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Prewar planning failures
highlighted
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - For the second time in as
many months, a report by a key Pentagon advisory
group has implicitly taken the administration of
President George W Bush to task for major failures
in prewar planning, particularly with respect to
Iraq.
A 220-page report, quietly released
late last month by the Defense Science Board
(DSB), concludes that the administration clearly
underestimated the number of troops and cost
required to achieve its political objectives in
Iraq. The report, "Transition to and from
Hostilities", explicitly contradicts another key
assumption of top Pentagon officials before the
Iraq war that Washington could quickly reduce its
troop presence after ousting the regime of
president Saddam Hussein.
"We believe that
more people are needed in-theater for
stabilization and reconstruction operations than
for combat operations," asserts the report, which
based its conclusions on a study of US military
interventions over the past 15 years.
Moreover, the DSB task force, which
interviewed scores of current and former US
officials with experience in war-fighting,
counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and
reconstruction, found that stabilization of
"disordered societies, with ambitious goals
involving lasting cultural change, may require 20
troops per 1,000 indigenous people".
Washington currently has 150,000 troops in
Iraq, a presence that translates into only six
troops for every 1,000 Iraqis - far short of the
roughly 500,000 troops the task force indicates
would be necessary in Iraq. A 5:1,000 ratio may be
sufficient to stabilize "relatively ordered"
societies for which the United States is not
seeking to achieve "ambitious goals", such, as
presumably, implanting a democratic, pro-Western
government.
"The United States will
sometimes have ambitious goals for transforming a
society in a conflicted environment," according to
the report. "Those goals may well demand 20 troops
per 1,000 inhabitants ... working for five to
eight years. Given that we may have three to five
stabilization and reconstruction activities under
way concurrently, it is clear that very
substantial resources are needed to accomplish
national objectives."
The report also
concludes that the State Department is much better
equipped to organize and oversee reconstruction
operations than the Bush administration, which
gave the job in Iraq initially to the Pentagon,
had recognized. It calls for the Defense
Department to support substantially increased
resources for the State Department to meet that
mandate.
The DSB consists of volunteer
experts - mostly from the private sector - chosen
by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to advise him
on key issues on which they have special
expertise. In many cases, Rumsfeld follows its
recommendations. Indeed, after the submission of
its originally classified report last fall,
Rumsfeld issued a directive instructing the
military's regional commanders to "develop and
maintain" new war plans specifically designed to
address stabilization and reconstruction issues,
another major recommendation highlighted in the
report.
The latest report follows another
on "strategic communication" by the DSB made
public in November (see Pentagon
pinpoints propaganda failures, November
30, 2004). That study also challenged a number of
core assumptions about the administration's "war
on terrorism", especially its insistence that
radical Islamists "hate" the United States because
of its "freedom" and democratic practices, rather
than concrete US policies in the region, such as
its staunch support for Israel against the
Palestinians, the invasion of Iraq, and its
backing for Arab autocrats.
Warning that
Washington was losing the propaganda war to the
Islamists because of its perceived "arrogance,
opportunism and double standards", the report
argued that the administration's insistence that
it wants to bring democracy to Islamic societies
was "seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy"
based on a faulty assumption that Arabs, in
particular, are "like the enslaved people of the
old communist world".
The latest report
does not specifically address either the "war on
terrorism" or the situation in Iraq, but its
conclusions are certain to fuel the ongoing
controversy over whether Pentagon civilians led by
Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and
Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith in effect
"lost" the Iraq war by ignoring warnings from the
State Department, the intelligence community and
the uniformed military that stabilizing the
country would require many more troops than they
wished to deploy.
Before the war, the
Pentagon civilians, who were backed by Vice
President Dick Cheney, sought to exclude the State
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) from postwar planning and operations largely
because of their belief that the two agencies
would promote Sunni Arab nationalists in the place
of Saddam Hussein. They, on the other hand,
supported exiled leader Ahmad Chalabi, a secular
Shi'ite who, they believed, was committed to a
thorough de-Ba'athification of Iraq and staunch
alignment with the US and even Israel.
They also believed Chalabi's repeated
assurances that US troops would be greeted as
"liberators" by virtually all Iraqis rather than
as "occupiers", and so planned to draw down
quickly the 140,000 troops who invaded the country
to only about 30,000 by early 2005.
In one
particularly notorious case, Wolfowitz publicly
ridiculed estimates by the army chief of staff,
General Eric Shinseki, that "several hundred
thousand" troops at least would be required to
stabilize the country.
Rumsfeld, who had
downgraded a special army institute devoted to
peacekeeping and stabilization shortly after
taking over the Pentagon, also wanted to make Iraq
a model for a "transformed" military that, with
massive firepower, precision weapons, superior
technology and mobility, could quickly overwhelm
the enemy.
While the military objective
was indeed quickly achieved, the absence of a
sufficiently large force, let alone one
experienced in peacekeeping and stabilization
operations, created a major security vacuum that
was filled over the following months by an
insurgency that, the head of Iraqi intelligence
said last week, has grown to some 30,000 full-time
fighters backed by 200,000 supporters.
Instead of focusing on Iraq, the DSB task
force examined US combat operations since the end
of the Cold War and their aftermath and found that
more troops not only were required for
stabilization than for combat, but that
stabilization operations have typically lasted for
five to eight years.
The Pentagon,
according to the report, "has not yet embraced
stabilization and reconstruction operations as an
explicit mission with the same seriousness as
combat operations. This mindset must be changed."
In addition, it went on, the Pentagon had
failed to establish a strong working relationship
with the State Department, whose regional
expertise, knowledge of culture, diplomatic
skills, and contacts with international agencies
and non-governmental organizations were critical
to achieving success in post-conflict situations.
"The orchestration of all instruments of
US power in peacetime might obviate the need for
many military excursions to achieve political
objectives; or, failing that, at least better
prepare us to achieve political objectives during
stabilization and reconstruction operations," the
report notes in an apparent critique of the both
the administration's rush to war and the
Pentagon's postwar performance.
(Inter
Press Service) |
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