War, the military, COIN and stuff

A mere pile of paper

This is a few days old, but John Robb offers an interesting take on the primacy that the American military is placing on the Awakening/Sons of Iraq groups that are providing security in many areas of Iraq:

This situation puts the US military in a difficult position, one that goes deeper than being caught on the horns of dilemma (as in: caught between supporting "former" insurgents or government forces). The improvised theory that led the US military to fund the insurgency (the "Awakening") has transformed the US Counter-Insurgency doctrine (COIN) -- a document was so carefully prepared and announced with such fanfare -- into a mere pile of paper. Why? Because we have abandoned the doctrine's binding assumption: that everything we do in counter-insurgency should increase the legitimacy of the host government. Essentially, the abandonment of our doctrine means that the US military is now completely adrift in Iraq without a counter-insurgency roadmap.

Is he going too far here? Perhaps, but it’s an interesting counterweight to those claiming early victory in Iraq due to the recent downturn in violence. It’s certainly true that the Shia-dominated national government in Baghdad is wary—to say the least—of the predominantly Sunni Awakening movement (Marc Lynch reports that an arrest warrant was recently issued for a pair of Awakening leaders in Anbar province). If the 80,000 Awakening members we’re currently paying to provide security in their own neighborhoods aren’t somehow folded into legitimate security outfits, which just isn't going to happen in the numbers the Sunnis want, this could get very ugly indeed.

Used Up

This is a profound national embarrassment. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports this morning that the State Department “has stopped processing the applications of 551 Iraqi and Afghan translators seeking special visas to come to the United States, because the current legal quota of 500 visas for the program this year is about to be reached.”

The halt is the latest obstacle for many of the several thousand translators who have worked for U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives and leaving their families vulnerable to retaliation from insurgents who see them as accomplices of American troops. More than 250 interpreters working for U.S. forces or their contractors have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many American service members have worked to help their former translators gain a visa to come to the United States under a 2006 congressional program initially designed to admit 50 translators per year, a quota later increased to 500.

I’ve seen these interpreters in action, and simply put, the American military would be lost without them. During my last embed in Iraq, I spent quite a bit of time with Iraqi interpreters employed by the U.S. Army and heard their stories. None of them—not one—can tell their family or friends what they do for a living, for fear of winding up dead for helping the Americans. The normal routine seems to be that they tell friends and family that they have a job (for a bank, for example) that forces them to travel to different parts of the country every couple weeks. They live on base with our troops for a week or two at a time, then go home for a week, then back out to the base. The travel back and forth is as dangerous for them as heading out on patrol with American units. And for this, we’re telling them “thanks, but no thanks.”

The terps have been thoroughly vetted by American forces, and by virtue of being out with the troops on missions, assume all the risks that American forces do. They’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts—they’re paid well by Iraqi standards, and at least among the guys I talked to, have aspirations to move to the United States or Canada as soon as they save enough to make the trip. And now the State department is shutting the door on them.

New Yorker writer George Packer recently wrote a play about our abandonment of Iraqi terps, called “Betrayed,” which he wrote by incorporating the real words of the many terps he interviewed for a story about them for the New Yorker in March, 2007.

The terps are in much the same position as Iraqis who work as stringers and reporters for western news agencies,who I profiled two years ago for the Columbia Journalism Review. I traveled to Iraq for the story, sat down for numerous interviews with these brave Iraqis, and time and again was told stories made up of equal parts fear, deception, and bravery. I wrote that they’re

forced to lead painful and dangerous double lives. One woman, whom I’ll call Salama, told me that although she has been working for American newspapers for over three years, her friends and neighbors don’t know about it. “My colleagues here don’t tell their neighbors they work for an American news agency either,” she said. As we sat in one of the hotel rooms that her news organization occupies in Baghdad — there are armed guards in the lobby and security in the room next door — she told me that she explains her long days at the office to neighbors and friends by telling them she works for a financial company with branches around the world, so she has to work late because of the time differences.

…Like Salama, Yousif is discreet about his work. “Ninety-five percent of my friends — close friends — don’t know I work with journalists,” said Yousif, who is fluent in English and began working for his American employer as the bureau’s IT manager. “It’s very dangerous to tell people you’re doing this. I tell them I’m working for a computer company.”

Bringing this danger into focus, one of the Iraqis I wrote about, Salih Saif Aldin, was shot dead at point-blank range on a Baghdad street last October.

The refusal of the American government to help those who have helped us so much isn’t happening in a vacuum. It has the potential to have far-reaching consequences as we continue to work in Iraq, Afghanistan and in other parts of the world where we need the assistance of English-speaking locals. From a “hearts and minds” perspective, the short-sighted refusal of Washington to live up to our moral commitment to these interpreters is devastating. The terps are trusted enough to live side-by-side with American troops on base, and we trust them enough to translate properly and coherently, but apparently we don’t trust them enough to save their lives.

Power Surge

The press often takes heat—not unfairly—for only reporting the “bad news” out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But sometimes the bad news just so happens to be the most important news of the day. Check out this morning’s front-page Washington Post piece about problems in the Awakening movement in Iraq—a mostly Sunni security effort that has put 80,000 Iraqi men on the American payroll, and which has cost the American taxpayer about $123 million so far, according to the Multinational Force-Iraq command. 

The program has undoubtedly produced results. Violence in the country is way down now that Iraqis have stepped up to staff checkpoints in their own areas, and some of the same guys who were planting IEDs a year ago are now turning in caches of weapons and explosives. That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that some of these groups, organized by the Americans and recognized the Iraqi government, seem to have read some of their own press clippings, and are flexing their political muscle. The Post:

U.S.-backed Sunni volunteer forces, which have played a vital role in reducing violence in Iraq, are increasingly frustrated with the American military and the Iraqi government over what they see as a lack of recognition of their growing political clout and insufficient U.S. support.

…The U.S. military acknowledges that it is caught in the middle of a political struggle. “Yes, they are frustrated,” said Lt. Col. Ricardo Love, commander of the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, who works in Baqubah, the provincial capital. “They think we can make the government of Iraq do anything. We tell them we don't control the government. But they think we are the mighty power.”

This doesn’t mean that the program of paying locals to secure their own areas is necessarily headed for failure, just that without a central government that can provide services for its people, and which has legitimacy in the eyes of the population, power is going to start taking shape at the local level. The Sunnis who comprise the vast majority of these Awakening groups have little faith in the Shia-led government in Baghdad, and trust it even less. One prospective Awakening group leader I met who was trying to get a contract with the Army "joked" to the American commander that he wanted security in his region so his men could join the Army and police and “overthrow the Maliki government.” Everyone laughed at his joke, but I wasn’t so sure he was kidding.

Book learnin'

In a conference call with bloggers this morning, the Army outlined the newest version of its Field Manual (FM 3-0 Army Operations), the first revision of Army operational doctrine since 2001. According to LTG William Caldwell IV, Commander of the Combined Arms Center, the manual has finally taken the step of elevating stabilization operations to the level of offensive and defensive ops.

An Executive Summary was passed out beforehand that outlines the chapters of the manual, which goes like this:

Read the rest at the ARES blog.

“The Sunni and the Shia are like the Tigris and the Euphrates”

A slim, slightly weathered-looking man with flecks of gray in his hair, Colonel Ehssan—leader of the local Sons of Iraq group—sat behind his desk, looking unhappy. We had driven from COP Courage this morning to his “office”—a first floor room in an old building set far back from the main road on a narrow dirt strip, only a few miles from the American base. The room, and the building, is typically Iraqi, meaning typically shabby, with sand-caked windows, peeling yellow paint on the walls, and a few long couches turned toward the colonel’s desk. A space heater sits in the middle of the room, providing whatever heat it can muster.

With Charlie company’s Stryker vehicles idling out in the courtyard, where I had accidentally kicked a rusted AK-47 clip laying in the dirt on the way in, Captain Helberg and his interpreter settle in for their meeting with the colonel. On the surface, things really aren’t all that bad for Ehssan: his 250 SOIs are all under contract, meaning the American military pays them each $300 a month to man checkpoints in their area and his men have all been entered into the HYDE system, which American forces use to take their biometric information and enter them into a central database. If any prospective SOI member is already in the system, that means that they’d been fingerprinted and photographed doing something that made the Americans unhappy at some point in the past, making them ineligible. On top of this, he has the backing of the local sheiks, and up to this point has had little interference from the Iraqi Police or Army. Still, there’s the local bogeyman, the Iraqi Army’s Muthana brigade, to contend with. The colonel assures Helberg that he has no problem with the Iraqi army as an institution, just with the Muthana brigade, which he calls “sectarian.” He’s concerned that the IA recently shot at one of his checkpoints stationed on a bridge, but Helberg thinks that the only reason they were shot at is because they weren’t wearing the tan SOI uniforms they had recently been issued, and they were camped out on a bridge, raising the IA’s suspicions. The uniform issue is one that I had seen come up several times before, especially as the SOIs go outside the bounds of their contract and become more “expeditionary” as one officer charitably put it to me, meaning that some of them are heading out on patrols or are trying to hunt down insurgents, when they’re supposed to be nothing more than a stationary guard outfit.

It’s a perfect example of how the American military is, in a very real way, caught between three distinct groups of armed men trying to assert their place in the new Iraq. It’s difficult to try and appease, strengthen and support the SOI, the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi Army when each group has its own ideas about how things should be run, and rarely consults with one another as to their plans—driven as they are by different leadership groups, agendas and tribal and sectarian interests. As Charlie company’s First Sergeant Kenny Clayborne would tell me later, if Muthana comes in to the area, “then there’s no need for the SOI guys to man the checkpoints any longer, and they’ll be out of jobs. Right now the SOI guys have some level of control of what is going on in their area, who comes in and out,” and understandably, they like this control, and being able to keep the peace.

Part of the problem is that the Iraqi government and its security forces have been absent from the area for so long. The local Sunnis don’t know what to expect when the government—a Shia-controlled government to boot—comes back. Clayborne tells me that when he served in Kirkuk in 2005, American forces were operating with Iraqi security forces “in ways that they haven’t even begun to do here.” He adds that “a lot of other places in Iraq are a lot further down the road in their partnership with Iraqi security forces. I never expected that I’d be in an area where I was operating pretty much independently of Iraqi security forces.”

But that is changing, albeit slowly. The local police outpost boasts 455 police officers, led by Colonel Hamed, who has proclaimed his willingness to work with both the SOI and the Iraqi Army. But there are still sectarian intrigues. During one meeting I sat in on between Helberg and Col. Hamed, the IP chief let slip that the head of the Muthana brigade, General Nasser, was planning to meet with the local Shia sheiks of the al Tamimi tribe. No Sunnis had been invited. Helberg hadn’t heard anything about this meeting before this, and was obviously unhappy that the delicate balance he was working so hard to maintain might be undercut by backroom maneuverings of the Iraq Army.   

But here with Col. Ehssan, Helberg is busy explaining that he can’t control what the Iraqi government chooses to do with its army, and that Muthana is, after all, the official security force of the Iraqi government. While Helberg and Ehssan are squaring off over the issue, a new wrinkle presents itself: a group of robed Sunni sheiks suddenly begins to file into the room, causing Helberg to crack a pained smile and mutter, “here we go…”

But the colonel is hardly done, claiming that Muthana will either arrest or kill all the young men in the area, and that with the Army will come the feared Shia group Jaish al Mahdi. Finishing with a cigarette-waiving flourish, the colonel claims that he will be among the first arrested. The sheiks eagerly join in, threatening to take their tribes and move out of the area if the Muthana brigade comes in. One, who says he is speaking on behalf of all his fellow sheiks, tells Cpt. Helberg that if the Americans start working with the Muthana brigade, the Sunni sheiks won’t work with the Americans any more. “The Iraqi government is against the sheiks,” he proclaims.

Things have hit an impasse, but one of the sheiks gives Helberg the opening he needs to regain control of the situation: he asks what the Captain thinks of the sheiks. Helberg takes a few seconds, collects his thoughts, and starts by telling them that he knows they’re all honorable men, and that they’re respected by the people. He respects them. They’re leaders. The sheiks like this, and nod. But then comes the hammer: “You tell me that you want to work for a better Iraq, but your actions show me otherwise.” A charge goes through the room, and you can feel the sheiks bristle. He brings up the sheik meeting he had called the day before, where only the Shia sheiks showed up. The Sunnis plead ignorance, claiming that they figured all the Shia were at the Muthana ceremony, so they didn’t bother going. Helberg turns this back on them, telling them that the Shia could have been at the ceremony, but felt that the meeting—and working together with the Sunnis—was more important. It’s a crushing blow. A few of the sheiks try turning the tables, saying that the Shia are stabbing them in the back by working with the Muthana brigade. One sheik rolls out an old Iraqi saying, “The Sunni and the Shia are like the Tigris and the Euphrates,” explaining that he doesn’t want to dump sewage in the rivers, but the Iranians, who back the Shia government in Iraq, are the sewage.

In the end, Helberg manages to wring promises out of the Sunni sheiks to work with their Shia counterparts, but it’s hard to be convinced that these words will be followed up by much effort at reconciliation. Walking back out to the Stryker vehicles for the trip back to Courage, I ask Helberg if he thinks the sheiks are serious about moving. “Some will move,” he says, shrugging. “I believe that. Some will take off their [SOI] uniforms and remove the happy faces and fight back, and some will go to ground and try to exist like they’ve done for years.” And without a strong, non-sectarian national government in Baghdad to stop this from happening, Helberg’s prediction is probably pretty close to being right on the money.

Full Spectrum Operations

I posted a set of pictures from my time with the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in central Iraq here . An in-depth series of posts, cross-posted at the Columbia Journalism Review, kicks off on Monday morning, complete with pictures and some video.

The Rejected

“They’re gonna see us going out, and know that we have to come back this way,” Captain Glenn Helberg cautioned his men. We were walking out of combat outpost Courage, northwest of Baghdad, just before nightfall. The message was simple: the enemy studies habits, trends, and patterns just as any other military outfit does; so as the platoon left the base, Helberg wanted to make sure that his men were not complacent on the way back in.

It was a hell of a way to walk to a neighbor’s house for dinner, but that was just what we were doing on this cold, clear January night. Sheik Munder, a prominent Shia in the area, had invited the captain over for dinner, and despite the fact that his house was less than a mile from the patrol base, we would be walking across open road, with flat, open land on either side, so every precaution would be taken. This rural area had been an al Qaeda stronghold until just a few months ago, before the Sons of Iraq—groups of local men paid $300 a month to man checkpoints and keep security in their area—came out in force. Given that some of these men are the same ones who were planting IEDs last year, American commanders are taking nothing for granted.

There is still plenty of daily combat going on—especially in the major remaining al Qaeda strongholds up north near Mosul, in the central “breadbasket” of Diyala, and south of Baghdad in Arab Jabour—but peaceful meetings like this are just as common. COIN strategy places a premium on what has been called the “strategic corporal,” soldiers who have to think like a infantryman, act like a diplomat, and be able to change from one to the other on the fly. This is how the game is being played in the new, relative quiet of Iraq—especially in areas where despite the lull in daily violence, the war is still far from over.

In 1999, Marine general Charles C. Krulak wrote of the “three-block war” where soldiers in irregular conflicts “will be confronted by the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and, potentially, within the space of three contiguous city blocks.” Most importantly for regions like the area around COP Courage, where the Iraqi national government is little more than a rumor, “the individual [American service member] will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy. His or her actions may not only influence the immediate tactical situation, but have operational and strategic implications as well.”

At heart, much of this work is done by cultivating relationships—showing the Iraqis that American soldiers are strong, but fair, and that they’re an honest broker in a country rife with corruption, double-dealing, and a government seen by most Sunnis as being sectarian at best, a tool of Shia Iran bent on violently subjugating the Sunni minority at worst.

Part of this relationship building is figuring out who the power players are in any given region. The term “sheik,” I discovered, has become one of the more overused terms in Iraq. Once the “awakening” movement started in Anbar in 2006, and then moved through different parts of the country in 2007, Iraqis began popping up, assuring the Americans that they were “sheiks.” Add the fact that Charlie company is new to the area, and “a lot of guys are coming out of the woodwork trying to assert themselves saying, ‘hey I’m a sheik, I’m in charge of this whole town,’ so you have to weigh that with what the old units told us about that guy operates,” Helberg told me as we walked to Munder’s house. Apparently, sheik Munder made the cut.

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The LTC and the Sheik

In a dim, chilly tent, lit by a single fluorescent tube and the gray winter light creeping in through the flap, Lieutenant Colonel Mario Diaz sits across the table from sheik Hussein al-Tamimi, an influential Shia sheik in the rural region northwest of Baghdad, sipping Pepsi and trading pleasantries.

Diaz made the drive to combat outpost Courage for this meeting from his headquarters at Camp Liberty, which is part of the staggeringly vast Baghdad airport military complex southeast of here. The string of American camps that abut the airport house a number of American bases kept running by an army of civilian contractors who are protected by Ugandan guards, all of whom live in a world carved into shape by rows of high concrete T-walls that separate the complex into discrete cells of activity. The place is so cut off from the country that surrounds it that it could be anywhere—Kosovo, Korea, Afghanistan, or Alaska—but out here, at Courage, there’s no such separation. Plopped down in a farm field and ringed simply by a row of T-walls no more than two city blocks in size, Courage is unmistakably part of today’s Iraq.

Diaz and Sheik Hussein are still feeling each other out, performing the slow dance that Arab culture prescribes strongmen perform with one another, complimenting, then pushing, declaring friendship, then starting all over again. “I purposefully have met with very few people in the first couple weeks,” Diaz tells him, “because I first want to meet with important people.” The sheik, the implication goes, is one of these important people. It’s a nice gambit in this year-old counter-insurgency campaign that places emphasis on building relationships at the local level, in hopes that each new brick will build a strong enough wall to keep law-abiding Iraqis on one side, and insurgents, terrorists and foreign fighters on the other.

Diaz is the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion “Gimlets” of the 21st Infantry, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. At the time of this meeting in late January, the 2nd SBCT had only been in country for a little over a month, and was still going through the arduous process of getting to know the local power players – something that takes many meetings, gallons of tooth-achingly sweet chai tea, and lots of expressions of mutual trust, admiration and respect.

Sheik Hussein, involved in the SOI movement, as all sheiks are, informed Diaz that some SOI checkpoints had recently been fired on by people he says were Shia fighters, part of a rival “awakening” movement that had been infiltrated by al Qaeda, and that his people were investigating the incident and would turn over the names of suspects soon. Unconfirmed rumors to be sure, but I heard enough rumblings among some officers that the Sunni al Qaeda had started to team up with elements of the Shia Madhi militia, a development that has the potential to sow chaos in the mixed region, if realized.

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The shitty sniper

On one bitterly cold night patrol run out of COP Courage, we made the usual stops at several SOI-manned checkpoints to see how things were going. Almost every trip outside the base requires stops at the checkpoints to try and gather intelligence and provide some visibility, in order to show the SOI and those potentially watching them that the Americans and their astonishingly mobile Stryker vehicles are around, and can and will drop in anywhere at any given time.

The checkpoints run the gamut from nicely constructed HESCO S-turns in the middle of the road to concrete barriers to little more than piles of dirt with shivering Iraqis standing nearby. In the entire 233 square kilometers that falls under Stryker Task Force Gimlet’s control, there are 1580 SOI on the payroll, with 75 checkpoints breaking up the roadways, denying the use of the roads to anyone carrying explosives, heavy weapons or bomb-making materials.

The thing about talking with the SOI is that a good portion of what they tell you is self-interested, so much of what you learn has to be taken with a grain of salt, several soldiers told me. Every last SOI will tell you that he hates al Qaeda and that he helped drive the group out of the region, but what he won’t tell you is that the area was a hotbed of al Qaeda trafficking for years, serving as an open, isolated expanse where foreign fighters could slip through the tall reed lines lining the canals into the Baghdad region from Anbar, and before that, Syria. But the selective history is to be expected. Less than a year ago, some of these same men were planting IEDs and shooting at American forces, and some no doubt helped al Qaeda members to move through the area. But that was then. For a variety of reasons, some honorable, some monetary, some just because they grew weary of fighting, they switched sides.

I asked one small group of SOI what the area was like a year ago. “You could not go out at night,” one said. “We found bodies in the streets. The volunteers are from this area, so we know who should be here, and who shouldn’t. al Qaeda depends on the people, because they are from outside of the country.” This is a common theme among the SOI members—at al Qaeda is made up solely of foreign fighters, and Iraqis didn’t take part in their plans. While one can’t deny that the SOI are fighting against al Qaeda now, the fact is some of these guys manning the checkpoints had allied with them, at least for a time. I asked a small group of them at another checkpoint if they would like to join the police force or the Army, since they’re essentially doing the work a well-run police force or army would do. They all said that they would. Well, why haven’t they already joined? “In the past,” one said, “we were afraid to join because of al Qaeda.”

I also asked at several checkpoints what they need most to keep al Qaeda out of the region, and the answer was the same every time: more powerful machine guns, more ammunition, and night vision equipment. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Corbin, was standing nearby during one of these exchanges, and broke in to tell me that “we can’t arm or supply them with arms, so one lump sum is paid to the commander, and then he’s supposed to trickle it down, $300 a month, and they skim off the top to pay for ammunition, food, water, tents, stuff like that. But that skimming usually goes in their pockets.” This isn’t as insidious as it sounds—Iraqi society is based on the Big Man, whether that man is a sheik, a SOI leader or whatever, and skimming like this is simply a part of life.

Another thing you’ll often hear out at the checkpoints is how a sniper or some al Qaeda terrorists fired on the SOI just a few nights before, but they managed to drive them off. This isn’t to say that the checkpoints aren’t being fired on—they are—but the stories often have a self-serving quality, being tied up in pleas for heavy machine guns or better equipment. Listening to one of these stories about a sniper that recently took two shots at the checkpoint, Lieutenant Corbin asked if anyone was hurt, and how close the shots came. It turned out that they weren’t very close, and Lieutenant Corbin grinned, “so it was a shitty sniper.” The SOI said that it was the second time they had been shot at, the first time being about a month ago. The Lieutenant kept pushing, and concluded that it was nothing more than a stray round or two that landed near the checkpoint; something not unthinkable in a country where random gunfire is a way of life. He asked if they had informed their chain of command about the shots, and they said yes, but he was skeptical, explaining that “I’m just trying to figure out why we never found out about it, because we like to come down and investigate when the checkpoints are fired on.” He gave them the tip line to call if they get shot at again, and was off to look in at another checkpoint.

This is crossposted at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Duds

To paraphrase roving war correspondent and recent CJR
contributor David Axe, getting mortared is boring. Walking out of
the DFAC (dining facility) early Wednesday afternoon at Camp
Taji in north central Iraq, soldiers and contractors were lined up to
dump their trays at the door before exiting--nothing new or
exciting there. But during the usual line up at the door, one of the
workers ran up and blocked the exit, preventing anyone from
getting out. The disruption lasted probably less than a minute, and
then the doors swung open again. Once we got outside, word
started trickling back that someone lobbed at least two mortars at
the base, and they landed about 150 meters away from the DFAC
near the PX. One round hit the trailer containing the beauty salon,
and a hole could be seen in the side of the structure, while the other
landed nearby, and the Army was still trying to figure out exactly
where. One soldier who cordoned off the area told me that as far as
he knew, there were no injuries.

Since no one heard any explosions, and the beauty salon trailer was
still standing, it seems that neither mortar round actually detonated.
Just another example of how despite the new security gains being
made in Iraq, there are still plenty of people out there who are ready
and willing to fight--even if their mortars are duds.

This post is crossposted at the Columbia Journalism Review.