Petraeus, Afghanistan, and the Lessons of Iraq (Cole)

The last 72 hours, following the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, have been filled by the US media with the glorification of McChrystal's successor, General David Petraeus. The New York Times set down the truth:

General Petraeus, 57, brings an extraordinary set of skills to his new job: a Boy Scout’s charm, penetrating intelligence and a ferocious will to succeed. At ease with the press and the public, and an adept negotiator, General Petraeus will probably distinguish himself from his predecessor with the political skills that carried him through the most difficult months of the counteroffensive in Iraq known as the surge.

Juan Cole offers a different perspective on Petraeus and, more importantly, on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Afghanistan Analysis: McChrystal, Counter-Insurgency, and Blaming the Ambassador (Mull)

President Obama’s appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to succeed Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of US forces in Afghanistan signaled a continued commitment by the White House to a large-scale counter-insurgency campaign involving taking large swathes of territory, clearing it of insurgents, holding it in the medium term, and building up local government and social services.

It is frequently asserted that Gen. Petraeus “succeeded” in Iraq via a troop escalation or “surge” of 30,000 extra US troops that he dedicated to counter-insurgency purposes in al-Anbar and Baghdad Provinces.

But it would be a huge mistake to see Iraq either as a success story or as stable. It is the scene of an ongoing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that is killing roughly 300 civilians a month. It can’t form a government months after the March 7 elections, even though the outcomes are known, having a permanently hung parliament, wherein the four major parties find it difficult to agree on a prime minister. The political vacuum has proved an opening for Sunni Arab insurgents, who have mounted effective bombing campaigns and more recently are targeting the banks. And now the caretaker government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is being shaken by a wave of violent mass protests even in Shiite cities that voted for him, against his government’s failure to provide key services, especially electricity in the midst of a sweltering summer heat wave.

On [19 June], a big protest rally denouncing the lack of electricity turned violent, and police shot dead two protesters. In some parts of Iraq temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and few places have electricity more than 6 or 7 hours a day. The minister of electricity has been forced to resign. On Thursday, the headline in al-Zaman, the Times of Baghdad, read “Electricity Uprisings Break out in Hilla and Diyala under the Banner of Ousting al-Maliki.” If the caretaker government falls in the face of this popular pressure before parliament can agree on a new prime minister, there would be a dreadful security vacuum and a constitutional crisis.

Going back 3 1/2 years, Gen. Petraeus did what he could to end the Sunni-Shiite Civil War of 2006-2007, which helped produce the nearly 4 million Iraqi displaced (most of whom are still homeless) and likely killed tens of thousands. He put blast walls up to separate Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods; he put in checkpoints to keep out car and truck bombs; he made some markets pedestrian-only to stop them being blown up; he established Sunni Arab pro-American militias, the “Sons of Iraq,” to fight the fundamentalist vigilantes, both Sunni and Shiite; and he systematically tracked down and had killed the leadership of the insurgent cells.

I mean to take nothing away from the significant and important efforts of the US military in 2007 when I say that they did not all by themselves end the Sunni-Shiite civil war. [But]in some ways, they inadvertently hastened a Shiite victory. Gen. Casey had been convinced to begin his plan of disarming the Iraqis in Baghdad with the Sunni Arabs by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The US military stuck to this bargain. But it turns out that if you disarmed the Sunni Arabs, then the Shiite militias came at night to chase them away. As I argued a couple of summers ago, working in part from the intrepid journalism of Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post, the main reason for decrease in the virulence of the Civil War (it is not over) was that the Shiites succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. Based on US military and NGO statistics, on patterns of ambient light from West Baghdad visible by satellite, on the on-the-ground investigations of journalists like AP’s Hamza Hendawi, and on subsequent voting patterns, I don’t think Baghdad is now more than 10-15% Sunni, whereas it was probably about half and half Sunni and Shiite at the time of Bush’s invasion in 2003.

Obviously, when formerly mixed neighborhoods gradually no longer had Sunnis living in them, the ethnic violence declined (militant Shiites would have had to drive for an hour to find a Sunni to ethnically cleanse). My own field research among Iraqi refugees in Jordan in August of 2008 revealed to me the mechanisms by which the Sunnis were chased out. Many had been explicitly threatened by name, receiving death threats in their mail boxes. In addition, one fourth of Iraqi families who formally registered as refugees in Jordan had had a child kidnapped. Many had seen family members or close friends killed before their eyes. Some continued to receive threats in East Amman apartments, as the militias tracked them down to their new, squalid residences.

It was in part this Shiite wave of militia power and the usurping of Sunni property (most displaced families in Iraq have lost possession of their homes) that convinced many Sunni clans to go over to the Americans and to fight the Sunni fundamentalists in their midst, since it was the latter whose constant bombings and attacks on Shiite neighborhoods that had provoked the Civil War. Sunni Arabs in Iraq were initially absolutely convinced that they were a majority and that the Sunni Arab world would help them get back their country from the Americans, the Shiites and the Kurds. By early 2007 it had become clear that the Shiites were overwhelming them and that, indeed, their only plausible savior was the Americans, who might be persuaded to act as a moderating influence on the Shiites.

The Shiite victory in the Civil War was thus absolutely crucial as an Iraqi social-history background for what success Petraeus’s policies had.

No such major social-historical change has occurred in Afghanistan or is likely to. The Taliban and other insurgents primarily spring from the Pashtun ethnic group that predominates in the east and southwest of the country. Pashtuns probably make up about 42 percent of Afghanistan’s some 34 million people. Pashtun clans provided the top political leadership to Afghanistan from the 18th century, through the Durrani monarchy, and they look down on the northern Tajik and Hazarah ethnic groups (who speak dialects of Persian). Although probably only 20-30 percent of Afghan Pashtuns view the Taliban favorably, more may admire the Taliban as a group that stands up for Afghanistan’s independence from the Western nations now occupying it.

The Pashtuns do not believe that they have been conquered by anyone, and the vast majority of them wants US and NATO troops out of their country. They would fall down laughing at the idea of being afraid of the Tajiks and Hazarahs. So they will not be as easy to turn as the terrified and traumatized Sunnis of Iraq were in 2007.

What governmental and military framework the government of Nuri al-Maliki has been able to provide depends deeply on Iraq’s human capital. It was an industrializing society with an educated work force, a majority urban sector, and a respectable literacy rate, and its army could be rebuilt in part because literate soldiers are easier to train (not to mention that a stock of experienced soldiers and officers familiar with conventional military tactics could be drawn on). Iraq is an oil state with an income of $60 billion a year from petroleum alone. Afghanistan’s entire nominal GDP is $12 bn. a year. Afghanistan is 28% literate and its army is 10% literate. It is largely rural, poorly educated, and decades of civil war have destroyed or chased abroad its small managerial classes. Afghanistan is far more dependent on kinship ties (clans and tribes) in politics than Iraq (only 1/3 of Iraqis in polling say that tribal identity is important to them). Clan politics is notoriously insular and difficult for foreigners to enter into.

Moreover, Gen. Petreaus’s policies in 2007 in Iraq had many drawbacks. As noted, starting with the disarming of one ethno-religious group, the Sunni Arabs, left them vulnerable to ethnic cleansing by the still-armed Shiite militias. The creation of 100,000 Sons of Iraq fighters among the Sunni Arabs was viewed as a security problem by the Shiite government of al-Maliki, which brought only 17,000 of them into the police or other security forces. Many of the others were gradually dropped from the payroll by the Iraqi government, and, deprived of support by the withdrawing American troops, began being targeted by vengeful fundamentalists as traitors. The blast walls erected around neighborhoods cut them off economically from the city and produced 80% unemployment within, and so that tactic was not sustainable. There were also joint Sunni-Shiite demonstrations against Gen. Petraeus on the grounds that he was imposing and artificial sectarian separation on Iraqis. (I know.) The heavy US dependence on Blackwater and other private security contractors went badly awry when they kept going cowboy and committed a massacre at Nissour Square in 2007. (The same firm, now renamed, is being brought into Afghanistan.)

Above all, Gen Petreaus was unable to attain in Iraq that pot of gold at the bottom of the counter-insurgency rainbow, increased government capacity and political reconciliation. Even his ultimate crackdown on the Mahdi Army and attempt to marginalize the Sadrists who follow Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr largely failed. The Sadrists did well in the March elections and may well end up being king-makers in the negotiations over a new prime minister and the speed of the American withdrawal. Nor has the Arab-Kurdish conflict been resolved (and that one is a tinderbox).

The Shiite prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, deeply dislikes the ex-Baathists (whom he sees as supported by neighboring Syria), and which he codes as predominantly Sunni Arabs. He has not reached out to them in any significant way, and some 80% of the Sunni Arabs are estimated to have voted for Maliki’s rival, Iyad Allawi (an ex-Baathist himself). Although the list they voted for, the Iraqiya, gained the largest single number of seats, it is not being recognized as the biggest bloc in parliament and will almost certainly not be allowed to form a government. Instead, the two big Shiite blocs made a post-election alliance and are insisting that they will form the government, and the courts have backed them.

The message to Sunnis? Even if you put down your arms and participate in the electoral process, you will likely be marginalized by the Shiite majority.

And now al-Maliki faces the Great Electricity Uprising of 2010. Iraq cannot be a model for victory in Afghanistan, and it isn’t even clear that there has been any meaningful ‘victory’ in Iraq. The best that could be said is that in summer of 2006, 2500 civilians were showing up dead every month, and now it is a tenth of that (still a lot).

The counter-insurgency push in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan could go either way. It could tamp down the Taliban and other insurgents and produce a population grateful for increased security, even at the cost of increased foreign control. Or it could involve Fallujah-like leveling of towns and large numbers of killed and displaced clansmen, pushing Pashtuns now favorable to Karzai into insurgency. I would give the former a 10% chance of happening.

Afghanistan/McChrystal Watch: Petraeus Takes Over

1805 GMT: The official line, now reinforced by a McChrystal e-mail to press outlets, is that he resigned and was not fired.

1800 GMT: Two thoughts. 1) From the frying pan to the fire: David Petraeus is just as hostile as Stanley McChrystal to Obama's declared intention to withdraw troops by July 2011. 2) Who takes over Central Command and become Petraeus' military boss?

1751 GMT: Obama says, "It was a difficult decision I made today. Indeed it saddens me to lose the service of a soldier whom I have come to respect and admire." But this decision was necessary "for the strength of our military and our nation".

And with that Obama exits, taking no questions.

NEW Afghanistan/McChrystal Analysis: Hyperventilating Over the Tip, Missing the (Petraeus) Iceberg
NEW Afghanistan Revealed: US Hands Over Millions of $$…To “Warlords” (DeYoung)
Afghanistan Special: McChrystal and the Trashing of the President (US Military v. Obama, Chapter 472)
Afghanistan Document: The McChrystal Profile (Hastings — Rolling Stone)

1750 GMT: Obama is flanked during the statement by Vice President Biden --- one of the targets of the McChrystal teams in the Rolling Stone interview ("Vice President Bite Me") --- and General Petraeus.

Obama is now on the section of the statement on how super-fantastic Petraeus is.

1749 GMT: Obama now reinforcing his play for support by stressing decision was necessary because of responsibility to troops and demand to defeat Al Qa'eda: "Our nation is at war. We face a very tough fight in Afghanistan....We are going to break the Taliban's momentum. We are going to rebuild Afghanistan."

1743 GMT: Obama begins his statement. Have accepted McChrystal resignation with "regret" but "with certainty" that is right thing to do for US troops and war effort.

Obama stresses that decision not because of any difference on policy with McChrystal or "any sense of personal insult". He expresses "great admiration" for McChrystal and his service in Iraq and Afghanistan as "one of America's finest soldiers".

But "war is bigger than one man or woman", and "this is right decision to make". McChrystal's conduct in Rolling Stone interview "did not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military, the core of our democratic system, and it erodes the trust that is necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan."

1725 GMT: CNN and Associated Press are reporting from sources that General David Petraeus, currently the head of Central Command, will take over the Afghanistan command from General McChrystal. This follows earlier leaks to CNN and NBC that Obama would "fire" McChrystal, who met the President for 30 minutes this morning but left the White House and did not attend a strategy meeting on Afghanistan.

That is pretty stunning, not because McChrystal is out but because Petraeus is effectively demoting himself from moving from Central Command --- where he is currently McChrystal's boss --- to the Afghanistan role.

Obama is making a statement within the next few minutes.

1430 GMT: The meeting between President Obama and General McChrystal, which lasted about 30 minutes, has concluded. The Afghanistan strategy meeting at the White House is at 1535 GMT --- will the general return for the discussion?

1325 GMT: Getting to the Important Point. A prominent activist ponders, "If McChrystal f**** up public outreach to Americans this often, how is he going to win hearts and minds of Afghans?"

1320 GMT: The Hot Tip? A "senior a

dministration official" has told CNN that the White House has asked the Pentagon to make a list of possible replacements for McChrystal.

1305 GMT: Beyond the Drama. A couple of commentaries to note, alongside our analysis this morning, that usefully note the policy issues beyond the McChrystal "crisis". Matthew Yglesias, drawing from his colleague Max Bergmann, writes:

The military can easily continue to pursue a McChrystal-style strategy on both the Afghan and US media fronts under different leadership. The more important question facing the White House is how they feel about that. A determined president will always prevail over the opinions of generals, but the political costs of attempting to do so can be quite high since military officials have a lot of prestige in American society.

(My caveat is the question as to whether Obama has ever --- when the crunch came --- been "determined [enough to]...prevail over the opinions of generals.")

And Juan Cole puts the challenge --- that will remain long after the Rolling Stone gathers moss --- to the President:

Obama needs to define an attainable goal in Afghanistan and then execute it swiftly. As it is, when he is pressed about what in the world we are doing there, he retreats into Bushisms: “So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.”

Well that isn’t a good enough reason to be in Afghanistan. There is no al-Qaeda to speak of in Afghanistan. And although insurgents and Taliban probably control about 20 percent of the country, they have not let al-Qaeda set up shop in their territory.

1255 GMT: On Day 2 of the Great McChrystal Balls-Up (with the reminder that we've posted the important story --- the US military v. Obama --- beyond the media noise), here's the latest....

General Stanley McChrystal, after his recall to Washington over his profile in Rolling Stone magazine, is now in the Pentagon for discussions before his meeting at the White House with President Obama. On the way into the building, he denied rumours --- spread by Joe Klein of Time magazine and picked up by other outlets from CBS News to Britain's Daily Telegraph --- that he had offered his resignation.

McChrystal told reporters, ""Come on, you know better than that.  No!"

Iraq War: What Was It Good For? (George W. Bush: "The US Economy")

Juan Cole picks up a revelation about President George W. Bush's enthusiasm for the 2003 Iraq War and adds context and aftermath:

Néstor Kirchner, former president of Argentina, revealed in an interview with Oliver Stone for the director’s documentary “South of the Border” that former US president George W. Bush was convinced that war was the way to grow the US economy. Here is the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI446mXonu0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Here is the transcript of Kirchner’s account of the conversation at a summit in Monterrey, Mexico, in January, 2004:

Kirchner: I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he grew angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.

Stone: War, he said that?

Kirchner: He said that. Those were his exact words.

Stone: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?

Kirchner: Well, he was talking about the United States: ‘The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.’ He said it very clearly. ‘

Zaid Jilani at Think Progress points out that job creation under "war president" Bush was in fact anemic and the whole house of cards collapsed toward the end of his tenure.

You wonder who else among the Republican elite fell for Bush’s typical piece of stupidity re: war= growth. It all depends on lots of other factors. If you borrow the money to fight the war and pay interest on it and you get no booty to speak of, then the war could ruin you, as happened to many European regimes in the early modern and modern period.

But even more outrageous is the Aztec-like willigness to rip the beating heart out of a sacrificial victim for the sake of an chimerical prosperity! Here is what was happening in Iraq around the time that Bush was boasting to Kirchner, according to Informed Comment on 18 January 2004:

23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing

AFP has raised the casualty count to as many as 23-25 killed and 130 wounded in the Baghdad car bombing of the US headquarters there.

The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters buildings inside the heavily-fortified area known as the Green Zone were unaffected. The blast came the day before Iraqi and US officials, including US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, are to meet with a wary UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a future UN role in Iraq. “At least 20 people have lost their lives and almost 60 were injured,” US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters. “It would appear from all the indicators this was a suicide bomb. We have confirmation some of those killed were US citizens, US contractors. We believe the current number is two. We are waiting for final confirmation,” Kimmitt said. Another five people were reported dead and 71 wounded at Baghdad hospitals. Witnesses claimed US soldiers opened fire in panic on Iraqis moments after the blast, but a military spokesman denied this.

Earlier AP had reported,

Officials said more than 60 people, including six Americans, were injured in the blast on a mist-shrouded morning near the north entrance — known as the “Assassin’s Gate” — to Saddam’s former Republican Palace complex, now used by the U.S.-led occupation authority for headquarters.

I’d say there is increasing evidence that the US is not in control in Iraq, and that the place may well be headed toward being a failed state for the near term. When, 9 or 10 months after an army conquers a place, its HQ is not safe from attack, this is always a bad sign. For those who keep making Germany and Japan analogies, I ask you if MacArthur’s HQ was getting blown up in Tokyo in April of 1946.’