Petraeus's Challenge: Security and Reconciliation
This week saw Gen. David Petraeus's first press conference since he took over command of U.S. forces in Iraq, and he began it by hammering home a warning that has been repeatedly emphasized by his predecessors as well: Military force alone will not fix Iraq.
He noted the need for reconciliation, to bring into the political process the groups who now oppose the Iraqi government and the U.S. military force supporting it.
"This is critical," he added, emphasizing that it is the political process that "will determine in the long run the success of this effort." To that end, many are looking toward the Baghdad regional conference this weekend, which will bring together Iraq's neighbors (as well as Russia, France, Britain, and China) in a bid to win a solid base of Arab support for the struggling Iraqi government.
But political strides, and security, are widely seen as a chicken-and-egg scenario there: To what extent can Iraq make any political strides without security, and vice versa?
And increasingly, against a backdrop of surging violence in Baghdad, military advisers are wondering just how effective principles of counterinsurgency can be in the beleaguered country in the midst of a civil war–even as applied by an acknowledged expert like Petraeus with more troops at his disposal. The National Intelligence Estimate released earlier this year said it, quietly and without much fanfare–and it was repeated, word for word, by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee last month to deliver his annual threat assessment: "Indeed, the term 'civil war' accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict," he testified, "including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethnosectarian mobilization, and population displacements."
And in the face of this sea change, military advisers are pointing out that, in short, the counterinsurgency manual does not address how to apply its principles to a civil war raging in a failed state, particularly one in which U.S. soldiers are forced to spend much of their time reacting to brutal and large-scale attacks on innocent civilians, rather than being on the offensive.
"In a pure civil war, you like to identify, localize, and destroy the enemy," says Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at Brookings Institution.
"But in a counterinsurgency, you kill innocents and feed the insurgency–trying to win one can be counterproductive toward the other." Today, he adds, "We're at a dangerous point where the violence may be too great for classic counterinsurgency doctrine to solve your problems in Iraq."
Behind the scenes, too, policy makers are grappling with the tension between pursuing a larger political strategy of empowering the disenfranchised–and the need to be a nonpartisan broker in a state where sectarian tension multiplies with each passing day. Some of this, analysts note, was playing out in advance of the conference of neighbors this weekend.
Members of the country's Sunni minority, who once made the rules under Saddam, may now get help from other Sunni-led governments in pressing for a new constitution–which many say is a prerequisite to Sunni insurgent groups laying down their arms. But Shiites bristle at what they see as any efforts to reverse the hard-fought strides they have made since the fall of Saddam. There will be no rewriting of the constitution, they say–and as they see it, "no going back."
Stemming the tide of violence, of course, is proving equally difficult. But though the large-scale, sensational attacks throughout the capital have continued, Petraeus pointed out some positive developments–that sectarian killings have been lower in Baghdad over the past several weeks than in the previous month and that some families have returned to the neighborhoods from which they were displaced, though those families are few and far between. In the small windows that these advances provide, re-establishing basic services is equally vital in bringing about security, say advisers.
"Indeed," Petraeus added, "Iraqis have often ranked the provision of services ahead of security in importance." And as long as schools remain closed in the wake of spiraling violence, for example, youths without the ability to, say, read, are far more likely to join violent groups.
In the meantime, there is some overlap in seemingly disparate goals.
"The good news is that some of what you'd want to do for a counterinsurgency and a civil war coincide," says O'Hanlon. "Certainly providing good security for the population is a valid approach either way." And the Baghdad regional conference remains an important start.
"This is the first small movement in the right direction. It's a long process," said one Sunni lawmaker. "Our neighbors have to understand that they cannot succeed if Iraq's political process fails."