Iraq: The Next Phase

Originally posted by Woofer

Long before the politicians or the press in this country noticed the king had on no clothes, news outlets in European and Asian countries and the populace of the vast majority of those countries called BS on the war of so called pre emption, we were just slow to react because of the Bushies wrapping themselves in the flag.

<b>Which nation of Europe or Asia do you want the US to emulate over the next hundred years?</b>

There is nothing more disgusting than this sort of fascism. There is nothing opportunistic about speaking the truth, and our country would be far worse off if we all meekly do what our leaders tell us to do.

<b>Our fascist senate approved military action. Speaking the truth is one thing, speaking it opportunistically so as to be self-serving is quite another thing entirely.</b>

Are Hagel and McCain traitors for not toeing the company line?


<b>I didn't call anyone a traitor. I criticized the opportunists. Remember, no one is above criticism.</b>

We would have been better off if the Bushies had gotten off their high horse on Day 1 of the occupation and learned from the reality on the ground and not the *truth* in their minds.

<b>Are you saying we should have cut and run on Day 1 of the Occupation? They have a direct line to the military commanders on the ground; you have CNN.</b>

 

Let's put it this way: I have less of a problem with things that are supposed to going on behind the scenes than I do with things that are going on in front of the cameras.


So I presume you had a major, major problem with Bush using taxpayer dollars to fly onto a carrier to proclaim victory for the cameras? An event that was choreographed in every way by Rove and company for political reasons? That goes well beyond using Iraq for political opportunism - that goes to spending a significant number of your tax dollars to do it.

 

Not really; that is presidential. Every president before and into the future will do things like that.

There is an adjective "presidential" which pertains to bearing and dignity. It's part of the job. Like it or not.

There is no adjective "senatorial."

 

BTW, there was a victory to be celebrated.

And thus began the occupation of Saddam-ville.

 

Originally posted by giddyup

<b>Which nation of Europe or Asia do you want the US to emulate over the next hundred years?</b>

There are plenty of good and bad things one could say about every country. In this one particular example we should strive to have the press as an independent monitor of government, not its cheerleader.

<b>Our fascist senate approved military action. Speaking the truth is one thing, speaking it opportunistically so as to be self-serving is quite another thing entirely.</b>
In this particular case and not the senate vote, dissent is an action, opportunism is a motive, to suppress an action by impugning a motive is motivation of the Bushies : "why is the press only reporting bad news..."

Are Hagel and McCain traitors for not toeing the company line?

<b>I didn't call anyone a traitor. I criticized the opportunists. Remember, no one is above criticism.</b>
Right on, sorry for bagging you with some of the more flamethrowing denizens of the bbs.

We would have been better off if the Bushies had gotten off their high horse on Day 1 of the occupation and learned from the reality on the ground and not the *truth* in their minds.

<b>Are you saying we should have cut and run on Day 1 of the Occupation? They have a direct line to the military commanders on the ground; you have CNN.</b> [/B]
I am saying they should have adapted and put everything we had in there to put a stop to the *insurrection* instead of saying "this is what freedom looks like" when the Iraq looters destroyed much of the infrastructure in the first couple of weeks during and after "mission accomplished." The reason they did not is that Rumsfeld happens to be on a mission to prove the United States Army is too big and therefore, the US Army will conquer Iraq with a very small force compared to traditional estimates for invasion. Then they believed their own hype that the Iraqis would accept us with open arms and did not pay attention to the truth on the ground that we needed a lot more boots on the ground to make the place secure. The first pro consul of Iraq screwed things up further by making the rest of the Iraqi Army unemployed, against the advice of people who had actually done
a reconstruction before, feeding the rebellion with a ton of guys with no money and lots of time and experience with weapons on the street.

 

Another one of those words that never gets used; that was my real message. I know you can turn just about any noun into an adjective.

 

Not really; that is presidential. Every president before and into the future will do things like that.

There is an adjective "presidential" which pertains to bearing and dignity. It's part of the job. Like it or not.

There is no adjective "senatorial."

I see. So you think the President should be able to politicize a war for his own personal benefit, but no one else should. Wonderful logic there.

 

No president in history has stopped an aircraft carrier from docking long enough for the CInC to fly aboard and deliver a political rally.

What makes it worse is that he dressed up in the uniform he eschewed while he left town during his "deployment" at Ellington. He pretended to be a good military man and disgraced the memories of the soldiers who HAVE gone to war and fought for our country.

If Clinton had tried something similar, y'all would have been up in arms, but for Bush, everything is hunky-dory.

 

That's not what I said. I said that I knew he would and I criticized political opportunists at a time when things are rough. American first.

 

That's not what I said. I said that I knew he would and I criticized political opportunists at a time when things are rough. American first.

OK, so let me get this straight.

You think it's OK for a President to start a war that is questionable at best, and then when things unsurprisingly go wrong, no one should say anything?

So basically, Presidents should have a free pass to do anything, and as long as it puts Americans in danger, no one should criticize it because that wouldn't be "putting Americans first".

WTF?

 

I don't agree with your premise that the war is questionable "at best."

I don't even agree with your premise that things have gone "wrong." This is war. There is opposition. It's not a Hollywood script. Setbacks are to be expected. Adjustments will have to be made.

Where do you get the notion that "as long as it puts Americans in danger, no one should criticize it because that wouldn't be 'putting Americans first?'"

"American first" is not the same as "putting Americans first."

All I've said is that I think it is in poor taste (and maybe even more serious than that) to be politicking against a challenging situation that is underway. There are no do-overs. I don't think it is traitorous but I don't particularly think it is patriotic either.

American political freedom is not essentially about griping. It's about using our system of free elections to set a course for the nation and to have your voice heard at election time.

 

I don't agree with your premise that the war is questionable "at best."

I don't even agree with your premise that things have gone "wrong."

When every intelligence and policy analysis service says there were plenty of questions that were ignored; when the administration itself says some of their assumptions were wrong, how do you argue it was not questionable?

The administration itself has also said things have not gone as expected and that mistakes were made. So yes, things have gone wrong.

All I've said is that I think it is in poor taste (and maybe even more serious than that) to be politicking against a challenging situation that is underway. There are no do-overs. I don't think it is traitorous but I don't particularly think it is patriotic either.


In other words, it's not patriotic to speak your convictions and actually argue against the war. That's where I get ...

<I>Where do you get the notion that "as long as it puts Americans in danger, no one should criticize it because that wouldn't be 'putting Americans first?'"
</I>

<B>"American first" is not the same as "putting Americans first."
</B>

What does "American first" even mean? The grammar makes no sense. I assumed you forgot an "s".

American political freedom is not essentially about griping. It's about using our system of free elections to set a course for the nation and to have your voice heard at election time.

And what about discourse between elections? Why should one party (the President) be able to promote one biased side of the war ("mission accomplished") while the other side cannot make the counterargument? How does that, in any way, come up with an honest discourse of the issues?

 

The next ten years - not quite the cakewalk the American Enterprise Institute was touting...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1113/p01s03-woiq.html
History's lessons call for stamina

The White House is urging Bremer to a quicker handover, but past cases suggest a long stay.

By Ann Scott Tyson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Guerrilla wars of the last half century cast a sobering light on the US-led occupation of Iraq: Insurgents often win - and when they do not, quelling them can take years of hard effort.
After a spate of helicopter downings and other attacks that signify an intensifying Iraqi insurgency, military strategists say a long-term US presence is all the more vital to bolstering fledgling Iraqi security forces and bringing hope of a viable representative government.


In nondescript offices inside the Pentagon, military planners are already projecting troop deployments to Iraq as far out as 10 years.

But a looming US election and public concern over casualties are pressuring President Bush to speed the transfer of power to Iraqis. The Pentagon has outlined a possible troop drawdown next year. Meanwhile, Iraq administrator Paul Bremer held urgent meetings here this week, amid intelligence reports that Iraqi support for the resistance may grow.

Military experts warn that a premature hand- -off to Iraqis could leave a power void, undermining Mr. Bush's stated goal of building a democratic, antiterrorist Iraq as an example for the entire Middle East.

"By staying, the United States will face a protracted insurgency," explains Steven Metz, director of research at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pa. "But by withdrawing forces before the new Iraq is able to stand on its own, the ultimate strategic objective - a unified, stable Iraq that does not threaten its neighbors and does not support international terrorism - will not be met."

"Iraqis will not be ready for several years to run a stable nation on their own," he predicts. Currently the US-led coalition includes about 130,000 US troops, 25,000 other foreign troops, and 130,000 Iraqi security forces, according to the Pentagon. But some US military officials question whether the number of Iraqis is that high, and say they lack adequate training (see below).

What history teaches

Lessons from past counter-insurgency campaigns - from the 1950s Malayan Emergency to Vietnam - suggest that success will require a broad civil-military strategy that emphasizes political and economic development and patient police work as much as infantry kicking in doors and hunting down guerrillas.

Past guerrilla wars also underscore a common mistake that experts say was repeated in Iraq: the failure of governing authorities to grasp the complexity and scope of the challenge early on.

"The insurgency in Iraq that is killing American soldiers daily has been incorrectly and simplistically characterized by US President George Bush's administration," wrote Ahmed Hashim, a professor of strategic studies at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I., in July.

That's not to say Iraq is Vietnam redux. Most Iraqis are glad Saddam Hussein's regime is over, for example, and the rate of US casaulties is far lower.

But the danger of misreading the situation is real nonetheless.

US officials initially depicted attacks on American forces as the work of a handful of "bitter-ender" supporters of the Saddam Hussein regime. Viewing the Iraqi opposition as a monolith reflected "pervasive cultural ignorance and arrogance" by the administration, wrote Mr. Hashim.

A dozen or more groups are fighting the US-led coalition in Iraq, according to Hashim and other experts. These include regime loyalists, nationalists, and Islamist forces - all with their own motivations, levels of organization, and skills. Some fight to regain lost power, others for revenge. Some Iraqis heed the radical call of jihad, as do small groups of fighters flowing in from Syria and Lebanon. Others voice a visceral objection to foreign occupation familiar to Arabs and evidenced by the history of wars in Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

'Multiheaded snake'

"The insurgency is like a multi-headed snake, unable to decide on a single course but difficult to kill," according to Metz.

Too weak to hold territory or create an alternative government, insurgents in Iraq are emphasizing terrorist-style strikes aimed at inflicting a steady stream of casualties and dealing a psychological blow to the US-led coalition and its Iraqi allies.

Using hit-and-run tactics that make them less vulnerable to overwhelming US firepower, they are launching ever bolder, more sophisticated attacks with low-tech weapons. Guerrillas in Iraq recently set off a roadside explosive device that disabled an Abrams tank, killing two soldiers inside. They are suspected of using a rocket-propelled grenade to shoot down a Black Hawk helicopter. Using modern communications, insurgents show signs of nationwide reach and networked control, US officials say.

Meanwhile, the US military has lost some of the high-tech edge it enjoyed in combat against conventional Iraqi forces, military experts say. For example, the pilotless drones that tracked Iraqi forces during the invasion are "far less capable" in covering "small enemy forces over large geographic areas," according to an Army report released last month. "Daily mortar and rocket attacks on bases and convoys became virtually undetectable to the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]," it said.

Guerrilla attacks also aim to provoke a harsh US military response that could further alienate Iraqi civilians. In recent days, US forces have dropped bombs and lobbed mortars in a show of force to intimidate Hussein loyalists and those who abet them. But this "get-tough" stance could also inflame anti-US sentiment.

"The population is always caught between the government and the guerrillas, and until they can perceive who will win, they will not help," says Jack Cann, associate professor of National Security Studies at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Va.

Lessons from past wars suggest that overcoming popular fear and resentment is vital to gaining the intelligence to uproot guerrilla activity. Combined with political and economic incentives, this requires manpower to mingle with and protect the population.

Communication key

"Counterinsurgency doesn't require tanks. It's a matter of communication. You need a knowledgeable soldier in the street. He's got to be trained in the local culture, able to intimidate but not necessarily threatening," says Professor Cann. He advocates an expansion of the military's civil affairs personnel.

Such training is not a new idea. In the 1950s, the British military created a jungle training center in Johore to prepare its troops to fight ethnic Chinese guerrillas in Malaya - a 13-year campaign that is now upheld as one model of successful counterinsurgency.

In Vietnam, in contrast, the US military never took in-theater indoctrination seriously - part of a larger failure to adapt basic Army methods for insurgency warfare, Cann says. One exception was the Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP), in which Marine rifle squads joined with South Vietnamese platoons to live in and protect villages, with some success. Still, US troops lack their counterparts' language skills and familiarity with Iraq's neighborhoods - which makes a competent Iraqi security force that respects civil rights essential.

"That's one lesson from history, from Malaya, from Peru against the Shining Path.... To deal effectively with any insurgency, you've got to have a capable and large police or paramilitary force that can work with the local population," says Bill Rosenau, a conflict expert at RAND.

Are there really 130,000 Iraqis helping?

In the Bush administration's push to rapidly transfer responsibility for Iraq's security to Iraqis, some are raising the question: Where are all the Iraqi security troops coming from?

Indeed, the ballooning of Iraqi forces, as counted by the Pentagon, is striking.

In a media roundtable on Sept. 5 at Camp Victory, Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top American civilian in Iraq told reporters that "it's realistic to think that in a year we could have 90,000 to 100,000 Iraqis involved in their defense." Later, he added, "I would guess by Sept. 1 next year, we should be somewhere in the 90,000 to 100,000 [range]."

On Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Richard Myers announced during a television interview that the number of Iraqi forces had just reached 131,000, surpassing the number of US troops. That is up from the Pentagon's estimate of 55,000 Iraqis in early September.

"Today, there are more Iraqis in the coalition, if you will, than any other force. They exceed the US forces in Iraq today by about several thousand. There are 131,000 Iraqis in the various police forces and facilities protection service, civil defense corps, border guards, and so forth. They're the largest part, if you will, of the coalition. And we just achieved that here today."

How has the number expanded so dramatically, just two months after Mr. Bremer offered a far slower growth in Iraqi forces? One US military source had this blunt response: "The administration is padding numbers."

Even if the numbers are accurate, US military officers and experts say the Iraqi recruits are receiving only rudimentary training and equipment and are often ineffective as a result.

During the September press conference, US Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commands coalition ground forces in Iraq, said the Iraqi recruits would not replace US troops. "That will be additive for the coalition," he said.

More recently, however, Pentagon officials have suggested that the growth in Iraqi security forces could allow for a draw-down of American troops in Iraq.

 

I was listening to On The Media today and heard a reference to this film, and the Pentagon trying to learn something from it:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/

The Pentagon's Film Festival
A primer for The Battle of Algiers.
By Charles Paul Freund
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 4:59 PM PT



Will The Battle of Algiers teach us anything?

A column in the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Pentagon's special operations chiefs have decided to screen The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic film of urban terrorist insurgency, for Pentagon employees on Aug. 27. The decision to show Algiers, David Ignatius writes, is "one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq." He even quotes from a Pentagon flier about the movie:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

It's welcome news that the military is thinking creatively about the American role in Iraq, but the lessons and pleasures of The Battle of Algiers are a lot more ambiguous than this Pentagon blurb implies. To praise the film for its strategic insights is to buy into the 1960s revolutionary mystique that it celebrates; it is the collapse of that very mystique that has contributed to the film's current obscurity and made screenings "rare."

Even so, The Battle of Algiers remains a fascinating artifact of its time. But when the film came out, viewers required a lot of context to understand it properly. Here's a primer about this famous and controversial film, and about how the ever-shifting moral of its story relates to the Battle of Baghdad.

What is The Battle of Algiers?
The Battle of Algiers was the premier political film of the 1960s. It was studied by the campus left for its lessons in revolutionary-cell organization and was obligatory viewing for Black Panthers.

The first part of the film depicts the campaign of terror launched by the National Liberation Front (FLN, called "the organization" in the film) against French colonial rule in 1956.* The story is built around a criminal-turned-revolutionary known as Ali La Pointe, and it details his political epiphany and his terrorist career. The movie's second half concerns the reaction by the French military, which consists primarily of a campaign of torture and murder, and focuses on the leader in charge of that campaign, "Col. Mathieu." Mathieu is by far the best-realized character in the film; his is the only role filled by a professional actor.

From its first release, the film was extremely controversial: When the film was finally shown in France, theaters were bombed. In Italy, viewers were attacked.

Is the movie accurate?
Within broad limits. Ali was indeed the hero of the Casbah, the Muslim section of Algiers; as the film suggests, his death marked the end of the real battle for the city. The French did torture and murder their way to tactical victory. Mathieu, for his part, is based mostly on the real-life Gen. Jacques Massu, who devised the counterterrorist strategy. Many sequences are meticulously accurate, such as the famous one referred to by the Pentagon in its flier, in which Algerian women put on Western clothes and makeup and then plant bombs at civilian French targets. Unsurprisingly, many characters are composites, and numerous details are fudged, made up, or altered. Among them is Ali's powerful last line in the film, directed at the French: "I do not negotiate with them." The line is actually appropriated from a speech by then-Interior Minister Francois Mitterand, who had directed it at the insurgents.

Is there anything important that the film leaves out?
The film leaves out the insurrection that was taking place in the rest of Algeria, which makes it impossible for viewers to judge how the FLN finally succeeded in driving out the French, much less what was wrong with French military strategy. (Even now, some blame defeat not on the military but on Charles de Gaulle.) The movie also omits the struggle between the FLN and other anti-French factions for control of the revolution. It took an Algerian filmmaker, not a European, to tell the story of insurgents killing each other (Okacha Touita's 1982 film, The Sacrificed).

Instead of offering an explanation for the ultimate triumph of the FLN, Pontecorvo offers a poetic picture of Algeria's revolutionary resilience. "Even though some rivers seem to disappear," he once told an interviewer, "they run underground instead and always reach the sea." That's an appealing metaphor, but it's neither politically nor militarily instructive.

What does any of this have to do with Baghdad?
Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war." Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: Its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. "Wars aren't won with terrorism," says one key revolutionary. "Neither wars nor revolutions." But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.

This is where The Battle of Algiers is potentially most valuable and most dangerous as a point of comparison for the U.S. military. While The Battle of Algiers has next to nothing to say about overall French strategy in Algeria, its most obvious military lesson—that torture is an efficient countermeasure to terror—is a dangerous one in this particular instance. Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate information, though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof.

The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the course of a series of exchanges with French journalists. As reports of torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, is unwavering in defense of the practice: To him it is a military necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, for example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann Coulter's heart: "Why are the liberals always on the other side?"

At one point Mathieu challenges the hostile French reporters with a question of his own: "Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 'yes,' you must accept all the necessary consequences." Mathieu might as well be addressing the American military and the American public. Is the United States to remain in the Middle East? If so, what are the "necessary consequences"? Do they include working with former members of the Baathist secret police, as recent news stories have suggested? Do they include the night-time invasion of Iraqi homes and the inevitable shooting of innocent civilians?

To raise such issues is not necessarily to condemn the continued presence of troops in Iraq; there would be disastrous "necessary consequences" to an American withdrawal, too. But moral compromise, according to the film, was inherent in France's position in Algeria. The United States is not France, Iraq is not Algeria, and whatever the sources of resistance in Iraq, none is the equivalent of the FLN. But to listen to Mathieu is nevertheless to be challenged on whether moral compromise is also inherent in the American role in Iraq.

Moral compromise, finally, was also inherent in the FLN's campaign, and not only as a result of terror. Although the FLN was a group of secular revolutionaries, it frequently tried to rouse Algerians with Islamic rhetoric, mostly to appropriate the anti-French movement led by Algerian clerics for decades. And yet upon taking power, the FLN betrayed the promises they'd implicitly made to Muslims. (The Islamists engaged in the current civil war in the country represent a different, Wahhabized strain of Islam.)

So who ultimately won the Battle of Algiers?
No one. The French won the battle, but in 1962 they lost the war. French soldiers, most of whom hated the idea of torture, were tainted by the association. Algerians got rid of the French but in their place got an authoritarian regime that, before it fell, was itself guilty of torture. In the meantime, French interests maintained substantial control of the nation's resources. The revolutionary left got another regime that lost the support of a culturally suffocated and economically deprived populace. The triumphant FLN was even at war with itself; in 1965 one faction surrounded another with tanks and ousted it from power.* The people of the capital literally thought another scene was being shot for The Battle of Algiers.

Ultimately, the film evades answering its own moral challenge. It justifies its support of FLN terrorist murder over French torture by rewriting history. According to the film, terror was futile; it didn't work. What finally drove France out, it suggests, was a spontaneous explosion of popular resistance. That scenario, however, is a fantasy. What drove France out was sustained and bloody insurrection.

As a portrait of revolution and of a war of ideas, The Battle of Algiers suggests that the French went wrong by denying they were foreigners; they treated Algeria as an extension of France. At least one lesson for the United States seems obvious: A liberal Iraqi order is going to have to develop within Iraqi terms, and only the Iraqis themselves can establish those terms.

Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: This article originally stated that the first part of The Battle of Algiers was set in 1954. In fact it was in 1956. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: The article also noted that one faction of the FLN had ousted another in 1967; in fact the ousting occurred in 1965. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

 

The baffling thing about this war is that we can't figure out who the heck we are fighting against or the Bushies don't want to reveal it. If we keep capturing dozens of these guys a week in Iraq, I'm not sure why they are not shipping them to Jordan or Egypt and letting the host countries torture them until they talk, I mean if we are saying this is an extension of the war on terror, they don't seem to want to use the same techniques we've used on other guys or it's not working because there is no vast anti-US conspiracy behind the attacks. To quote someone else we are like Butch Cassidy and Sundance, and we keep saying "who are these guys?"



How about we finish Afghanistan, while we're at it...

 

Good even handed analysis of current situation and "the next phase."


Suspicious Sugarcoating

By Fred Hiatt
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A25


Last Thursday, as the death toll in the bombing of the Italian police station in Nasiriyah stood at 29, a senior administration official was telling me and a few colleagues about the "good things" taking place in Iraq.



The United States is hastening the transfer of authority to Iraqis, this official explained, because the Governing Council and cabinet are working so well -- "they're exercising more authority and responsibility." There is "a very good dynamic with the Iraqi people." Many potential problems "didn't happen" -- massive refugee flows, ethnic violence.

This at-least-the-oil-wells-aren't-on-fire speech was inadequate even last spring, when it was used to deflect criticism of American troops' failure to stop the looting of virtually every office and factory in the country. Today it serves only as a reminder of the failure to prepare for the real challenges of occupation. Worse, it raises questions about the administration's commitment to meet those challenges now.

Yes, good things are happening in Iraq. Markets are bustling, traffic is snarled. Iraqis are taking advantage of new freedoms with newspapers, political parties, town councils.

But the progress is not sustainable if the United States loses the war that is still being waged against it. And at the moment, in key ways, it is losing.

Occupation authorities have been forced into such a hunkered-down isolation that many of Paul Bremer's assistants might as well be working in Crystal City. They would meet as many Iraqis, and the phones would work better.

Through a deliberate and ruthless strategy, the enemy also is isolating the Iraqi people from the world, at the very moment when -- after decades of a stifling dictatorship -- what they need most is contact. Terrorists are killing Americans to undermine political support in the United States for the occupation; they are killing U.S. allies, United Nations officials and Red Cross workers in a successful effort to force such foreigners to leave (and others not to come); they are assassinating Iraqis who cooperate with the United States.

It is likely that the backbone of this enemy force is Saddam Hussein's secret police, its networks still intact, still well funded by the billions the dictator stole, still determined to prevent democracy from emerging. Just a few weeks ago, two U.S. investigators on their way to interview an Iraqi scientist about weapons of mass destruction found themselves under surveillance so professional that the investigators, professionals themselves, could not shake loose. This is not a ragtag band of "dead-enders."

It is also not, at least not yet and not in most places, a popular insurgency. Many Iraqis still fear Saddam Hussein's return, but they do not wish for it. They may chafe at the presence of U.S. troops in the country, but their aspirations -- for stability and normality, for freedom, for a representative government that keeps Iraq whole -- dovetail with U.S. goals.

For that reason, transferring authority to Iraqis, while desirable if done in the right way, will not quell the fighting. Saddam Hussein's henchmen would seek to destroy a U.N. authority or a democratic Iraqi authority just as mercilessly as they are opposing U.S. authority. Their motivation is not anti-Americanism or nationalism, though they may invoke both, but a determination to maintain their power and access to wealth. And even if they number no more than 5,000, as Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for Iraq, suggested last week, they may not be easy to defeat.

Which is why it is worrisome to hear administration officials understate the threat. It's true that President Bush has come some distance since July 2, when he boasted, "Bring 'em on -- we got the force necessary to deal with the security situation," and even since last month, when he said the killers were growing "desperate" because of U.S. progress. Speaking with David Frost in a PBS interview aired yesterday, Bush said that Iraqis "need to know that we won't leave the country prematurely. They need to know two things: we're not going to cut and run; and two, we believe they have the capacity to run their own country."

The difficulty is that the administration's emerging strategy is susceptible to two interpretations. Hastening the training of Iraqi forces could be an important step toward improving intelligence and freeing American soldiers for more aggressive operations; or it could be a prelude to America's turning over an unfinished operation to an unready force. When senior officials sugarcoat the current situation, they naturally raise suspicions that they are tending toward the latter option -- that they are fooling themselves, or think they can fool the rest of us, about what it will take to win.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

 

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1120/p06s01-woiq.html


Afghanistan's lessons for Iraq

Experts draw parallels between Iraq's occupation and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

MOSCOW – The young Soviet soldier was bewildered, and in the hands of Afghan guerrillas, when he spoke a few years after Moscow's Christmas Day 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
"Everybody [in Afghanistan] used to say to me, 'Friend, friend,' " the POW told Anthony Davis, a military analyst with Jane's Intelligence Review. "Then they turned around and stabbed us in the back."
As America's ambitious nation- building campaign in Iraq comes under more frequent attack from increasingly sophisticated forces, analysts are drawing some lessons from another conflict: the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its defeat at the hands of the US-backed mujahideen.

The analogy is not perfect: Soviet forces invaded to prop up a cold war client regime, and destroyed entire villages to get at the enemy - using magnitudes more violence than that currently deployed by US troops in Iraq.

And unlike the Soviet example, no superpower is aiding the Iraqi resistance today. Americans are suffering far fewer casualties, as well, which have been magnified by Western media coverage that, for the Soviets, simply didn't factor until the final years of the Afghan campaign.

But the senior US officer in Iraq recently dismissed the resistance as "strategically and operationally insignificant," just as the Kremlin once expected that poorly trained and equipped Afghan rebels would cower before its military might.

There are many other parallels with the Soviet mire, analysts say, that should yield valuable lessons and warnings for the Pentagon today.

"They welcomed us with flowers - I saw it with my own eyes," says Makhmut Gareev, the Soviet general whose small team of advisers kept the Afghan regime afloat for nearly three years, after the Soviets pulled out in 1989.

In Iraq, as Afghanistan: few troops

Just as the Pentagon top brass asked for - but did not receive - many more troops before the Iraq war, the Soviet General Staff advised that 30 to 35 divisions would be necessary to stabilize Afghanistan. Only 4 or 5 reserve divisions were sent, for a mission expected to be quick and low profile.

Within months, widespread resistance had begun; within years, the Soviet inability to seal the borders and control ground with so few troops enabled the guerrillas to create a pipeline for weapons and recruits.

"It's the same mistake [US Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld made in Iraq," says the white-haired octogenarian Mr. Gareev, who heads up Russia's Academy of Military Sciences. "I would have left all the Iraqi border guards under American control. Now terrorists are flocking to Iraq.

"They disbanded the Army, police, and frontier guards," says Gareev, who in 1996 wrote one of the most detailed assessments of the Soviet experience. "What was [Rumsfeld] going to count on?"

The ratio of Soviet forces to population - some 130,000, for 24 million Afghans - roughly matches that of the US in Iraq. Only 56,000 of the 130,000 Americans troops there are combat trained, however, in a nation of 23 million Iraqis.

Some faulty assumptions appear eerily similar. The Kremlin did not expect Afghans to fight back, and the Soviet military mind-set was geared toward fighting a massive conventional war in Europe, not controlling hit-and-run bands of guerrillas.

In Iraq, too, US commanders have been frustrated by the inability of their overwhelming firepower to stamp out the resistance. The rising US death toll has prompted in recent days a significant boost in the scale of military counterattacks.

Boosted also are strong vows to arrest and kill Iraqi rebels, or to ensure, in the words of one officer, that they are required to stay in hospital "for the rest of their natural lives."

The Soviets and Americans both "neglected one vital element: nationalism," says Olivier Roy of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, an expert on political Islam who has covered Afghanistan since the Soviet era. A CIA report made public last week described how growing disillusionment among Iraqis is increasing support for the resistance.

"For the Americans, it is dictatorship or democracy - the word 'nationalism' is never heard," says Mr. Roy. "They can't understand, like in Palestine, that somebody could choose a dictatorship for nationalist reasons. It is something totally unthinkable in Washington."

Hard fight to the exit

One difference between the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq may work in the US favor. While the resistance to the Soviets was "spontaneous and universal," in Iraq it has focused on a narrow region known as the "Sunni Triangle."

And despite the host of problems, many Iraqis remain grateful to the US for ending the Hussein regime.

"If the Americans are able to crush the Sunni Triangle without sparking off other places, it will be OK," says Roy. "They will never win Iraq, but they will get enough time to get out, while saving face and claiming victory."

Even getting to that point will not be easy, if the Soviet experience is any gauge.

Emergency meetings at the White House last week formulated a new strategy, to speed up "Iraqification" of security, by replacing US soldiers with freshly minted Iraqi units.

When the Soviets tried it, political reliability was a major problem, says Davis of Jane's. He saw the results repeatedly: newly recruited Afghan soldiers sitting down to tea with mujahideen units, handing over their guns and going home.

"It starts with a low-level hemorrhaging, desertions of a few people with weapons. Then you have a few officers being shot," says the Bangkok-based Davis. "Then you run the danger - if the opposition in Iraq can attain what it does not have now, which is a degree of political cohesiveness - of whole units going over to the other side.

"In Iraq, the dangers are so much more pressing, because of the speed with which the Americans are trying to push this strategy through," says Davis. "That is bound to be exacerbated by the fact that, right now, [guerrillas] will be ensuring that their moles are in the intelligence services, and signing up to join new units."

One difference in the Soviet and US comparison does not work to US advantage, he says. It took more than three years for the Afghan resistance - unable to shoot straight at the start of the war, and making "stupid mistakes" - to get their act together. That's a luxury US troops don't have in Iraq.

"You've got a disbanded army, Iraqi special forces that were well trained and took minimal casualties in the war, and weapons stockpiles all over the country," says Davis. "So the Iraqis have moved straight into sophisticated guerrilla operations, virtually from day one."

A further parallel is the broader, nation-shaping ambition of the Soviets and US, says Dmitri Trenin, a Soviet military veteran with the Carnegie Moscow office. In the 1980s, Moscow tried to impose a Soviet-type system on Afghanistan; today the US is placing "too much emphasis on democracy, and not enough on good governance and rule of law," he says.

And in Iraq, the US faces difficulty because it is the "perfect machine for waging war," but "not a good machine for imperial policing," Mr. Trenin says. "The US never liked the idea, it doesn't have the culture."

But the root problem is one that has dogged foreign invaders throughout history, Trenin says: "Occupying powers are never popular."

The lessons of the Soviet experience have not been lost on US military historians. Robert Baumann of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was a graduate student in Moscow when the war began, wrote a case study on Soviet Afghanistan and discovered what he called a "pervasive pattern: tactical successes that did not add up to tangible, strategic gains." And though he is obliged not to discuss current US military operations, he can speak of the Soviet example.

"Sometimes [Soviet leaders] were captives of their own propaganda," though not telling the public much for the first five years of the war "hurt them badly," Mr. Baumann says.

"Even when they did start reporting combat, it masked the circumstances," says Baumann. "Meanwhile, you've got all these soldiers coming home, with a different version of the truth."