U.S. and Iraqis Are Wrangling Over War Plans
By JOHN F. BURNS
nytimes.com.
BAGHDAD, Jan. 14 — Just days after President Bush unveiled his new war plan for Iraq, the heart of the effort — a major push to secure the capital — faces some of its fiercest resistance from the very people it depends on for success: Iraqi government officials.
American military officials have spent days huddled in meetings with Iraqi officers in a race to turn blueprints drawn up in Washington into a plan that will work on the ground in Baghdad. With the first American and Iraqi units dedicated to the plan as part of the new troop buildup due to be in place within weeks, time is short for setting details of what American officers view as the decisive battle of the war.
But the signs so far have unnerved some Americans working on the plan, who have described a web of problems, ranging from a contested chain of command to issues of how to protect American troops deployed in some of Baghdad’s most dangerous districts, that some fear could hobble the effort before it begins.
First among these is a Shiite-led government that has been so dogmatic in its attitude that the Americans worry that they will be frustrated in their aim of cracking down equally on Shiite and Sunni extremists, a strategy that President Bush has declared central to the plan.
“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem,” said an American military official in Baghdad closely involved in negotiations over the plan, expressing frustration. “We are being played like a pawn.”
The American military’s concern over these problems came as new details emerged of the reconstruction portion of Mr. Bush’s plan, which calls for more than doubling the number of American-led reconstruction teams in Iraq to 22 and quintupling the number of American civilian reconstruction specialists to 500. But how the new specialists will be recruited and how security will be provided for them — major issues now — remain unclear. [Page A7.]
Compounding American concerns about the government’s willingness to go after Shiite extremists, the Americans say, has been a behind-the-scenes struggle over the naming of the Iraqi officer to fill the key post of operational commander for the Baghdad operation. In face of strong American skepticism, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has named an officer from the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq who was virtually unknown to the Americans, and whose bullish attitude about Iraqi primacy in the effort has deepened American anxieties.
The Iraqi commander, Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, will be part of what the Americans have described as a partnership between the two armies, with an American general, Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of the First Cavalry Division, working with Gen. Aboud, and American and Iraqi officers twinned down the operational chain. For the Americans, accustomed to clear operational control, the partnership concept is troublesome — full of potential, some officers fear, for dispute with the Iraqis over tough issues like the equal targeting of Shiite and Sunni lawbreakers.
As late as Sunday evening, it was still unclear whether the prime minister would be in overall charge of the new crackdown, a demand the Iraqis have pressed since the plan was first discussed last month, American officials said. They said days of argument had led to a compromise under which General Qanbar would answer to a so-called crisis counsel, made up of the ministers of defense and interior, Mr. Maliki, the top American commander in Iraq and the Iraqi national security adviser.
The structure seemed rife with potential for conflict. An American military official who has been centrally involved in the negotiations over the new command structure said that for the Americans involved, the arrangements appeared unwieldy, and at odds with military doctrine calling for a clear chain of command. “There’s no military definition for ‘partnered,’ ” he said.
Along with these problems, the Americans cite logistical issues that must be solved before the new plan can begin to work. Intent on using the large numbers of additional American and Iraqi troops that have been pledged to the plan to get “boots on the ground” across Baghdad, they are planning to establish perhaps 30 or 40 “joint security sites” spread across nine new military districts in the capital, many in police stations that have been among the most frequent targets in the war.
But in many areas, there are no police stations, at least none suitable as operational centers, so the planners are seeking alternate locations, including large houses, that will have to be fortified with 15-foot-high concrete blast walls, rolls of barbed wire and machine-gun towers. There are no solutions yet to basic questions like who — the American forces, or the Iraqis’ own anemic logistics system — will supply the fuel required to keep Iraqi Humvees and troop-carrying trucks running, at a time when the American supply chain will face new strains in supporting thousands of additional American troops.
Against these concerns, American officers cite several factors they believe will lend impetus to the new offensive. The five additional brigades of American troops committed by President Bush — approximately 21,500 American soldiers, about 80 percent of them to be deployed in Baghdad — will roughly triple the numbers of American soldiers available for ground operations, as a relatively small proportion of the new troop strength will be needed for “force protection,” the military term for troops who safeguard bases and ensure the safety of other soldiers.
American commanders say those already dedicated to force protection will cover the new troops, some of whom have already begun to move into Iraq from Kuwait. Since the resignation of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after the November elections, American commanders here have been more candid in acknowledging something Mr. Rumsfeld often refuted: that the commanders have had to play shell games with thinly stretched troops, and that many crucial operations, including previous attempts to secure Baghdad, have failed because troops have often been moved on to other operations, allowing insurgents and militia groups to retake areas vacated by the Americans.
One positive cited by American officers is the naming by President Bush of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus as the new overall American commander in Iraq, succeeding Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who will leave next month after more 30 months in command of the war. General Petraeus, who has already completed two 12-month tours in Iraq, has a reputation among officers who have served under him as an imaginative commander who enlists strong loyalties among his troops.
Many officers interviewed for this article said they still believed the tide of the war here can be reversed, with the additional troops, the focus on regaining control of Baghdad and the more consistent military strategy they say they expect from General Petraeus. The 54-year-old native of New York State , a marathon runner, will come to Baghdad after overseeing the Army’s reworking of its counterinsurgency manual, parts of which he redrafted himself.
Some officers, however, said they worried about General Petraeus’s reputation as a “spotlight general,” with a readiness to thrust himself into the glare of media coverage in a way that contrasts with General Casey, who once said he was happy to be the “least well-known” American commander at war in recent memory. The two generals, who worked together during General Petraeus’s last tour here as commander of the unit responsible for training Iraq’s new forces, are said by other American officers to have developed a mutual wariness that has added an edge to General Petraeus’s nomination as General Casey’s successor.
American officials in Baghdad and Washington have said that they have limited time — perhaps no more than six to nine months — to show gains from the new American push before popular support erodes still further and the onset of the 2008 presidential campaign leads American politicians to push harder for a troop withdrawal. There are also questions of how long the overstretched American military can sustain the stepped-up presence here.
Together, these factors have thrust American military planners into the military equivalent of a two-minute drill, trying to develop a plan that will yield rapid gains in regaining control of Baghdad neighborhoods that have slipped into near-anarchy as Sunni insurgents and Shiite death squads have run rampant, killing scores of people almost every day. While American officers are confident the additional troops will make a major impact, they worry about what happens when the American troop commitment is scaled down again, and Iraqi troops are facing the main burden of patrolling the city.
That prospect raises the specter of repeating what has happened on several other occasions in Baghdad: Americans clearing neighborhoods house-by-house, only for insurgents and militiamen to reappear when Iraqi security forces take over from the Americans and prove incapable of holding the ground, or politically compliant with the gunmen who are supposed to be their enemy. That was the pattern with Operation Together Forward, the last effort to secure Baghdad, which was launched with an additional 7,000 American troops over the summer , and effectively abandoned within two months when Iraqi troops failed to hold areas the Americans handed over to them.
One concern is that the enemy that President Bush and American commanders have identified as the target of the new Baghdad plan — Sunni and Shiite extremists — may replicate the pattern American troops have seen before when they have launched major offensives — of “melting away” only to return later. Some officers report scattered indications that some Shiite militiamen may already be heading for safer havens in southern Iraq, calculating that they can wait the new offensive out before returning to the capital. “This is an enemy that will trade space for time,” one officer said.
A major worry among the Americans is that their own efforts to clear areas of the city will be used by militia groups, or even by the Shiite-dominated government forces, as an opening to grab territory and to seed the newly cleared area with their own allies. The concern centers on both Sunni and Shiite armed groups, but particularly on the Shiites. “We are doing their bidding unknowingly,” one American military official said.
“You go clean the area, but then it’s backfilled by JAM,” he said, in a reference to the Mahdi Army, the militia of the renegade Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. “That’s the heart of the problem.”
The number of Americans to be based at the new joint security centers is also the subject of intense debate. At a minimum, according to officers involved in the planning, there will be an American platoon, about 30-40 troops, working from each new center, with another platoon patrolling nearby, serving as both a quick reaction force to quell any surge of violence in the area and also to protect the Americans stationed with the Iraqis.
That places American soldiers directly in neighborhoods where, until now, they have only passed through on patrols. Under the new plan, they will work closely with the Iraqi Army and police in an attempt to establish a trust that has hitherto been elusive. The approach has been modeled on a successful American campaign effort 18 months ago in Tal Afar, a northern city that saw dramatic drops in violence and is now regarded as one of the few success stories of the American campaign.
The Tal Afar strategy was developed by Col. H. R. McMaster, commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment at the time. Colonel McMaster, who is widely regarded within the army as one of its most creative counterinsurgency thinker, as well as something of a maverick, has been involved in Pentagon planning for the new Baghdad operation. Other officers say he is likely to return to Baghdad to work with General Petraeus on implementing the new plan.
But unlike Tal Afar, Baghdad is at the heart of the country, with nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population, and American officers say that success here will be far more complex than in the operation masterminded by Col. McMaster. Still, some elements of the new plan are expected to yield immediate results. Under existing American deployments, most American units conducting patrols or raids in Baghdad have to travel miles from bases on the outskirts of the city — or a handful of forward operating bases inside the capital — to reach conflicted neighborhoods. That will change with the new plan.
In embattled West Baghdad, the plan is to place the new security centers squarely where the sectarian fighting has been fiercest. One of the first centers expected to begin operating is in Ghazaliya, a Sunni enclave that has repeatedly come under assault from Shiite militias. That seems certain to pose early on the central question that confronts American commanders as they launch the plan: Will the Maliki government agree to operations aimed at the Shiite extremists, or resist them and push for the focus to be laid on Sunni extremists attacking Shiite areas?
American officers say that only time will tell, but that they will be surprised if Mr. Maliki and his top aides change colors, despite the assurances the Iraqi leader is said to have offered President Bush. As described by American commanders, the pattern in the eight months since Mr. Maliki took office has been for the Shiite leaders who dominate the new government to press the Americans to concentrate on Sunni extremists.
Sabrina Tavernise and Marc Santora contributed reporting. |
