Papering Over The Cracks In Iraq, Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

Tom Ricks points to a paper by Najim Abed al-Jabouri, the former mayor of Tal Afar in Iraq, in which the mayor recounts the sectarian affiliations of various Iraqi Army divisions.

A major reason that the army and police can drive the country apart, he said, is that political meddling has created a divisive situation within those forces. "The majority of [Iraqi army] divisions are under the patronage of a political party," al-Jabouri asserts. Unusually, he then lists the political affiliations of various units:

• "the 8th IA division in Kut and Diwanya is heavily influenced by the Dawa party"

• "the 4th IA division in Salahideen is influenced by President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan"

• "the 7th IA division in Anbar is influenced by the Iraqi Awakening Party"

• "the 5th IA division in Diyala is heavily influenced by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq"

Similarly, he adds, many of the forces of the Ministry of Interior actually operate beyond the control of that ministry and instead report to political parties. Officers who blow the whistle on the role political parties play in the Iraqi army risk losing their personal security guards as well as their jobs, he notes. 

Ricks has long been more than a little schizoid regarding The Surge (tm) in Iraq, saying that it worked while also insisting that an Iraqi civil war is on it's way - which is a way of saying it failed since Iraqi reconciliation was always The Surge's (tm) stated purpose. He manages this by lying to himself. He calls his ongoing series of posts about the upcoming Iraqi civil war "The Unraveling" but the truth is that Iraq was never ravelled and he knows it. A better analogy would be removing the steel underpinning that was preventing an old and subsiding building from collapse, papering over the yawning cracks in the walls, and calling it a success. "The Unraveling" is just those cracks showing through again. Al Jabouri writes:

U.S. leaders do not realize that by not doing more to ensure that incumbent parties stay away from influencing ISF behavior, the United States risks training and arming security forces that will be the instrument for provoking, rather than preventing, future ethno-sectarian conflict. A politicized ISF heavily influenced by ethno-sectarian loyalties will not perform as a national security force, but will act more like a hodgepodge of regional militias that can divide the country into sub-fiefdoms, purging political opponents from their respective areas.

That's something skeptics about the success of The Surge (tm) were warning about years before Kagan and Keane first invented the phrase, and years before Tom Ricks decided that first Petraeus then Odierno were "victory's" true architects.

And we've warned about the same papering-over-the-cracks being labelled as any kind of success in Afghanistan too, But we're unheeded by the likes of Kim Kagan, wife of The Surge's architect and the only neocon ever to have an entire think-tank invented just so that she can have a job. In her latest piece of foolery, she argues explicitly that Afghanistan can be turned around if only a proper Surge (tm), with thousands of more troops, is implemented.

Yet as in Iraq, more so in Afghanistan. Surge (tm) advocates are calling for a doubling or even quadrupaling of Afghan security forces, at a cost of up to $4 billion a year when the entire Afghan government's revenue amounts to only a little over $400 million. That's idiocy unless the aim is to have an Afghanistan which is a perpetual satrapy of the U.S. And the threat of warlord control of the Afghan security forces is even more imminent and threatening to any prospects for stability than the control of political parties is in Iraq. Aid agencies have begged the Obama administration not to arm local militias and so strengthen the warlords' already strong hand and Elizabeth Rubin recently wrote at the NY Times:

Only now is it dawning on Washington policymakers that they have a serious problem of warlordism on their hands which renders the Afghan government illegitimate in the eyes of the vast majority of Afghans. At the same time whey are talking about doubling the number of Afghan police and troops, even though they have no idea how the influence of the warlords on those additional police and troops through a warlord-dominated chain of command would be avoided.

It may be dawning on some Washington policymakers, but not the hardcore interventionists who are advising McChrystal. They're quite prepared to keep papering over the cracks and calling for more troops, all only so as to advance their own careers as Serious People. Meanwhile, Kandahar already looks like a Taliban stronghold, Helmsland was "a sideshow" and senior Dem lawmakers couldn't care less about a four month lack of benchmarks.

If you've got that sinking feeling that it's "long war, stay the course" deja vu all over again, only with Afghanistan substituting for Iraq and Democrat cheerleaders acting the roles of Bush Republicans, well - I'm not going to argue with you.