Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (5 page)

As I’ve pointed out, AQI’s beliefs (and the contempt and violence with which they treated their community) were alien to most Iraqis, none more so than the Sunni tribes who dominate the country’s vast western desert, with its remote frontier crossings, dusty supply routes and ancient smuggling trails. The tribes had always been an authority unto themselves. They were conflict entrepreneurs from way back – their interests had a coincidental relationship with legality at the best of times – and they were no friends of Baghdad. But AQI was bad for business, grabbing the most lucrative smuggling routes, skimming money off the tribes’ earnings, bringing violence that shut down trade and coming in as outsiders to impose a virtually unrecognisable version of Islam.

Early in the war several tribal leaders had approached Special Forces in Anbar, proposing that they work together, only to be snubbed by higher headquarters. By 2005 some tribes – the Albu Mahal, the Rishawi – were rising against AQI in a series of rebellions the terrorists crushed with a brutality breathtaking even for them. AQ slaughtered tribal leaders, raped and enslaved women, disembowelled children in front of their parents, burned houses with families in them, but still the tribes rose, again and again.

It’s a persistent myth that the Surge only worked because of the lucky accident of the Awakening. Actually, the reverse is true: 2007 was the tribes’ fifth attempt to throw off AQI, and the reason this attempt succeeded, where the previous four failed, was the Surge. This time around, we finally had enough troops to protect people where they slept, led by commanders willing, able, funded and authorised to reconcile and partner with them. We had a command team and a doctrine that encouraged such partnership, and – not least – support from the White House to do whatever it took to end the violence. Each factor had existed at some point beforehand, but never all at the same time – and that made all the difference.

By September 2007 the carnage was slowing dramatically. Along with political and economic pressure to convince the Iraqi government and Shi’a militias to call off their death squads, this triggered a tipping point, with precipitous drops in all conflict indicators: roadside bombs, civilian deaths, coalition casualties, sectarian killings, numbers of incidents. Petraeus briefed a sceptical Congress that September, using a PowerPoint image we nicknamed the “waterfall slide” because the plummeting violence, represented graphically, looked like Niagara Falls. Against all odds, the Surge was working.

The ultimate reason for the turn-around, in my view, wasn’t counterinsurgency, the President’s engagement or the extra troops. It was the partnership we finally achieved with Iraqis and the measures we took to make ordinary civilians safe, which (by extension) reduced our losses. The horror of the preceding eighteen months, the most violent in the modern history of Iraq, helped us. Iraqis gazed into the abyss, the abyss looked back into them; they blinked and looked away.

But of course, the turn-around was fleeting, since it was founded on a scale of US presence, and thus a degree of US leverage, that was not to be sustained.

By October, after a month or so in Australia, I was back in Washington, now a US government employee, serving on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s staff as senior adviser for counterinsurgency, and with a new focus: Afghanistan. Secretary Rice was the first of President Bush’s cabinet to lift her eyes from Iraq to the bigger picture, to break the tunnel vision and try to get a grip of problems that had festered while we were distracted there. The most important of these was Afghanistan, and by late 2007 I was back out on the same outposts along the Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier, working the forested hills of Kunar and Nuristan, helping stand up the civilian counterinsurgency effort of the “Other War” – which had taken a decided turn for the worse. Afghanistan remained my focus for the rest of my service in government, in the field and in Washington. But I still had friends in Iraq. I’d wake five times a night thinking about it, tense up when I heard a truck’s airbrakes (which sound exactly like an incoming rocket), saw a random piece of debris on the road or heard an ambulance or a fire truck. I’d obsessively scan the news and the intelligence feed for people, places and units I knew.

This preoccupation made me watch the 2008 presidential election very closely. Through 2007 and 2008, Senator Obama (a strong opponent of the Surge and one of the last in Congress to admit it was working) campaigned on getting out of Iraq to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was in a stronger position than more experienced politicians because, being so junior, he hadn’t been in Congress for the vote to authorise force in Iraq in 2002. Senators Biden, Clinton and Kerry had all voted for the war, which caused them political difficulty. Senator Obama was free to be principled and consistent since (at that time) he’d yet to accumulate any baggage on Iraq.

As a non-political adviser, I happened to agree with Senator Obama that Iraq was a bad idea from the outset and that the occupation had been bungled, and I fully endorsed the second part of his argument – the need to stop the rot in Afghanistan. But the first part – the bit about leaving Iraq – had me extremely worried, and as President Obama took office these worries intensified.

I felt the new President and his team were confusing talk with action – as if a well-crafted narrative on some issue equated to handling it. If speeches could have fixed our problems in Iraq, then Rumsfeld, Bremer and President Bush could have seen off the insurgency in 2003 with mere rhetoric. The new team talked about what they’d “inherited,” as if Iraq had been foisted on them rather than being a problem they had (in theory) been thinking about and campaigning on for years, had actively sought responsibility for, and Americans had elected them to solve. They seemed to spend as much energy blaming others as taking responsibility for the next steps. There
was
a huge amount of blame to go around – virtually all of it attaching to the previous administration – but that didn’t change realities on the ground. Most seriously, I felt they were conflating
leaving
Iraq with
ending
the war. As mentioned earlier, the hard reality is that once you’re in a full-blown insurgency, your choices are tightly constrained: you either leave well, or you leave quickly. And as the Obama administration took the reins, all signs pointed to the latter.

CROCODILE

Iraq after the Surge

It’s worth pausing to consider how Iraq stood in January 2009. AQI had been virtually destroyed, its leaders describing it as being in “extraordinary crisis.” Violence was down dramatically. According to an independent assessment by Iraq Body Count, an NGO, in July 2007 (the first full month all Surge forces were in place) 2693 civilians died; by January 2009 the figure was down to 372 – an 86 per cent reduction. In that time, monthly incidents fell 79 per cent, from 908 to 195, US troops killed per month fell from 101 to 14 (an 86 per cent drop), while wounded per month were down 90 per cent, from 756 to 73. These statistics give a sense of the transformation, but the most important things were harder to quantify. Business confidence was up, kids were back at school and people were getting on with their lives. The trickle of intelligence had become a torrent, reflecting improved trust between the community and security forces. Muqtada al-Sadr, after losing several key lieutenants, had declared a ceasefire and exiled himself to Iran, so that violence from Shi’a militias also dropped dramatically.

Prime Minister Maliki was being more inclusive (albeit off a low baseline) towards Sunnis and Kurds. He’d personally led Iraqi forces against Shi’a militias in Basra, Iraq’s main southern city, in March 2008 – a hard-fought military action that was even tougher for a politician from a Shi’a sectarian party. He’d cleaned up some of his government’s abuses, removing corrupt officials in the finance and interior ministries. The police had improved (again, off a shockingly low base) and the army was more capable, with competent Special Operations Forces, some excellent infantry, improved skills and better equipment, logistics and maintenance. Under pressure from the coalition, competent officers had been promoted in the armed forces, and Sunni police or mixed-sect military units were protecting some Sunni-majority districts.

The Sons of Iraq (successors to the Awakening) had expanded: 110,000 young Sunni men were protecting (and, incidentally, deterring government abuse of) their communities. These men and their families – another half-million people, since most Iraqi families had four to five kids – were partnering with the coalition, when they would otherwise have been in the recruiting base for the insurgency. This had a huge impact on confidence in the Sunni community, which was no longer subject to hostile Shi’a occupation.

These improvements led some, then and later, to call the Surge a victory. This is wrong. First, even if the Surge had been a total success, it did nothing to advance the strategy from which we’d been distracted by the long detour to Baghdad. Second, as I’ve noted, the attention on Iraq was welcome, but it tightened the tunnel vision, so other crises received even less attention. Third, the drop in violence created breathing space for politicians to resolve their differences, but they didn’t use that space. Ultimately it was the presence of international troops, money, pressure and advisers that compelled Baghdad to act more inclusively – Maliki had reluctantly accepted the existence of the Sons of Iraq, under US pressure, but there was no way he would continue to do so once we left. (During a meeting at his office one evening in 2007, at the height of the Awakening, Maliki exclaimed to a coalition officer, “You’ve taken a crocodile as a pet!” only to be told, “It’s not
our
crocodile.”) Fourth, and most importantly, calling the Surge a victory made us think we could leave. This, of course, had been the goal ever since the quick-in, quick-out fantasy of the invasion plan. It had been the strategy before the Surge, when we kept our eyes on the exit even as the country fell apart. Now that we could convince ourselves we’d “won,” the undertow reasserted itself.

President Bush, in his final months in office, settled with Maliki on a timeline that saw US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011. This was supposed to be accompanied by a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) allowing US troops to stay on after 2011, while remaining subject to US rather than Iraqi law. There were also supposed to be agreements between Baghdad and the regions over oil revenue, territorial demarcation with Kurdistan, reforms to broaden the recruiting base of the police and military (still heavily Shi’a) and a revision of Bremer’s de-Ba’athification statute. None of this happened. So, no, the Surge wasn’t a victory in any sense.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessary – it absolutely
was
necessary, on moral grounds, to halt the carnage and restore some normality to a society we should never have invaded in the first place. We owed Iraqis that, not just as an ethical matter but also as a matter of international law. Neither was it a failure, as some claimed later when things went bad, nor proof that counterinsurgency doesn’t work. Counterinsurgency (in fact, warfare generally) is a complex discipline, like medicine or architecture. If your building fails, it doesn’t mean “architecture doesn’t work” – it means you built a bad structure. If violence drops when you apply a given approach, then returns when you stop, it doesn’t mean that approach doesn’t work: it means it
does
work, and you shouldn’t have stopped. The reporter Thomas E. Ricks – whose first book on Iraq was rightly titled
Fiasco –
called the Surge a gamble, pointing out in 2009 that “the decisive events of the Iraq War haven’t happened yet.” To me, that’s the best verdict.

As the Obama administration took office, there were signs that the situation was fragile. One of these was the existence of a small but determined AQI remnant. Allied with them was a cadre – larger and more influential than many realise – of former Saddam intelligence and special ops people, specialists in clandestine warfare, who tended to hang back, direct traffic and treat the jihadists as useful idiots to further their own goals. Another danger sign was the continued existence of Shi’a militia groups, many backed by Iran. Remember that whereas AQI had been all but destroyed, the Shi’a militias had merely accepted a ceasefire, and as long as they retained their organisation, weapons and Iranian support, the potential remained for renewed violence.

Ignoring these danger signs, President Obama’s priority was to deliver on his election promise and leave. The flawed but unifying construct of the Global War on Terrorism was gone, replaced not by a single framework but by many “Overseas Contingency Operations,” each treated as a discrete engagement. For someone who’d argued against the over-broad “War on Terror,” it was disappointing to see Washington come up with something even worse. This was like trying to run each World War II campaign – Burma, New Guinea, Greece, North Africa, Italy, Normandy – as a stand-alone war in its own right, a recipe for incoherence.

To the extent that a main effort was discernible, in the early days it was Afghanistan. In fact, the principal shift was tactical, not strategic, and went unannounced at first: the Obama administration ramped up drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, emphasising killing-at-a-distance outside declared war zones and “surgical” strikes rather than boots on the ground. Indeed, of all drone strikes since 9/11, more than ninety per cent happened during the first six years of the Obama administration, against only ten per cent in all eight years under President Bush. This could be described as “light-footprint” counterterrorism – drones, surveillance and raids.

President Obama was far less engaged – the phone calls to Maliki and videoconferences with the force commander and ambassador ceased abruptly. Obama, like most new American presidents, was putting domestic issues (the financial crisis and his new health-care law) ahead of foreign policy. He was the opposite of President Bush, which of course was quite appropriate, since that’s exactly what he’d been elected to be. But the lack of engagement cut Prime Minister Maliki adrift, freeing him to pursue his personal (and his party’s sectarian) agenda.