Fighting talk, but who's going to
fight? By David Isenberg
The new consensus in Washington is that US
troop withdrawals from Iraq are a question of
when, not if, and how many.
Answers
include US military sources saying that the
current force of about 160,000 could be reduced by
two-fifths by the end of next year, and that,
depending on the security situation, 20,000 or
more troops could start to pull out in the next
three months.
Some groups, such as the
Washington, DC-based Center for American Progress,
have released plans in which 80,000 of the
total troops deployed in Iraq
would be redeployed by the end of 2006.
However, all these plans depend on one
thing; the ability of Iraqi military and security
forces to operate effectively against the
insurgents in the place of US forces. This, in
turn, is dependent on the ability of the US and
other coalition forces to equip and train these
forces. Unfortunately, until about a year ago,
this was something that was done as an
afterthought, if at all.
Not now, though.
US President George W Bush, speaking to cadets at
the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on
Wednesday, spent considerable time outlining what
has been done, and what will be done, to train up
a "substitute" force in Iraq.
This is not
going to be an easy task, with recent reports from
Iraq suggesting that the Iraqi security forces -
and their sectarian make-up - are themselves
contributing to the country's destabilization.
An extensive article in the December issue
of Atlantic Monthly by James Fallows details some
of the problems:
Time and again since the training
effort began, inspection teams from Congress,
the Government Accountability Office (GAO),
think tanks and the military itself have visited
Iraq and come to the same conclusion: the
readiness of many Iraqi units is low, their
loyalty and morale are questionable, regional
and ethnic divisions are sharp, their reported
numbers overstate their real effectiveness.
The numbers are at best imperfect
measures. Early this year, the American-led
training command shifted its emphasis from simple
head counts of Iraqi troops to an assessment of
unit readiness based on a four-part classification
scheme.
Level 1, the highest, was for
"fully capable" units - those that could plan,
execute and maintain counterinsurgency operations
with no help whatsoever. Last summer, Pentagon
officials said that three Iraqi units, out of a
total of 115 police and army battalions, had
reached this level. In September, the US military
commander in Iraq, Army General George Casey,
lowered that estimate to one.
Level 2 was
for "capable" units, which can fight against
insurgents as long as the US provides operational
assistance (air support, logistics, communications
and so on). Marine General Peter Pace, who is now
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in
summer that just under one third of Iraqi army
units had reached this level. A few more had by
fall.
Level 3, for "partially capable"
units, included those that could provide extra
manpower in efforts planned, led, supplied and
sustained by Americans. The remaining two thirds
of Iraqi army units, and half the police, were in
this category.
Level 4, "incapable" units,
were those that were of no help whatsoever in
fighting the insurgency. Half of all police units
were so classified.
In short, if American
troops disappeared tomorrow, Iraq would have
essentially no independent security force. Half
its policemen would be considered worthless, and
the other half would depend on external help for
organization, direction and support. Two thirds of
the army would be in the same dependent position,
and even the better-prepared one third would
suffer significant limitations without foreign
help.
As Fallows notes, it was not until
mid-2004 that the US became serious about the
training effort. After former ambassador L Paul
Bremer went home and the Coalition Provisional
Authority ceased to exist, a new American army
general, Dave Petraeus, arrived to supervise the
training of Iraqis. He is one of the military's
golden boys.
Under Petraeus, the training
command abandoned an often ridiculed way of
measuring progress. At first Americans had counted
all Iraqis who were simply "on duty" - a total
that swelled to more than 200,000 by March of
2004. Petraeus introduced an assessment of "unit
readiness", as noted above.
Training had
been underfunded in mid-2004, but more money and
equipment started to arrive. The training strategy
also changed. More emphasis was put on embedding
US advisers with Iraqi units. Teams of Iraqi foot
soldiers were matched with US units that could
provide the air cover and other advanced services
they needed. Contrary to procedures under Saddam
Hussein, Petraeus introduced live-fire exercises
for new Iraqi recruits.
Petraeus, however,
is not without problems. His record indicates that
through his career, starting in 1974, he was more
of a military intellectual than a battlefield
leader. Although he was in the top 50 of his class
of 733 at West Point and received a PhD in just
two years at Princeton, prior to Iraq he had only
two field commands, with the 101st Air Mobile and
82nd Airborne divisions.
Next to doing
body counts, assessments of military readiness
have long been among the most controversial and
easily manipulated of military measurements. And
embedding US advisers in Iraqi units is hardly
novel. That is exactly what US forces did in
Vietnam 40 years ago.
On November 30, at
the time Bush was giving a speech at the US Naval
Academy, the White House released a "US National
Strategy for Victory in Iraq" report. Among its
talking points was the claim: "As of November
2005, there were more than 212,000 trained and
equipped Iraqi security forces, compared with
96,000 in September of last year."
But as
the blog Arms Control Wonk pointed out the same
day, Iraq did not, however, have 96,000 trained
and equipped Iraqi security forces in September
2004. Reuters obtained internal Defense Department
documents in September 2004 that revealed only
8,169 had completed the full eight-week academy
training. So 46,176 of what were publicly called
"trained and equipped" forces were listed
privately as "untrained".
It is true that
Iraqi security forces are improving, both
quantitatively and qualitatively. But they are far
from being ready to operate on their own. A
mid-November report by Anthony Cordesman of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies
pointed out, "The progress the coalition has
claimed does not mean that the Iraqi force
development effort can, as yet, claim to be
successful. Iraqi forces still do have major
weaknesses, and the problems in the Ministry of
Defense required a significant change in the
coalition advisory effort as recently as October
1, 2005."
It is best to view with
skepticism administration claims when it comes to
numbers about Iraqi military and security forces.
As the Center for American Progress noted on
November 30:
In February 2004, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed, "There are over
210,000 Iraqis serving in the security forces.
That's an amazing accomplishment." Seven months
later, in September 2004, Rumsfeld said that
95,000 trained Iraqi troops were taking part in
security operations, less than half the number
the administration had been publicizing. A year
later, General George Casey testified before
Congress that the number of Iraqi battalions
rated at the highest level of readiness had
dropped from three to one. "That number has
apparently not changed." Now, just a few months
later, the administration is claiming there are
212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security
forces. But as it has been for the past
two-and-a-half years, it is unclear exactly what
measuring sticks [the administration] is using,
and whether they present the full picture.
Rotten to the core Apart
from the actual number of competent personnel, the
Iraqi security forces are also cause for worry in
other areas, reports Jim Lobe of Inter
Press Service.
A spate of articles in the
mainstream US media since the discovery two weeks
ago by US troops of a secret underground prison in
the Iraqi Interior Ministry, where some 170 Sunni
Arab men and boys had been subjected to torture
and ill-treatment, has detailed the existence of
death squads in the largely Shi'ite police, or
special commandos operating with their support.
These units appear to be under the control
of two sectarian militias that have successfully
infiltrated the security forces - the
Iranian-trained Badr Organization, the armed wing
of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI); and the Mahdi Army, which is led
by the Shi'ite nationalist politician, Muqtada
al-Sadr.
Operating through or with the
Iraqi security forces, the two groups, which are
themselves rivals, have abducted, tortured and
executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Sunni
males, according to front-page reports that have
appeared this week in the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times and Knight-Ridder newspapers.
"Hundreds of accounts of killings and
abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of
them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim
that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi
men in uniform without warrant or explanation,"
the New York Times reported on Tuesday. "Some
Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and
fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid
burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies
apparently made by electric drills. Many have
simply vanished."
The motives for the
abductions are mixed, according to the reports. In
some cases, they appear directed against suspected
insurgents or their supporters. In others, they
seem designed to "ethnically cleanse" certain
neighborhoods. In still others, they appear aimed
at achieving revenge for decades of discrimination
and repression by the Ba'athist regime, which
generally privileged Sunni citizens.
The
repression that is now directed against the Sunni
community by the police and commandos and their
sectarian auxiliaries threatens the Bush
administration's plan to let the Iraqi security
forces fight the largely Sunni insurgency on their
own. The perception that those security personnel
- about 110,000 of whom are controlled by the
Interior Ministry - are in fact acting against
Sunnis on behalf of Shi'ite political parties will
likely only fuel the insurgency, despite new US
efforts to persuade Sunnis that their interests
will be protected.
"[The abuses] undermine
the US effort to stabilize the nation, and train
and equip Iraq's security forces - the Bush
administration's key prerequisites for the
eventual withdrawal of American troops," said the
Los Angeles Times in a lengthy article that noted
that US military advisors in Iraq, as well as the
Interior Ministry's inspector general, concurred
that "death squads" were indeed operating within
the security forces.
"It's increasingly
becoming a war of all against all, with no rules,"
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert London's International
Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Wall
Street Journal this week. "The Iraqi security
forces themselves are becoming just another of the
players, and if they owe allegiance to anything,
it's to their commanders or communities, and not
remotely to the state itself."
The problem
itself is not a new one, particularly after US
forces began conducting "joint" operations with
Iraqi forces - which had been largely purged of
Ba'athists by the Coalition Provisional Authority
- in 2004. The newly constituted Iraqi forces
consisted largely of units recruited from Kurdish
peshmerga or Shi'ite militias. Their operations in
the so-called Sunni triangle - combined with and
often following those of US forces - clearly
helped fuel the insurgency.
While US
commanders have tried to remedy this problem - in
part by ending the Iraqi army's ban on recruiting
most former Ba'athist junior officers in early
November and paying tribal militias to maintain
order - the SCIRI-controlled Interior Ministry has
been more resistant, even after the discovery of
the secret prison.
While Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jaafari promised that the incident would
be fully investigated and those responsible
punished, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a former
leader of the Badr militia, played down the
abuses.
But it now appears that the prison
was just the tip of the iceberg of anti-Sunni
operations conducted by the police and commandos
and their auxiliaries, as hundreds of bodies of
Sunni males, many with their hands still bound by
police handcuffs, have turned up in garbage dumps,
rivers and alongside roads in recent months,
according to the newspaper reports. In many cases,
the victims had been abducted, sometimes in groups
of a dozen or more, by individuals who identified
themselves as police or commandos.
"These
reports are definitely credible and very
worrisome," said Joe Stork, a veteran Middle East
specialist at Human Rights Watch in Washington.
Last week, former Iraqi prime minister
Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who is trying to
woo Sunni support in next month's elections,
charged that the level of repression recalled
former president Saddam Hussein's reign. "People
are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," he
told the London Observer.
While Stork
called that characterization "a bit much", he
stressed that Washington should be very concerned
about the situation.
But while US military
commanders were willing to tell reporters about
the abuses, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
discounted the reports as "unverified" during a
press conference on Tuesday.
"There's ...
a political campaign [in Iraq] taking place, and
we ought to be aware of that, that there are going
to be a lot of charges and countercharges and
allegations," he told a reporter who asked about
the death squad reports. "And they may very well
be timed - as they are in every country in the
world that has a free political system - they may
be timed in a way to seek advantage," he said.
David Isenberg, a senior analyst
with the Washington-based British American
Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide
background in arms control and national security
issues. The views expressed are his own.
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