraqi forces.
"I think it is too much to expect that we were going to start from
scratch ... in an environment that featured a rising sectarian
struggle and lack of progress with the government," said a senior
Pentagon official. "The conditions had sufficiently changed that
the Abizaid/Casey approach alone wasn't going to be sufficient."
Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who's in charge of training Iraqi troops,
said in February that he hoped that Iraqi troops would be able to
lead by December. "At the tactical level, I do believe by the end
of the year, the conditions should be set that they are
increasingly taking responsibility for the combat operations,"
Dempsey told NBC News.
Maj. Gen. Doug Lute, the director of operations at U.S. Central
Command, which oversees military activities in the Middle East,
said that during the troop increase, U.S. officers will be trying
to determine how ready Iraqi forces are to assume control.
"We are looking for indicators where we can assess the extent to
which we are fighting alongside Iraqi security forces, not as a
replacement to them," he said. Those signs will include "things
like the number of U.S.-only missions, the number of combined U.S.-
Iraqi missions, the number where Iraqis are in the lead, the number
of Joint Security Stations set up," he said.
That's a far cry from the optimistic assessments U.S. commanders
offered throughout 2006 about the impact of training Iraqis.
President Bush first announced the training strategy in the summer
of 2005.
"Our strategy can be summed up this way," Bush said. "As the Iraqis
stand up, we will stand down."
Military leaders in Baghdad planned to train 325,000 Iraqi security
forces. Once that was accomplished, those forces were to take
control. Casey created military transition teams that would live
side by side with their Iraqi counterparts to help them apply their
training to real-world situations.
Throughout 2006, Casey and top Bush administration leaders touted
the training as a success, asserting that eight of Iraq's 10
divisions had taken the lead in confronting insurgents.
But U.S. forces complained that the Iraqi forces weren't getting
the support from their government and that Iraqi military
commanders, many who worked under Saddam Hussein, weren't as
willing to embrace their tactics. Among everyday Iraqis, some said
they didn't trust their forces, saying they were sectarian and
easily susceptible to corruption.
Most important, insurgents and militiamen had infiltrated the
forces, using their power to carry out sectarian attacks.
In nearly every area where Iraqi forces were given control, the
security situation rapidly deteriorated. The exceptions were areas
dominated largely by one sect and policed by members of that sect.
In the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, which Bush celebrated last
year as an example of success, suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents
set off a bomb last month that killed as many as 150 people, the
largest single bombing attack of the war. Shiite Muslim mobs,
including some police officers, pulled Sunnis from their homes and
executed dozens afterward. U.S. troops were dispatched to restore
order.
Earlier this month, U.S. forces engaged in heavy fighting in the
southern city of Diwaniyah after Iraqi forces, who'd been given
control of the region in January 2006, lost control of the city.
U.S. officials said they once believed that if they empowered their
Iraqi counterparts, they'd take the lead and do a better job of
curtailing the violence. But they concede that's no longer their
operating principle.
Pentagon officials won't say how many U.S. troops are engaged in
training, though they said that the number of teams assigned to
work alongside trained Iraqi troops hasn't changed.
Military officials say there's no doubt that the November U.S.
elections, which gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress,
helped push training down the priority list. The elections, they
said, made it clear that voters didn't have the patience to wait
for Iraqis to take the lead.
"To the extent we are losing the American public, we were losing"
in the transition approach, said a senior military commander in
Washington.
Military analysts cite a number of reasons that the training
program didn't work.
"The goal was to put the Iraqis in charge. The problem is we didn't
know how to do it and we underestimated the insurgency," said
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington.
Said Paul Hughes of the U.S. Institute for Peace: "In our initial
efforts to hand security missions over to Iraqi forces, we took the
training wheels off too early - and the bike fell over."
Military officials now measure success by whether the troops are
curbing violence, not by the number of Iraqi troops trained.
Many officials are vague about when the U.S. will know when troops
can begin to return home. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. is trying to buy "time for the Iraqi
government to provide the good governance and the economic activity
that's required."
One State Department official, who also asked not to be named
because of the sensitivity of the subject, expressed the same
sentiment in blunter terms. "Our strategy now is to basically hold
on and wait for the Iraqis to do something," he said.
-------------
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/troop-surge-may-be-extended-
in-iraq/20070421153209990001
If the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does manage to
achieve the political milestones demanded by Washington***, then
the U.S. military probably will be told to sustain the troop
buildup much longer than originally foreseen -- possibly well into
2008. Thus the early planning for keeping it up beyond late summer.
More than half of the extra 21,500 combat troops designated for
Baghdad duty have arrived; the rest are due by June. Already it is
evident that putting them in the most hotly contested parts of the
capital is taking a toll. An average of 22 U.S. troops have died
per week in April, the highest rate so far this year.
"This is certainly a price that we're paying for this increased
security," Adm. William Fallon, the senior U.S. commander in the
Middle East, told a House committee Wednesday. He also said the
United States does not have "a ghost of a chance" of success in
Iraq unless it can create "stability and security."
The idea of the troop increase, originally billed by the
administration as a temporary "surge," is not to defeat the
insurgency. That is not thought possible in the near term. The
purpose is to contain the violence - in particular, the sect-on-
sect killings in Baghdad - long enough to create an environment in
which Iraqi political leaders can move toward conciliation and
ordinary Iraqis are persuaded of a viable future.
...
When Bush announced the troop boost in January, administration
officials pointedly left unclear how long the extra troops would
remain in Iraq. Some, including Gates, suggested that troop levels
could be reduced to the previous standard of about 135,000 as early
as September - assuming the addition of 21,500 combat troops and
roughly 8,000 support troops this spring proved to be an
overwhelming success or a clear-cut failure.
Three months later, with troops still flowing into Baghdad, the
Pentagon is beginning to take steps that suggests it expects to
maintain higher troop levels into 2008 and beyond, yet officials
still won't say whether the increase is intended as a short-term
move. Some believe the lack of clarity is a mistake because it adds
to the strain on troops and their families and it may lessen the
psychological pressure on the belligerents.
Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, whose January
report on changing the U.S. military strategy in Iraq was largely
adopted as part of Bush's new approach to the war, said in an
interview Thursday that it appears the administration believes it
will have to sustain the troop buildup much longer.
"They seem to be taking the steps that would make it possible to
sustain it for longer, which is good," Kagan said. "But they seem
to be reluctant to commit to a willingness to do that, which I
think is unfortunate."
Kagan says the troops, the Iraqi government and the insurgents all
ought to be convinced that U.S. forces will keep up the pressure,
particularly in the most contested neighborhoods in Baghdad, for at
least another year.
"If I were running the show I would say, 'Look, everyone should
assume that we're going to sustain this through 2008 - the Iraqis
should assume that, too - and if we can turn it off sooner, then
everyone would be happy," Kagan said.
Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, takes a
similar view. In an interview earlier this month he pondered the
thought process of a U.S. commander in Iraq evaluating the way
ahead. "In six months, if it's working, is he going to say, 'OK, it
worked, now you guys can go home'?" Conway thinks there is a
reasonable chance for success, and for planning purposes he is
preparing to sustain the troop buildup.
The Marines added about 4,000 to their contingent in western Anbar
province, the focal point of the Sunni Arab insurgency. In March
the Marines made a little-noticed move that gives them the
flexibility to continue at the higher rate in Iraq at least into
2008. They extended the tours of Marines in Okinawa, Japan, which
freed up other Marine units in the United States to deploy to Iraq
later this year instead of Okinawa.
Also, the Pentagon announced earlier this month that normal tours
of duty in Iraq will be 15 months instead of 12 months. Gates said
that gives the military the capability to maintain the higher troop
levels in Iraq until next spring.
------------------
***"political milestones demanded by Washington"
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?
type=worldNews&storyID=2007-04-20T202631Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-294
977-3.xml
Washington, which has 146,000 troops in Iraq, is putting more
pressure on Maliki's fractious government to speed up a law on
sharing Iraq's oil wealth and rolling back a ban on members of
Saddam Hussein's Baath party from office.
Gates said in his meeting with Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-
Maliki he expressed the hope that parliament "will not recess for
the summer without passing laws on hydrocarbons, debaathification,
provincial elections and other measures".
"These measures will not fix all the problems in Iraq, but they
will manifest the will of the entire government of Iraq to be a
government for all of the people in Iraq in the future," he said.
A spokesman for the speaker of Iraq's parliament said lawmakers
were due to go on summer recess in July and August.
Tensions between Shi'ites and Sunnis remain high since the bombing
of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 unleashed a wave of
violence that has killed tens of thousands. More have fled their
homes.
OIL LAW
U.S. military commanders have repeatedly said there is no military
solution to the violence and that the crackdown in Baghdad is aimed
only at giving Iraq's government breathing space to speed up
national reconciliation.
But analysts say the government has so far failed to match some
early gains in the crackdown with political progress and that the
international community must play a greater role.
Iraq's cabinet will present the oil law to parliament next week,
but it faces opposition from Iraq's oil-rich northern Kurdistan
region which says some details are unconstitutional.
The law is seen as vital for Iraq to attract investment from
foreign firms to boost it's oil output and rebuild its economy.
Maliki's government has also agreed on a plan to allow thousands of
former members of Saddam's party to return to public life, but a
bill has not yet gone to parliament and there is likely to be
fierce opposition to it.
On his first trip to Iraq since the U.S.-backed security crackdown
was launched in February, Gates warned Iraq's leaders that
America's patience was wearing thin.
More than 3,300 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the U.S.
invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. President George W. Bush is under
growing pressure at home to set a timetable for a U.S. troop
withdrawal, something he has so far rejected outright.
Gates arrived in Iraq a day after suspected Sunni al Qaeda
militants killed 200 people on Wednesday in the worst violence
since the Baghdad security plan was launched.
"What seems clear to me is that al Qaeda has declared war on all of
Iraq," he said.
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