Insurgencies and wars are complicated things. If someone tells you there are simple solutions to them, they’re either fools or crooks. Consider the Iraqi surge.
The Iraqi troops surge began in January of 2007 with the deployment of 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division to Baghdad. Over the next four months an additional four brigade combat teams would be deployed to Baghdad and the tours were extended for 4,000 Marines in Al Anbar Province. In mid-June Operation Phantom Thunder, a major security effort, got under way. There was some tough fighting in Baghdad for several months, but U.S. casualties began dropping in September. About six months later a friend just back from Iraq told me the change in Al Anbar province was remarkable. Surge = Success, right?
Yes and no.
There were five elements which contributed to the drop in violence and casualties in Iraq following the surge. The increase in troops in theater was one of them, but arguably was the least important.
1. Karbala
Sectarian violence had been a feature of the Iraqi conflict from the start, with a violent attack against Shias provoking a retaliatory attack against Sunnis and vice versa. The escalating violence reached a climax on April 28, 2007, when a car bomb exploded outside the Imman Abbas Mosque in Karbala, killing 68 and injuring over 160 Shiite religious pilgrims. What happened next was truly remarkable. Instead of retaliating in kind, Moqtada al-Sadr, the head of the largest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, announced a unilateral cease-fire.
The west was skeptical at first, and some branches of the Mahdi Army continued their attacks on Coalition troops and Sunnis. As al-Sadr got his subordinates under control, however, and made the cease-fire stick, the results became clear. Before the Mahdi Army cease-fire, the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq had been from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) placed by Shia militias, primarily the anti-government Mahdi Army. What happened when the force producing the most casualties in our troops unilaterally stopped shooting (and bombing)? Casualties started to drop. Duh.
The Mahdi Army cease-fire took place two months before Operation Phantom Thunder hit its stride, and was a response to events unrelated to the surge. The resulting steady drop in IED attacks was one of the most important contributors to the decreasing US casualty rate in late 2007.
2. Awakening
The main armed insurgency opposing the U.S. effort in Iraq had been centered in the so-called Sunni Triangle area, particularly Al Anbar province. Al Qaeda in Mesopotmia recruited heavily among disaffected Sunnis, the former dominant group in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In November of 2005, the Sunni Abu Mihals tribe offered local US forces an alliance against Al Quaeda extremists along the Syrian border. Never mind the Abu Mihals were notorious smugglers more concerned with turf issues than ideology – anything was worth a try.
The US provided money, arms, and training. A year later the sheik of the Abu Mihals formed the Awakening Council and the Sunni Awakening started getting real traction on the ground. By late 2008 there were over 50,000 Awakening warriors on the US payroll and Al Quaeda in Mesopotamia had gone from a major player to a broken force. The Awakening movement’s success at converting Sunni insurgents to paid allies of the Coalition was the major element in pacifying Al Anbar province, but the lion’s share of progress had been made before the surge began.
3. Cleansing
Iraq had a great many mixed Sunni/Shia regions before the overthrow of Saddam. Once the social fabric of the country began unraveling, violence skyrocketed in these mixed neighborhoods. Sunnis and Shia militias struggled for dominance and in each area bloody massacres and reprisals followed one on another until one side gained an upper hand – at which point the survivors of the losing side generally fled to an area controlled by their own militias. The heavy fighting in and around Baghdad following the surge accelerated this trend, with the number of internal refugees doubling from about half a million to over a million (out of a total population of about 30 million). The Coalition tacitly supported this effort, which some have called “soft partition” – meaning an informal separation along ethnic lines without a formal political division of the territory of Iraq.
The result has been the effective disappearance of mixed neighborhoods. Much of the fighting in Al Anbar Province was between Sunnis and Shia. Today there are hardly any Shia left in Al Anbar for the Sunnis to fight; they have all been forcibly relocated – by Sunni militias active in the Awakening movement — to the Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad. If the goal is a short-term reduction in violence, ethnic cleansing (once it’s done) works. The problem is, if the goal is long-term national cohesion, not so much.
4. COIN
One of the amazing twists in the Iraq war was the enthusiasm with which US military leaders embraced the counter-insurgency (COIN) philosophy. Gen. Ray Odierno’s turnabout on the subject was perhaps the most striking example, but it really did show up all through the command structure. We didn’t just end a bunch of soldiers to Baghdad; we sent them out into the communities and kept them there, living with the locals and keeping them safe.
5. Boots
Yes, add 30,000 US troops to the mix on the ground and it will make a difference. No doubt. The danger is that people think that’s all that’s needed – just hit the magic “surge” button and everything will work out fine.
The problem is, the people planting IEDs in Afghanistan haven’t declared a unilateral cease-fire, the bulk of the fighters for the Taliban haven’t decided to switch sides and form a “Pathan Awakening,” there’s no ethnic violence which we can slap a band aid on by separating folks into different provinces, or different districts of Kabul, and nobody I know thinks that the same approach of close security out in the community will work nearly as well in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq.
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