Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (4 page)

Senior AQ leaders detested the Shi’a as heretics, but they viewed America and its allies as the main, and by far the more important, enemy. They sought a global Islamic uprising, using an attrition strategy – bleeding the United States and its allies dry – to force Western influence out of the Muslim world, after which they planned to inherit the wreckage. As Zawahiri explained in a letter to Zarqawi, this strategy had four phases:

The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq.

The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate over as much territory as you can, to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans, immediately upon their exit . . .

The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighbouring Iraq.

The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.

The goal of this approach – which, remember, came from AQ leaders in Pakistan, not Zarqawi in Iraq – was to defeat the occupation through a mass uprising – what Marxist guerrillas would call a Popular Front strategy. For core AQ, a Shi’a–Sunni civil war in Iraq was, at best, a distraction from the main effort. As Zawahiri reassured Zarqawi, they could always deal with the Shi’a and the apostates later.

Later in the same letter, Zawahiri – in a schoolmasterly, passive-aggressive tone that must have infuriated the hot-tempered Zarqawi, if he ever read it – posed a series of snide, pointed questions about AQI’s war against the Shi’a.

Indeed, questions will circulate among mujahedeen circles and their opinion makers about the correctness of this conflict with the Shia at this time. Is it something that is unavoidable? Or, is it something can be put off until the force of the mujahed movement in Iraq gets stronger? And if some of the operations were necessary for self-defence, were all of the operations necessary? Or, were there some operations that weren’t called for? And is the opening of another front now in addition to the front against the Americans and the government a wise decision? Or, does this conflict with the Shia lift the burden from the Americans by diverting the mujahedeen to the Shia, while the Americans continue to control matters from afar? And if the attacks on Shia leaders were necessary to put a stop to their plans, then why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won’t this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? And can the mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that? And why kill ordinary Shia considering that they are forgiven because of their ignorance? And what loss will befall us if we did not attack the Shia? And do the brothers forget that we have more than one hundred prisoners – many of whom are from the leadership who are wanted in their countries – in the custody of the Iranians? And even if we attack the Shia out of necessity, then why do you announce this matter and make it public, which compels the Iranians to take counter-measures? And do the brothers forget that both we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us?

The message was clear: Zarqawi’s brutality was undermining AQ’s popular front strategy, turning off supporters and alienating potential allies. Zarqawi was starting to piss off Zawahiri and the other AQ leaders – he was giving terrorism a bad name.

Unlike Zawahiri, Zarqawi’s group saw (and ISIS still sees) the Shi’a as the main enemy, not a distraction. They viewed the West and Iran as being in a
de facto
alliance against the true faith, with Shi’a domination the greater threat. They perceived a four-fold opportunity: creating a bad enough sectarian conflict would make Iraq ungovernable, cement AQI’s control over the Sunnis, allow them to create an Islamic State, and help draw other Sunni states into a unified caliphate. For senior AQ figures like Zawahiri, the caliphate was a vague, utopian ideal that helped unify disparate groups precisely because it was so far off in the future. For Zarqawi and AQI – like ISIS today – the caliphate was an immediate, real-world objective, and a sectarian war with the Shi’a was the quickest road to it.

This disagreement may have proven fatal for Zarqawi. Predictably, given the haughty, independent streak he’d shown from the start, he ignored Zawahiri, escalating his slaughter of Shi’a and triggering a breakdown between AQI and AQ. He was killed on 7 June 2006 in a US airstrike on his safe house north of Baghdad, after an intelligence tip-off and amid persistent rumours that AQ leaders had sold him out. But the slaughter outlived its instigator – like most conflicts, once rolling, it took on a life of its own.

By November 2006 the violence had massively escalated, and US public support had plummeted to the point where President Bush was forced to make a change. He replaced Rumsfeld, pushed Vice President Cheney aside and took direct charge of the war, appointing General Petraeus to command in Iraq. He then launched the Surge – a wholehearted attempt to apply Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, plus more troops and heavier political leverage. This escalation of involvement was intended to protect the population, break AQI’s hold of fear over the community, stop the cycle of sectarian violence, force the Iraqi government to be more inclusive, and reduce civilian casualties. On a more basic level, President Bush’s actions made it clear to Iraqis, Americans and allies that his goal was to win, not just to leave. He was belatedly recognising an enduring truth; it’s far better to avoid getting dragged into counterinsurgency warfare in the first place, but once you’re there you have only two choices – you can leave early, or you can leave well.

I’d worked with Petraeus throughout 2006 and had enormous confidence in his ability to turn things around in Iraq. Not that I necessarily thought that was possible – in fact, from what I’d seen there over the preceding year, I gave the Surge a one-in-three chance at best. But I felt that, hard though it would be, if Petraeus couldn’t do it, nobody could. A few days after President Bush’s speech launching the Surge, Petraeus asked Secretary Rice to lend me to his staff in Baghdad as Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor.

Before deploying, I flew to Australia for briefings and, late one hot night in February 2007, was called to Prime Minister John Howard’s suite in Parliament House. I’d met the prime minister once before, the night before our intervention in East Timor in 1999, when he’d visited our base in Townsville to speak to the troops who’d be on the first planes in. Now, sitting in a green leather armchair in his office, he talked about Australia’s commitment to the US alliance, the need to play our part in freeing Iraq of terrorism, how it was impossible for a maritime, multicultural trading nation like Australia to be secure in an insecure world. At the end, in his quiet, concise way, he gave me his guidance for the deployment, which I scribbled inside the cover of my field notebook: “You have our 100% support. We’re committed to making this work. Do whatever it takes to help P [Petraeus] succeed. Keep me informed.”

A week later I was back in Baghdad.

THE WATERFALL SLIDE

Baghdad and the Belts, 2007

This time things were far worse. As I flew in on a C-130 troop transport from an airbase in Jordan, we had to circle for an hour over Baghdad International Airport; the loadmaster told me airspace over the city was closed, a firefight was raging on the edge of the Green Zone and F-16s were hitting snipers less than 1000 yards from the US embassy, pulling gun runs directly over the palace. We eventually landed but had to wait five hours for permission to make the run to the Green Zone along Route Irish, at that time the most dangerous ten-mile stretch of road in the world. I reached my sandbagged trailer behind the embassy well after midnight, just in time for a rocket attack, the fifth that day.

Despite my title, my job wasn’t to advise Petraeus – he didn’t need advice, least of all from me – but to help coalition and Iraqi units, aid agencies and embassy personnel adapt to the new strategy. You might think of it as a variation (a very particular variation, to be sure) of “change management”: helping a big, failing enterprise turn itself around. I’d spend a day or so in the Palace among Saddam’s byzantine floors, gargantuan helmeted heads and phallocentric Scud Missile murals, absorbing data between rocket attacks, before escaping back to the field. I’d accompany patrols, sit in on meetings with community leaders, develop an understanding of people’s problems and work with them to develop a fix – new tactics, new technology, re-purposing a particular piece of kit, whatever it might be.

As Iraqi and coalition units got to know me, and realised I could offer support and relay their concerns, but that I wouldn’t carry tales to Baghdad unasked, we developed a close rapport. And since most people in Iraq, even in remote outposts, had email, I was soon plugged into a network of junior leaders who’d tell me their problems and offer unvarnished advice on how we could better handle the battle. I connected them with each other, so that they began to pass information across units and districts, sharing lessons and helping the organisation adapt. I used this network to field-test a set of best practices (later codified as
Multi-National Force Iraq Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance
, the tactical blueprint for the Surge).

Four months in, it was far from clear that the Surge was going to work. By then I was intimately aware of how difficult and dangerous it was proving to be for the troops who had to execute it. We’d gotten off the bases and built a network of combat outposts across Baghdad. The plan was to build trust and begin listening –
really
listening – to the Iraqis, working with them to co-design solutions, and figuring out Iraqi ways to get things done that were obvious to them but that we might never have considered. We expanded “district-hardening” programs – blast walls, checkpoints and neighbourhood-watch groups – that had been started the previous year, trying to break the cycle of tit-for-tat sectarian slaughter. We instituted controls on the abuses of Iraqi police and military units, mainly by accompanying them everywhere and second-guessing their every move. We reduced civilian losses a little, and generated better intelligence through tip-offs from the community. But our casualties were still too high – the highest in the war so far – and the rate of suicide bombings, sniper attacks, roadside bombs and mortar hits was up, not down.

I was no fan of President Bush, whose actions of the past four years had led us to this desperate position. I thought the War on Terror had been mishandled from the outset: through aggregating threats, through the diversion into Iraq, and then through failure to manage the occupation properly while other theatres languished. But in spite of this, when the President took charge in 2007, I found myself impressed by the man’s leadership, grasp of detail and determination. Two things epitomised this for me: the first was his performance at a conference in Tampa, Florida, on 1 May 2007.

Tampa was a coalition conference – almost fifty countries represented – and the President spoke after lunch on the first day. He was singularly unimpressive: folksy, shallow and upbeat in a way that the facts on the ground simply didn’t justify. But then he finished his remarks and asked the television cameras to leave. As soon as the doors closed his voice changed, his body language became more alert, and he began to talk in a concrete, specific, realistic way. He showed a comprehensive grasp of both tactical-level detail and the big picture, and – what impressed me most – a clear understanding of exactly what was, and was not, working on the ground. (I found myself wondering why he felt he needed to conceal this side of himself from the media: I, for one, would have found it far more reassuring than his relentlessly positive public persona.) Then he began to appeal to coalition members to raise their commitment – and in so doing demonstrated emotional intelligence, as well as deep knowledge of what nations were already providing and of the political constraints on their contributions. It was a
tour de force
of coalition leadership, and by the end he’d converted my scepticism into a grudging acceptance that we
might
just get it done.

The second illustration of the President’s leadership was his focused engagement, epitomised by continual phone calls and videoconferences with General Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi leaders. On the Iraqi side, President Bush made it clear to Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, that he was paying close attention, that Maliki had his support, but that the United States would insist on a fair distribution of power among Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’a and prevent any one group from exploiting its opponents. This was a message only the President could credibly send, and it was critical in encouraging Maliki to act more inclusively during this period, and in restraining some of his officials.

However good the President’s performance during the Surge, we should never have been there, of course. Even taking the invasion as a given, he should never have let things get this bad. He shouldn’t have waited three years to fire Rumsfeld, sideline Cheney and take charge – above all, he should have thought the invasion through. And while his attention was central to the improvement we started to see in 2007, it made the tunnel vision even worse. It would have been thoroughly awesome, in short, if we’d never been in this situation at all. But here we were, and with the President’s engagement, Petraeus’s leadership and the talent of commanders like General Raymond Odierno and people at every level below him, we were finally getting out of the hole we’d dug for ourselves. And by June a new factor had emerged: the Anbar Awakening.