Tactics versus Strategy
Via the comments at Balloon Juice, an article regarding the lack of recent debate over the Iraq War strategy. The recent drop in US casualties has been used to claim a success for the “surge” strategy, without any real analysis whether or not the strategy being employed is actually the same as the surge proponents promised at its beginning or if it bodes well for future development in the country.
Body counts are only one small part of a much larger puzzle. What I want to know is not the day to day casualty trends, or good news stories from some carefully selected hamlet, or the latest assassination of an Awakening shaykh. I want to know: does the devolution to the local level make strategic sense, even if it reaps short-term tactical sense? Towards what endpoint are the tactics leading? Do we want to see a unified Iraq with a sustainable political accord - the official goal of American policy, as Undersecretary of State Nick Burns reminded the DACOR audience yesterday? If so, are American political and military tactics encouraging or discouraging such an outcome? . . .
I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session conversations) about where Iraq was heading: towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.
As I've argued repeatedly, this is the most likely effect, intended or otherwise, of the Petraeus-Crocker tactics. The US is empowering local actors at the expense of the national level, while both communities are fragmenting at a remarkable rate. The Sunni side is divided among the various insurgency factions (their efforts at forming a Political Council notwithstanding), the various Awakenings (which are themselves internally divided, bickering over power and personalities), tribes and local leaders looking out for their own, and an al-Qaeda movement which peaked last fall when it launched its abortive and self-defeating bid for hegemony with its ill-fated Islamic State of Iraq project. On the Shia side, the UIA has fragmented, the Mahdi Army has fragmented (though reportedly Sadr has used the ceasefire period to try to sort things out), Badrists and Sadrists are fighting in the streeets, Sistani has lost influence and his aides are being murdered at an alarming rate, and as Jon Alterman has pointed out there are some 144 competing militias in Basra alone.
This kind of fragmentation might help the US in its tactical maneuvers at the local level, and buy local stability in the short term. But it is absolute anathema to any kind of national deal. As Jim Fearon, one of the leading political scientists working on civil wars, recently put it, "a power-sharing deal tends to hold only when every side is relatively cohesive. How can one party expect that another will live up to its obligations if it has no effective control over its own members?" It also deeply complicates any neat ideas about partition, of course, since there are no unified blocs to which one could easily devolve power.
Tactics working against strategy - that's been the concern I've been expressing for many months now. I haven't been reassured. Instead of getting sucked into debates over body counts, or clutching at whatever good or bad news crosses the headlines each morning, the national debate should be looking at the big picture. It isn't about how we are doing day to day - what are we trying to achieve?
The complete fragmentation of the Iraqi state into myriad competing militias now seems a foregone conclusion, particularly given the US has decided to support those local militias in an attempt to reduce violence and its own casualties. This has worked in the short term in places like Anbar, where the local leadership used the opportunity to rid themselves of AQI, but the local leadership is no more supportive of the central government than they were before, or, for that matter, than AQI was.
Add the recent kidnapping of Sunni sheiks by an offshoot of al-Sadr’s Shiite forces, and you can see that this model isn’t exactly inspiring national reconciliation and cooperation.
The situation in Basra, which the British have basically abandoned to the Iraqis, is thought by some to be a model of just what may happen in all of Iraq when the US and what’s left of the coalition pulls itself out of the cities and leaves them to Iraqis. The British experience is instructive.
The British Army campaign in Basra is exhausted and looking for a way out. That is the conclusion of one of the most senior Army officers in Iraq, in a necessarily anonymous interview with our foreign correspondent Gethin Chamberlain today.
"We are tired of firing at people," the officer said. "We would prefer to find a political accommodation."
The report paints a bleak picture of an Iraq in which the British have ceded control of Basra city, and must even ask the local Shia militias for permission to skirt its edges. The Iraqis within Basra have been effectively surrendered to rule by paramilitary squads, and the British-trained Iraqi police are ineffectual and compromised. Politically, the British are placing their faith in a Shia general, Gen Mohan al-Furayji, and negotiating with him in preference to the elected provincial governor.
They;re not even trying to fight anymore, and a recent story in the Washington Post makes it apparent the US Army is doing much the same, if not in an official capacity.
And this does all lead to a drop in casualties, if only temporarily, but achieves virtually nothing else. As for the last part of Marc's post:
UPDATE: one of the commenters below brings up the point that the sheer magnitude of oil resources in Iraq makes control of Baghdad so valuable that an Afghan or Somali style warlordism is unlikely. That's a good point, which actually did come up in the DACOR panel discussion, made by Jim Planke I believe. The upshot is that the model for Iraq's future may most plausibly by Nigeria. So, as before it's worth thinking about whether a Nigeria outcome (as opposed to Somali or Lebanese or any other outcome) is compatible with US interests (and Iraqi aspirations) and worth the expenditure of US resources to achieve.
The question is more whether Nigeria will start looking like Iraq than the other way around. Both the insurgents in Iraq and in the Nigerian delta have proven a remarkable capability to limit the transport and production of oil by targeting infrastructure and occasionally oil workers. This disruption of oil supplies has helped push the price into record territory, which makes profits from oil bunkering and other black market opportunities much more lucrative. Indeed, this is a large part of how the Iraqi insurgency funds itself.
Given the very real possibility that Peak Oil is here or very soon approaching, oil prices aren't about to diminish significantly, which allows small groups to effectively hold their governments ransom by denying them the ability to get the oil to market. That not only makes their black market sales even more lucrative, but denies the central government the revenue it needs to provide the services it has to in order to win over the population.
And if you think that this kind of disruption will encourage the oil companies to come to the aid of that central government to exert its control, you might want to remember that some companies are already negotiating separate contracts with Kurdish authorities because the central government can't agree on an oil bill favourable to them. Which is to say that the oil industy will make its accommodations with whoever they need to so they can get their oil, the Iraqi government be damned.
The current "strategy", if it can be called that, is a holding pattern. The end result is no longer in American hands, and hasn't been for quite some time.
