Who owns Sadr City?

Earlier this week, the New York Times'€™ Michael Gordon wrote a piece about the pathetic state of government-sponsored services in Baghdad'€™s Sadr City—specifically, the Malaki government's failure to provide basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection, which is "€œjeopardizing the effort to win over the area's wary residents." This is a problem in and of itself, but it gets worse when you look at it through the lens of counterinsurgency operations. Since Sadr City is the base of operations for Moqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army, any lapse in government services directly aids Sadr, and harms the government. In fact, it's not far-fetched to say that for every pile of trash that the government lets pile up, another potential Sadr supporter--and anti-government fighter--€”is born.

Over at his blog, Global Guerrillas, John Robb writes that the situation in Sadr City is an example of how "€œcounter-insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq aren't gaining traction despite the enormous cost in lives and treasure already paid."

Robb tosses in his idea of what he terms "€œcommunity resilience," which he says, allows the "€œsmallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid" in areas like providing energy, food, security, communications and transportation. 

The concept can also be applied to counterinsurgencies, to "€œprovide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world."€ Essentially, then, the resilient community has some sort of reserve supply of goods and services, and enough of a cohesive civic structure to look after itself if there's a disruption of the systems that normally provide these goods and services. 

The question of how to do this is another story, and one that Robb's been thinking through over at his site. Robb i€™s right in saying that at the very least, the failure on the part of the government to provide basic services is a major problem for the forces fighting the Mahdi Army. It creates a legitimacy crisis. If a government can'€™t fulfill the most basic tenants of the social contract, then the people will go elsewhere for what they need. Just like Hezbullah in Lebanon, Sadr's forces have stepped in to fill this gap—providing medical care and financial assistance to the neighborhood's homogenous Shia population when the government can'€™t, or won'™t. If you were a poor Shia in Sadr
City, who would you side with, a mostly invisible government who allies with the occupiers, or the group of local nationalists who gave your kid medicine when she was sick?

In this vein, Michael Gordon's piece in the Times this morning is interesting, since it shows the US Army stepping in to fill the role the Iraqi government should be playing, by having U.S. Army medics treat sick and wounded Iraqi civilians in Sadr City.

As a side note to the Gordon story, does anyone know if he’s been embedded with the troops in Sadr City this whole time? He seems to file a story a day from the belly of the beast, and is making B company’s Captain Logan Veath a star.