Last week, the news from Iraq was pretty grim. Five U.S. soldiers were killed near Mosul, two female suicide bombers struck in Baghdad, killing scores of innocent civilians, and leaders of the Concerned Local Citizens--Iraqis who are paid $300 a month by American forces to police their own neighborhoods--were targeted by al Qaeda and other indigenous insurgent groups. But there was a lot more going on in Iraq than that. Most critically for the current war effort are the small combat outposts spread throughout the country as part of General Petraeus' counterinsurgency plan -- company-sized bases that are trying to build some sort of political and security infrastructure from the ground up. This is what the American war effort arguably should have been about all along, but only now are American forces truly fighting a counterinsurgency.
Out in the muddy winter farmland just northwest of Baghdad,
wedged between Baghdad and Anbar province, the 760 soldiers of the
Army's 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade
Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, attached to the 2nd Stryker
Calvary Regiment are in the middle of the fight. Out here amid the
irrigation canals and tall reed lines that dissect the landscape
stands Combat Outpost Courage, manned by the 180 soldiers of Charlie
Company. The base is little more than a ring of T-walls surrounding
a tall farmhouse and a smattering of tents. Like other combat outposts
across Iraq, the men of Charlie company live a Spartan lifestyle,
eating their meals on cardboard trays on which food from large
plastic bins is slopped, showering in trailers, and using portable
toilets. A small trailer with several telephones and computers for
Internet access serves as their contact with the outside world.
The company arrived at the outpost on January 1, 2008, and will
call this dot on the map of Iraq home for the next 15 months. It's
all part of the counterinsurgency plan that began to show successes
in late 2007, taking U.S. forces away from the big bases and
scattering them around the country to swim like Mao's fish in the
sea of the people.
Here, company commander Captain Glen Helberg, an affable 30-
year old Virginian, can walk down the road to a local sheik's house
for dinner to discuss local politics, and locals can walk up to the
gates to share information or lodge complaints. Helberg, and other
company grade officers like him, is doing the messy business of local
politics with little help from the Iraqi government, which hardly
exists in the area, and little input from an American diplomatic corps
that ideally would be right there with him.
There is no good definition of victory in a fight like this, nor is
there any good way to pull out, not with the slow, tenuous progress
soldiers are making at the local level. This isn't to say that we're
winning--or losing--the fight, only that the United States at a crucial
juncture where things can easily swing back toward chaos, or ahead to
increased security, and quickly. The choice at this point truly lies
with the Iraqi people, and their government, or whatever branches
of their government might actually functioning. American soldiers out
here are at one of those famous crossroads in Iraq that pundits love to
proclaim to have found, performing several levels beyond their pay grade
in acting simultaneously as war fighters, diplomats, civil servants and
tribal consigliores, while trying to build trust between Sunni and Shia
sheiks, the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police, local Nahia and Qada councils
(something like city and county governments) and the Concerned Local
Citizens movement, any of whom might be working at cross-purposes with
one another at any given time.
When I came to Courage in late January, Helberg's men had only
taken ownership of the area from the 2/5 Calvary a few weeks
before, but already he and his platoon leaders were well-versed in
the politics of the area. If you were looking for a down and dirty
example of the application of counterinsurgency doctrine on the
ground, you could hardly find a better place.
