Iraq “Surge”

The US “surge” into Baghdad and western Iraq is complete, 28,500 additional troops are now in Iraq. An early Pentagon assessment concluded:

Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.
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Iraq’s government, for its part, has proven “uneven” in delivering on its commitments under the strategy, the report said, stating that public pledges by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have in many cases produced no concrete results.

Iraqi leaders have made “little progress” on the overarching political goals that the stepped-up security operations are intended to help advance, the report said, calling reconciliation between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions “a serious unfulfilled objective.” Indeed, “some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq,” it said, noting that 36 percent of Iraqis believe “the Iraqi people would be better off if the country were divided into three or more separate countries.”

Unfortunately the Bush administration will not be able to claim the the “surge” is still surging and that the full “surge” is not present. That didn’t stop Press Secretary Tony Snow from using this excuse one last time in yesterdays press conference:

So what the President does is he looks at the 90-10, and you look at it in terms of what’s going on not merely throughout the nation, but keep in mind that the Baghdad security plan understands that the first thing you’ve got to do is secure the capital. There have been some encouraging signs, but, again, we will reiterate, the surge is not complete, forces are just now, this next couple of weeks flowing in so that you’ve have the full complement of forces, and it’s going to be another month or two before they’re completely up and running at full speed.

Next, I’m sure will be the line, they just got there and they are just now getting started. I expect this line to last till September. Hopefully Sept. will bring a marked improvement but I’m not optomistic and don’t believe the case will be made that the strategy is effective enough. Now is not the time for baby steps in Iraq. The time for that was in 2003-04.

Menwhile, 4^th generation warfare guru William Lind lambastes the tactics used in this urban guerrilla war as indicative of the failure of US foreign policy (check out a coming post on the Gaza situation for more claims of US FP failure). Particularity the use of US air power on Iraqi ground targets such as a railroad station. Lind writes:

It turns out the bombed railroad station was no fluke. According to other reports, U.S. aircraft have dropped more than 200 bombs or missiles on Iraqi ground targets this year in support of U.S. ground forces at a rate double that of last year.

Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the “surge” is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: It isn’t.

Worse, the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and Gen. David Petraeus’s best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping Fourth Generation war.

To put it bluntly, there is no surer or faster way to lose in 4GW than by calling in airstrikes. It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air. Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight. So negative are the results of air strikes in this kind of war that there is only one possible good number of them: zero, unless we are employing the “Hama model” of seeking total destruction, which we are not.

Lebanon Violence, Pakistan Violence

Four more Lebanese troops were killed in continued violence in Palestinian refugee camps. This is a continuation of a confrontation at the Nahr al-Bared camp and elsewhere earlier this month. This is all happening while the Lebanese consociational government is facing targeted assaniations of anti-Syria member. It is still unknown who is ordering these killings. Is it internal or external? But one can easily opine that “…Lebanon has become a ravaged battlefield where regional and global warriors are facing off in an increasingly brutal contest that shows no signs of abating.”

US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher was given a going away present during a visit to Pakistan in the form of an ambushed military vehicle and around 9 killed, mostly soldiers. This attack came hours after Boucher left the Balochistan region. Motive is still foggy. Was it a local call for autonomy which is typical in this region or a response to the blowing up of the minarets at the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra, which is being blamed on the US, among others. This blame is sticking. More fiery sermons and protests are to take place in Pakistan and the greater Shi’a ME.

Iraq: al-Sistani and al-Sadr are inseparable

Less than a week ago the NY Times reported that some indications were given by a leading Shi’a figure in Iraq (and the greater MENA), Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that he favored a new governing coalition in Iraq. In particular it hinted at a willingness to sideline radical Cleric Moktada al-Sadr and other extremist factions. This made a hopeful few days for those interested in the stability of Iraq. Unfortunately, the LA Times reveals that this report was “just a rumor.”

One of Iraq’s most influential Shiite clerics rejected a U.S.-backed proposal to isolate Shiite extremists in the national government, saying the country should govern itself with the help of anti-U.S. firebrand Muqtada Sadr, according to politicians who spoke with the cleric Saturday.

Shiite politicians met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in this Shiite holy city, and then said they had thrown their support behind Sadr, who demands a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq rather than the temporary increase under consideration in Washington.

“The Sadr movement is part of Iraqi affairs,” said Haider Abadi, a leader of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party. “We won’t allow others to interfere to weaken any Iraqi political movement.”

Ali Adeeb, another member of the Dawa Party, said Shiite leaders, including the prime minister, would resist U.S. efforts to sideline Sadr and his Al Mahdi army.

Somalia and Ethopia Prepare to Face-off

Add this ominous and highly likely scenario to Sudan and Darfur and the Horn of Africa becomes one of the most unstable places on Earth. The combination of Islamists, failed states, oppression, and anti-Americanism and you get a volatile combination that has the potential to spawn regional and international conflict and possible terrorism.

The inevitability of war hangs over Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-pocked seaside capital. But unlike the internal anarchy that has consumed the country for 15 years, the looming battle is now with Ethiopia, threatening to further destabilize the troubled Horn of Africa.

In the past week the increasingly militant Islamists in control of Mogadishu and much of the rest of the country have begun a food drive, a money drive and an AK-47 assault rifle drive, and have sent doctors and nurses, along with countless young soldiers, to the front lines.

For its part, Ethiopia, with tacit approval from the United States, has been steadily slipping soldiers across the border, trying to hold off the Islamists and shore up Somalia’s weak, unpopular and divided transitional government.

MENA Blog Roundup (12/13/2006)

Marc Lynch (aka the aardvark): “I want to throw this out for discussion: in the not so distant future, we may be looking at the return of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.”

Why? Lynch notes that Nouri al-Maliki has lost the confidence of the US and holds no parliamentary mandate. Abd al-Aziz Hakim (of SCIRI) is presented as the current replacement for Maliki here in the US but he is also a figure complacent in the current sectarian/civil war driving the Sunni-Shi’a divide. A Sunni sponsored nationalist alliance is in the works that proposes to unite “Salah Mutlaq, a key secular Sunni leader…” and his “Iraqi National Dialogue Front, Muqtadar Sadr’s organization, and the al-Wifaq movement headed by Allawi (who recently returned from London to Amman), in a ‘nationalist’ (wataniya) front.”

Why Allawi? He’s an ex-Baathist secular Shi’a with an existing record. And he’s more palatable to the West (and US) than anyone else mentioned above at this time and he is not an Iranian puppet.

Full disclosure: Commenter’s at Abu Aardvark rejected this idea soundly… Lynch points out Allawi’s work of late with the insurgency, pointing to recent reports:

Brushing aside the results of Iraq’s democratic elections, the insurgents proposed that an emergency government be formed under Allawi’s leadership. Non-sectarian politicians should be appointed to the crucial ministries of defence and the interior, they urged, because they would be responsible for rebuilding a strong national army and security service. Under this proposal, the newly elected Iraqi government would, in effect, have been sidelined.

We’ll have to see, for no one knows. My question is, why would an American voice pull any weight in a sovereign Iraq?

al Qaeda in Algeria

UPI: The recent attack on foreigners in Algeria signaled renewed activities of Muslim extremist groups believed to be linked to al-Qaida network.

The notorious Salafi Group for Daawa (call) and Fighting, one of Algeria’s armed groups resisting a peace pact for national reconciliation, Tuesday claimed responsibility for an attack two days ago on a bus carrying foreign employees of an American company in which two were killed and eight injured.
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The attack, the first on foreigners in Algeria since the 1990s, occurred three months after al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, announced that the Salafi Group has joined the network, warning that the armed group will be “a thorn in the throats of the Crusaders and France’s agents in Algeria.”