All the young punks

Earlier this week, I participated in a Pentagon conference call with Colonel Daniel Roper, director of the Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Since I’ve spent the bulk of my time on this site writing about the big counterinsurgency effort currently underway in Iraq—funding the Sons of Iraq movement—I figured it would be fruitful to ask the Colonel what the Center thinks is the way forward with the group.

Remember, the Sons of Iraq—or Concerned Local Citizens, take your pick—are comprised of 80,000 armed Iraqis the American command is paying $10 a day apiece to, so that they’ll pull security in their own neighborhoods. The plan has cost the American taxpayer $143 million so far, and I was wondering what the endgame was, from the perspective of a American military think tank devoted to just such issues.

 Turns out, I asked the wrong guy. The Counterinsurgency Center isn’t studying the issue at all. The Colonel did, however, offer that:

I saw a statement Lieutenant General Odierno made shortly after coming back from MNTI Command, and I believe he said that approximately 20 percent of the people that were recruited into the…[Sons of Iraq]…were going to make their way into the Iraqi security -- you know, actually, the Iraqi police or maybe the Iraqi army because of the different requirements physical and so forth for them to -- to meet those demands and those criteria.

But it's an initial step -- the CLC by itself is not -- is not any kind of long-term strategy. It does an initial bit of vetting, it gets the bad guys off the street, it gets them, you know, in the tent, and then it's up to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi governance processes to provide them the economic opportunity to have some other meaningful form of employment.

This was really disappointing, considering that, as Col. Roper said earlier in the call, his organization is tasked with “researching best practices from the past in order to prepare ourselves for the future,” and working on the improvement of doctrine. What better way to improve doctrine and research best practices than to look at what is a major part of our current counterinsurgency plan in Iraq?

His answer resembled what commanders on the ground in Iraq told me when I asked what they thought we should do with the Sons of Iraq. The difference being, Col. Roper’s center is supposed to be figuring this stuff out, whereas the soldiers on the ground are merely following orders.

For a better look at what’s happening with the Sons of Iraq groups, and efforts to wrest some of these fighters away from their checkpoints and into other lines of work, check out the Los Angeles Times’ Alexandra Zavis’ latest piece from Iraq:

U.S. and Iraqi officials are now hammering out details of a plan to revive local economies and create new opportunities for the fighters through vocational training, public works schemes, farm revitalization programs, micro-grants and business start-up loans. The two governments have committed $155 million apiece to the projects.

Problem is, not all of the guys at the checkpoints are interested in being retrained.
 

Nasir, the unemployed wedding singer, readily agreed to join the new program. But it has not been easy to persuade the proud tribesmen to trade in their AK-47s for trash bags and brooms. Some were wealthy landowners under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime. Many hold university degrees.

"I graduated from the teaching college. I don't want to sweep the streets," said Daoud Salman, a tall man in traditional Arab robes.

Salman, a father of four, said his former comrades-in-arms laugh at him when they see him picking up trash and burning reeds to clear canals supplying water to farms.

This isn’t to say that the job training programs won’t be successful, at least in part. But with 80,000 mostly Sunni men out there—only 20 percent of whom the Shia-controlled government is willing to absorb into the Army and Police—we better get the Iraqis to pony up more money to get these guys some more comprehensive training than sweeping the streets.

Comments

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 03/24/2008 News and Personal dispatches from the front lines.

http://thunderrun.blogspot.com/2008/03/from-front-03242008.html