Month: August 2005

by Charles

24-year old West Point grad Laura Walker wrote about her time with the "Triple Nickel" out of Fort Lewis, a group officially known as the 864th Combat Engineer Battalion, 555th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade.  Her task:  Working on an 80-mile road construction project involving the support of the United Nations, Indian contractors, and United States Army troop labor.

Fifteen hours is a tremendous barrier. It is the obstacle preventing one village from attaining the assistance of another and surviving a drought. It is the reason a trip to the hospital, or receiving an education, aren’t realistic options. Fifteen hours is what stands in the way of commerce between two provinces. It prevents communication between neighbors only 80 kilometers apart. Fifteen hours is the reason for isolation. Before Task Force Pacemaker began work, the drive between Kandahar and Tarin-Kowt took fifteen hours. Upon completion of the road it will take only three. The end of geographical isolation will be a new beginning for hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.

Walker contended that this isn’t just a public works project because it strengthens Afghanistan on multiple levels.

Continued development is essential to peace building in Afghanistan. The road between Tarin-Kowt and Kandahar will provide developmental access to rural areas which never existed before. As 1LT Sullivan puts it, “This road is not just an engineering feat; it is a show of political force.” The five month reduction in project duration by Task Force Pacemaker becomes five months gained by the new government towards progress. The fifteen hours of travel cut down to three are hours gained by Afghan citizens towards opportunity. Every cut of the TK road is another blow to the primary weapons of the Taliban, isolation and hardship. When Pacemaker soldiers watch the ribbon cutting on September 15th, every soldier can exhale with relief, joy, and pride in a job well done.

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by hilzoy

The reason I’ve been writing posts on Iraq is that I’ve been trying to figure out what I think of it all, and I wanted both to get a few large topics out of the way and to think it through as I wrote. In this post, I want to try to figure out what we can still achieve in Iraq, and whether it’s worth it. To state the obvious: I am not an expert on Iraq. I am just trying to work this out for myself. Everything I say could be completely wrong. However:

I think we are long past the point where we can talk about “success” in Iraq. Whatever we do now, we have undone decades’ worth of work containing Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf, destroyed any air of invincibility that we had after the first Gulf War, bogged down our army, destroyed our moral authority both by allowing the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere to occur and then by not holding anyone high up in the military or civilian leadership accountable, done enormous damage to our alliances and interests, and on and on and on. I take all of this as a given.

I also think it is pointless to think about constructing any kind of model democracy for the Middle East. That was always a very long shot; to bring it off we would have had to plan meticulously, and then have everything break our way. We didn’t; it didn’t; as a result, I think this possibility has gone glimmering.

My modest goals now are two. First, we should, if possible, prevent the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. (In the comments to my post on militias, several people noted that there is already a civil war underway in Iraq. They are, of course, right. But it’s a civil war within certain limits, of which more later.) Second, we should, if possible, prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state like Afghanistan, both because failed states are very bad for the people who live under them and because failed states are important to terrorists.

As I see it, Ted Kaczynski proved that you can be a terrorist without much assistance or infrastructure. But two things help a lot: money and a secure base of operations where terrorists can set up training camps and live unmolested. Non-failed states would have to be nuts to allow Osama bin Laden the latter. But failed states, which cannot enforce the law within their own borders, have no choice in the matter. A failed state is, therefore, not just a disaster for its own people but a danger to others.

The question is: can we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state and/or having a full-blown civil war? And can we do so without instituting a draft, which we seem to be unwilling to do?

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by hilzoy

The NY Times reports this:

“Under a deal brokered Friday by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, Islam was to be named “a primary source of legislation” in the new Iraqi constitution, with the proviso that no legislation be permitted that conflicted with the “universal principles” of the religion. The latter phrase raised concerns that Iraqi judges would have wide latitude to strike down laws now on the books, as well as future legislation.

At the same time, according to a Kurdish leader involved in the talks, Mr. Khalilzad had backed language that would have given clerics sole authority in settling marriage and family disputes. That gave rise to concerns that women’s rights, as they are enunciated in Iraq’s existing laws, could be curtailed.

Finally, according to the person close to the negotiations, Mr. Khalilzad had been backing an arrangement that could have allowed clerics to have a hand in interpreting the constitution. That arrangement, coupled with the expansive language for Islam, prompted accusations from the Kurd that the Americans were helping in the formation of an Islamic state.”

The Times also reports that this deal is unravelling. And much as I’d like to see the delegates who are drafting the Iraqi constitution (or accepting bits of it drafted by us) meet their deadline, I can’t say that I’m sorry. Because Iraq under Sharia law is simply not something the United States should be pushing. As one Kurdish politician put it:

“We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi’ites,” he said. “It’s shocking. It doesn’t fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state … I can’t believe that’s what the Americans really want or what the American people want.”

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by hilzoy

The Washington Post has a terrifying article on militias in Iraq. Excerpts:

“Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

The parties and their armed wings sometimes operate independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to control territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their ascendance has come about because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January parliamentary elections.

Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province’s governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.

Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees’ families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.

“I don’t see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here,” said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats. Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. “Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore,” she said. “Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights.”

“Here’s the problem,” said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. Referring to the militias, he said, “They’re taking money from the state, they’re taking clothes from the state, they’re taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties.” Whoever disagrees, he said, “the next day you’ll find them dead in the street.””

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by hilzoy

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times did a good piece on the question of permanent bases in Iraq a few days ago, and I have been collecting links on it for a while, with the vague intention of posting something on it. Since it was brought up in the comments to von’s last post, I thought: why not now? For starters, some excerpts from Brownstein’s article:

“So far the administration has downplayed the possibility of permanent bases without excluding it. In Senate testimony in February, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said flatly: “We have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.” Pentagon officials echo that insistence today. But Rumsfeld last winter said he could not rule out the idea because the United States and the permanent Iraqi government would make the final decision. Bush took a similar line in January in an interview with Arabic television. “That’s going to be up to the Iraqi government,” the president said. “[It] will be making the decisions as to how best to secure their country, what kind of help they need.”

Leaks from the Pentagon have deepened the uncertainty. In May, the Washington Post reported that military planning did not envision permanent bases in Iraq but rather stationing troops in nearby Kuwait. But the report noted that the Pentagon was also planning to consolidate U.S. troops in Iraq into four large fortified bases. On the theory that concrete speaks louder than words, critics see such work as a sign the administration is planning to stay longer than it has acknowledged.

John E. Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, points to another indication. Although the United States is systematically training Iraqis to fight the insurgents, he notes, the Pentagon has not taken key steps — like making plans for acquiring tanks or aircraft — to build an Iraqi military capable of defending the country against its neighbors. To Pike that means that although the United States might reduce its troop level in Iraq, the fledgling nation, like Germany or South Korea, will require the sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers. “We are building the base structure to facilitate exactly [that],” he says.”

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