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SHEILA VEMMER, AFJ
The
spark,
oxygen
and
I
fuel
n a nationally televised broadcast Jan. 10, 2007, President
George W. Bush made a stark admission to a problem
that had become painfully evident: “It is clear that we
need to change our strategy in Iraq.” With this
declaration, the wheels were set in motion to deploy five combat brigades to Iraq for what would become known simply as
“the surge.” Though highly controversial at the time, it became
clear by the end of 2007 that the surge had succeeded in dramatically reducing both civilian violence and U.S. military
casualties. What is more difficult to divine, however, are the
reasons for that success.
The popular narrative that has emerged in the three years
since has been that the effort succeeded because:
å Then-Iraq commander Army Gen. David Petraeus implemented his FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual, which taught
combat soldiers how to properly conduct counterinsurgency
(COIN) operations.
å U.S. troops moved off the large consolidated forward
operating bases and out into the local neighborhoods to live
with the people.
LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS is an Army officer who fought in Operation
Desert Storm in 1991, and served in Afghanistan in 2005 and in Iraq in
2009. He is stationed at Fort Belvoir, Va., and will deploy to Afghanistan
in November. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Army or Defense Department.
22 AFJ S E PTE M B E R 2010
What made the
Iraq surge work
BY LT. COL.
DANIEL L. DAVIS
å Petraeus “paid off” insurgents to remove them from the
battlefield.
å Once the people saw us living among them, they came
to realize that their future lay with the U.S.-supported Iraq
government — not with terrorists — and they turned against
al-Qaida.
While there is an element of truth to all four points, they
obfuscate the complexity of the issues and ignore entire categories of crucial factors.
In a letter Petraeus wrote to the troops on taking command
in Iraq on Feb. 10, 2007, he explained how he intended to
accomplish the president’s orders: “Our task is crucial. Security
is essential for Iraq to build its future. Only with security can
the Iraqi government come to grips with the tough issues it
confronts and develop the capacity to serve its citizens. …
Together with our Iraqi partners, we must defeat those who
oppose the new Iraq. … In the end, Iraqis will decide the outcome of this struggle. Our task is to help them gain the time
they need to save their country. To do that, many of us will live
and fight alongside them.”
Translating those goals into success on the bloody-boot battlefield, however, would prove remarkably difficult. The security environment in Iraq at that time was probably the most
complex, violent and seemingly intractable set of problems
facing the U.S. military since Vietnam. Army Brig. Gen. H.R.
McMaster, who was a member of the Council of Colonels on
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SHEILA VEMMER, AFJ
U.S. soldiers show their Iraqi counterparts how to maintain order in the streets of Baghdad in April 2007.
Iraq for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 2006,
said of the fight in Baghdad, “We concluded that the conflict in
Iraq had evolved beyond the current strategy and that the current strategy was actually in effect a rush to failure.” He based
this assessment on the fact that “we were accelerating a transition to an Iraqi government that not only lacked the capacity,
but also lacked the willingness to do what was necessary to
provide basic services on a nonsectarian basis.”
Those views were not unique to American observers. The
Sunni population was painfully aware that the Iraqi government was engaged in this type of behavior. Sunnis viewed the
government’s actions as an existential threat, and this perception, along with a few other key factors, led them to engage in
violence against the government.
A former al-Qaida leader named Mullah Nathem Jabouri, who
is now a religious scholar and a political analyst doing commentary on Arab media, told me that most Sunnis did not intend to
fight as insurgents at the beginning. “When the Americans
invaded Iraq, there weren’t armed groups ready to fight, especially among the Sunnis,” he said. “Mujahedeen groups were small,
and while the loyalists to Saddam were trying to rally people,
they didn’t have much influence. The idea of resistance amongst
the Sunnis didn’t really come until they started feeling the weight
of a sectarian government supported by Iran.”
The majority of the Sunnis were in a “wait and see” mode as
to what the U.S. would do. They began hearing rumors that
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the Americans not only wanted to de-Baathify Iraq, but to deSunnify it. Al-Qaida was exploiting these fears and spreading
and intensifying the rumors. Though de-Sunnifying Iraq was
never seriously considered by American policymakers, it didn’t
matter because the Sunnis perceived it to be the case.
But the unity of effort between the Sunni Iraqis and al-Qaida
in Iraq (AQI) would be short lived. Not long after these Sunni
allies joined forces, al-Qaida leaders began to make a series of
miscalculations that would later prove to be their undoing
because, ironically, they helped to create the very conditions
necessary for Petraeus’ strategy to succeed against them.
Although al-Qaida is ostensibly a Sunni Muslim organization, it is stridently religious in orientation, while the Iraqi
Sunnis are more nationalistic. Al-Qaida leaders believed themselves to be superior to the “less pure” Iraqi Sunnis and as such
believed the Iraqis owed them allegiance and submission. The
Iraqis, meanwhile, began to privately grouse that al-Qaida
came to Iraq to liberate it not from the Americans, but from
the Iraqis.
As AQI leaders began making more intrusive demands on
the Iraqis, many initially demurred and refused to comply. At
first, al-Qaida tried to intimidate the Iraqis into following its
orders, but as time passed, it moved to more physically coercive measures. Eventually, al-Qaida used outright brutality to
force Iraqi Sunnis to do its bidding.
In 2006 the commander of 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division,
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You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency — but you’d better
be ready, willing and able to fight.
was then-Col. Sean MacFarland. He deployed his unit to
Ramadi in Anbar province in June 2006 and began conducting
COIN operations almost immediately. In a recent interview,
now-Brig. Gen. MacFarland explained to me that when his unit
first arrived in Ramadi, it began conducting some of the same
types of COIN operations that had proven successful in Tal Afar,
but with far more modest results. Al-Qaida was the dominant
force in Ramadi as the civil government had all but ceased to
exist. After several months of fighting, however, a seemingly
small event occurred upon which arguably the success of
Petraeus’ surge strategy would later hinge.
On Sept. 9, 2006, MacFarland met with a midlevel Iraqi
sheik named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha at a council meeting.
Sattar told MacFarland that if the U.S. would support him, he
would rid Ramadi of al-Qaida. MacFarland decided to take the
risk of working with the Iraqi leader — very much an unknown
quantity at this point. Once Sattar and his men began operating in Ramadi, MacFarland said it had an immediate impact.
“It was like the difference between night and day. You see, it
was an intelligence-driven war,” he said. “Once we got the people
on our side, they provided us intel on who the good guys were
and who the bad guys were. Often the tribes drove the enemy
out by themselves because the terrorists could no longer hide in
plain sight. Once a tribe flipped, overnight the security situation
improved dramatically.” It was like opening the floodgates.
According to two Sunni Arab leaders, supporting the
American military operation against AQI at that time was
based on the fact that the Sunnis’ hatred of al-Qaida had finally eclipsed their hatred of America. Retired Maj. Gen. Najim
Jabouri, the mayor of Tal Afar in 2005, told me that the Sunnis
in 2006 Ramadi would have “worked with the devil” to get rid
of al-Qaida.
“It wasn’t just that al-Qaida was stupid; they were,” Petraeus
said. “It was that that we exploited their behavior with a very
carefully targeted IO [information operations] plan. We hung
three labels around their necks like millstones. One was their
extremist ideology, which didn’t play well in predominantly
secular Sunni sections of Iraq; the second was their indiscriminate acts of violence; and the third was the oppressive practices
they forced on the Sunnis, actions like forced marriages, cutting
off fingers for minor infractions, etc. We amplified their atrocities and broadcast them and saturated the media throughout
Baghdad using TV, radio, Internet, billboards, you name it.”
MacFarland says the Iraqi people were a critical part of the
turnaround: “I give huge credit to the Iraqis who stood up to
24 AFJ S E PTE M B E R 2010
al-Qaida. Maybe 75 to 80 percent of the credit for the success
of the counterinsurgency fight in Ramadi goes to the Iraqi
people who stood up to al-Qaida and joined us in common
cause. Without the intel provided by the awakening groups,
our job would have been vastly more difficult.
“We could have gone into an area, and over time cleared it
out and slowly but surely taken control. But if the Iraqi Sunnis
had remained allied with al-Qaida against us, we would not
have been able to achieve anything lasting or of strategic consequence.”
But it was also essential to have American forces in place.
“Make no mistake, there would have been no Anbar awakening without the U.S. forces. It’s like asking, ‘Which element is
the most important component in making an engine run: the
spark, oxygen or fuel?’ The answer is ‘all three.’ You can debate
all day long over which is the most crucial, but without all
three, nothing happens. It was like that in Anbar. Al-Qaida
threats and atrocities were the spark, we provided the oxygen
(or environment) to make it happen, but without the fuel provided by the various awakening groups, we would not have
achieved anything lasting or widespread,” MacFarland said.
Former commander of U.S. Central Command, retired
Adm. William Fallon, said that the demonstrated resolve of
the U.S. to deploy the surge forces and our willingness to
place tactical units directly into the neighborhoods were crucial to the overall success. “In the days leading up to the decision to surge, many in Iraq thought we were just looking for
the quickest exit, to bail out. The Sunnis believed that if we
bailed out, they would be at the mercy of AQI. When we
instead signaled our increasing resolve to win, the Sunnis had
motivation to work with us.”
AN BAR TO BAG H DAD
As news of success in Anbar spread through the country during the first few months of 2007, Sunnis in Baghdad began to
court Sheik Sattar in an effort to get him to use his influence
with the Americans to bring a similar effort there. Petraeus
said that one of the first trips outside of Baghdad he took in
February 2007 was to Anbar to see what MacFarland’s Ready
1st Brigade had done with Sattar and the awakening movement. “From the first day I was on the ground, I began looking
for ways to conduct some form of reconciliation because I had
seen it work when I was commanding the 101st Airborne in
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Mosul. I knew what the potential was,
but needed to find the right vehicle.”
The pointer came in the Amiriyah
district of western Baghdad. 1st
Squadron, 5th U.S. Cavalry,
commanded by then-Lt. Col. Dale
Kuehl, was engaged in some of the most
brutal, hellish fighting of any American
unit in Baghdad. On May 29, 2007,
Kuehl was approached by an Iraqi man
named Abu Abed who presented him
with an offer to clear al-Qaida out of
certain areas of Amiriyah with the
American’s help similar to what Sattar
had done in Anbar. When Petraeus
heard about the effort, he seized on it
and encouraged 1-5 Cav to expand the
operation. “As soon as we saw what was
working, I directed the rest of our units
to try to replicate it, recognizing that the
dynamics were different in each area. In
the late spring and throughout the summer, we got the breakthrough in
Amiriyah, then another in Ghazaliyah,
and then in other places in Baghdad.”
Army Col. Gian Gentile, director of
the Military History Program at West
Point and in 2006 a squadron commander in Baghdad, emphasized the
symbiotic nature of the success of the
surge. In a recent e-mail message, he
wrote, “The surge did play an important
role, but not particularly in terms of
‘winning the hearts and minds’ of Iraqi
citizens. It did, however, play a valuable
role in the tactical application of military
force in that the extra brigades under the
superior tactical generalship of [Army]
Gen. [Raymond] Odierno helped to
reduce the irreconcilable opponents like
al-Qaida much more quickly. But that
reduction could have only taken place
with the human intelligence provided by
the awakening and later the Sons of Iraq.
Without it 20 more brigades would not
have stemmed the tide of violence.”
Four key points emerge from this
analysis.
1. Living among the people works, but
it may seem counterintuitive. Petraeus
explained why it was necessary to move
troops into neighborhoods in Baghdad:
“It wasn’t enough to send patrols
through the area. You had to live there to
provide security to the people and to give
them the confidence to talk to our troopers and, ultimately, to oppose the
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extremists. We explicitly recognized that
the human terrain was the ‘decisive terrain,’ and living with them was a logical
extension of that recognition.”
However, having U.S. troops living in
their cities was the last thing the people
wanted. Anbar is largely a homogeneous
province where Sunnis did not want to
see a U.S. troop presence in the cities.
Even within the confines of the same
COIN fight, the U.S. had to employ
seemingly contradictory concepts in different cities to accomplish the same
ends. In truth, there is no contradiction
at all; the commander must employ the
solution that best reflects the conditions
in his local area of operations.
2. Whatever it takes, gain the support
of the people. The primary objective
must be to do whatever is necessary to
detach the people from supporting the
insurgency, even if they never view us in
saintly terms.
Petraeus underscored this truth in
Iraq when he said, “You had to re-establish incentives for the people to be willing to work with the government. That
was my world, and one about which
we’d learned from the early days after
liberation in 2003. If you could get the
people to reject al-Qaida and their philosophy, that would probably be
enough to get them to work with us.”
Notice he said nothing about requiring them to consider us their best
friends — only that his objective was to
get the people to reject AQI in order to
detach the insurgents from their support. In Tal Afar in 2005, U.S. forces were
successful in gaining the trust, confidence and admiration of the people,
while also separating them from insurgents; in Ramadi, many of the people
continued to hate us. But, as
MacFarland explained, while the Sunnis
didn’t really want us there, they ultimately “recognized it was absolutely
necessary,” which allowed his efforts to
reach the minimal threshold necessary
to convince the Sunnis to detach themselves from supporting AQI.
3. You can’t kill your way out of an
insurgency — but you’d better be ready,
willing and able to fight. In the early
days of the insurgency, the U.S. military
relied too heavily on kinetic operations
while placing insufficient attention on
winning hearts and minds. We must be
careful that in the interest of correcting
past mistakes, we do not completely
reverse this imbalance. The key to an
insurgency is convincing the people to
cease supporting the insurgents, but we
must never lose sight of the fact that
there is an enemy out there who is willing to steal, kill and destroy to attain his
objectives, and we must always be prepared to return the favor.
4. Time, resources and competing
requirements, including domestic political realities, make winning counterinsurgency fights extremely hard for the
U.S. The clock is always ticking. In the
Iraq surge, the timings worked to our
advantage. Had al-Qaida not worked at
cross-purposes with what should have
been their natural Sunni allies, there
would have been little reason for the
Sunnis to “awaken” and work with the
coalition forces. When Petraeus went
before Congress on Sept. 10. 2007, to
report on the status of the surge, he was
armed with three months of demonstrated reductions in both Iraq-on-Iraq
violence and a dropping U.S. casualty
rate. He could point to concrete reasons
for having an optimistic view of the tactical situation and could logically
explain why there was reason for genuine hopefulness over the coming
months. Time proved him right, and
every month of declining violence thereafter quieted down political opposition
to the surge. Absent that awakening, and
without reductions in violence to trumpet, public and political support for the
war might have reached a tipping point
for an immediate withdrawal.
It’s not hard to see that these findings
have significant ramifications to our
effort in Afghanistan. In the future, we
may run into a situation where, despite
our best efforts, the conditions necessary for victory might be beyond our
ability to independently produce at an
acceptable cost and within the time
available. We must remain vigilant to
avoid the hubris that suggests we can
always win, everywhere, irrespective of
the associated circumstances. AFJ
In the October AFJ, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis
will assess the chances for success of the
Afghanistan surge.
S E PTE M B E R 2010 AFJ 41