Prof Nagel's War, Part Two
The picture was the same across Iraq as the year ended: the number of attacks against American forces, which averaged about 40 a day in November, fell to an average of about 20 a day in December, according to American officials. The capture of Saddam Hussein is a reflection of better intelligence; he was found not by chance but after hard intelligence work buttressed by raids in which associates of his were found and persuaded to offer tips on his whereabouts. It is, in the annals of counterinsurgency, a notable achievement.
Military officers and scholars are conducting an unusually open debate about counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, focusing on the question of calibration of firepower and the use of other pressure tactics, like surrounding hostile villages with barbed wire -- this has been done on at least two occasions by American units in the Sunni Triangle -- and demolishing houses used by insurgents and detaining their relatives. In March, the Marines will return to Iraq, and the man who will command the 20,000-strong force, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, said in an interview last month with The New York Times that the Marines will use a softer touch than the Army. ''I don't want to condemn what people are doing,'' General Conway said. ''I'll simply say that I think until we can win the population over and they can give us those indigenous intelligence reports, that we're prolonging the process.'' Referring to the Army's use of airstrikes against insurgent targets, Conway added: ''I do not envision using that tactic. It would have to be a rare incident that transcends anything that we have seen in the country to make that happen.''
It's not clear why the Marines believe a softer touch will be more effective. During the war and its aftermath, no Marine battalions were based in the Sunni Triangle outside Baghdad, which is where the majority of attacks against American forces have occurred and where American tactics have been the most hard-nosed. Yet it is true that the Marines are, historically, more experienced at counterinsurgency warfare than the Army.
When I asked Nagl what he thought of Conway's critique, he shrugged in a dismissive manner -- his way of saying the Marines don't understand the reality on the ground in the Sunni Triangle. But at least one Sunni leader said he thinks Conway's critique is spot on. Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar is deputy chief of one of the largest Sunni tribes and a member of the American-appointed Governing Council. Al-Yawar is a moderate who wants the occupation to succeed and Iraq to become a democracy. However, he doesn't see the Army's counterinsurgency doing much to bring real security and peace.
''The United States is using excessive power,'' he said when I visited his residence in Baghdad. ''They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam? They are demolishing houses now. They say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his family's home destroyed?''
Al-Yawar continued: ''You cannot win the hearts and minds of the people by using force. What's the difference between dictatorship and what's happening now?''
The formation of ''indigenous'' forces, as they are called, is considered a paramount element of successful counterinsurgency. In his book, Nagl emphasizes that one of the many shortcomings of American policy in Vietnam was America's inability to build a capable South Vietnamese fighting force. ''Vietnamization,'' when it finally came along in 1969, was too little, too late. During one of our discussions, Nagl explained the use of Iraqi forces as a matter of efficacy and necessity.
''There are lots of reasons why Iraqis are going to be better at it than we are,'' he said. ''They know who is supposed to be where and what they are supposed to be doing. They can see patterns of behavior that are irregular in a way that our untrained eye cannot. They can talk to everybody in a way that we cannot.''
A patchwork of Iraqi security forces is being created. In addition to the beleaguered police, there are, most notably, the new Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or I.C.D.C. The first battalion of the new Iraqi Army went through a nine-week training course late last year, but within two months of its graduation, nearly half of the battalion's 700 soldiers had quit because their pay, about $60 a month, was too low. Although pay scales are now being reviewed, the army remains embryonic and is unlikely to assume significant counterinsurgency missions for some time. The I.C.D.C., on the other hand, already numbers more than 10,000 and is regularly engaged in joint patrols with American troops. Still, members of the I.C.D.C. appear far from ready to take over the hard-core missions being carried out by the occupation force.
Last month, I went to a base in Balad, about 50 miles from Camp Manhattan, where the Fourth Infantry Division's First Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, was training a class of about 50 I.C.D.C. recruits. Each course takes two weeks, the first week in the classroom and the second week in the field. The battalion had already trained three classes, but not without hitches. The first commander and deputy commander of the I.C.D.C. in the area were fired after it emerged that they were extorting kickbacks from the recruits. One recruit was found to be trying to organize other recruits into an anti-American cell that would use its training to mount attacks against the occupation force; he was thrown into prison. ''In every class there are people we're concerned about,'' an American officer told me. ''There are people in the I.C.D.C. now who we're concerned about.''
The classroom was situated in a concrete airplane hangar in which Iraqi and American flags hung from the ceiling. The recruits, wearing red baseball caps with ''I.C.D.C.'' printed in English and Arabic, ranged in age from their late teens to their mid-40's. Because the American trainers were having a hard time recalling the recruits' Arabic names, the Iraqis were given English nicknames. (One of the recruits, a pudgy Iraqi in his 20's, was called Flounder, after the character in the movie ''Animal House.'') When I visited, they were being trained to say, in English, ''Raise your hands!'' and ''Drop your weapon!'' -- a strange choice in a country where few people speak English.
The recruits came from local villages, and most of them had joined the I.C.D.C. for two reasons: because they wanted better security and because they needed the money. When the classes started in October, the first group of recruits faced harassment from other locals -- sometimes even from family members -- who threatened to kill them if they worked with the Americans. According to Lt. Col. Aubrey Garner, the battalion commander, the quality of recruits has increased and threats against them have diminished as the local population realizes the money is useful and the Americans are not going to leave tomorrow. Yet Garner harbors no illusions about his I.C.D.C. recruits.
''We had this idea that we could train them and they could start independent operations quickly,'' he said. ''But what we learned is that a two-week training regimen isn't going to turn them into soldiers like we have.''
Because the I.C.D.C. has been so slow to mature, American officials decided in December to form a special I.C.D.C. battalion composed of veteran fighters from the militias of the five major Iraqi political groups. This special battalion is intended as a strike force of determined soldiers who will focus on capturing or eliminating insurgents. The plan drew instant criticism from some Iraqis who say they believe the new battalion will focus not on fighting the insurgency but on eliminating the enemies of their political patrons. Al-Yawar, the Sunni tribal leader, is one of the plan's harshest critics.
''It means civil war in the future,'' he said. ''If they do this, there will definitely be warlords.''
The creation of a strong security force can backfire in unexpected ways. In the Middle East, as in most of the third world, security forces do not behave terribly well. In Egypt, to take just one example, the army and other security forces have an abysmal human rights record. True, the American military has more of a guiding hand in Iraq, but that doesn't guarantee much. The American-trained and -equipped Salvadoran Army, which was an effective fighting force in the 1980's in the sense that its soldiers were excellent killers, eliminated not only the leftist rebels who were its official enemies but large numbers of ordinary civilians and political activists who were not bearing arms. Moreover, in countries that lack strong political leaders -- and Iraq today is such a country -- strong military leaders have a habit of exercising political control in a fashion that does not favor democratic development or political reconciliation.
For these reasons, it seems unlikely that Nagl and soldiers like him will soon be able to cede their role as the principal counterinsurgency force in Iraq. And while they wait, their work will probably not get any easier.
Two days before the attack on Khaldiya's police station, a soldier in Nagl's battalion, Sgt. Jarrod Black, was in a convoy that was attacked by an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., in Ramadi, a Sunni city 10 miles from Khaldiya. Black, the father of two boys, whose wife was pregnant at the time, was killed by the blast; he was the 455th American soldier to die in Iraq.
Three days later, just 24 hours after the Khaldiya car bomb, a memorial service for Black was held at an American base in Ramadi, and Nagl attended. Nagl had warned me that the final stretch of our trip to the base, about a mile's drive through the busy center of Ramadi, might be dangerous because American convoys often got stuck in traffic, where they turned into easy targets. But the drive there was uneventful.
After the service, Nagl returned to his Humvee -- there were five vehicles in the convoy, including two, in the front and back, that had .50-caliber machine-gun turrets. The convoy left the base and headed back into Ramadi. The main street has four lanes divided by a large median; two lanes go east, two lanes west. The eastern lanes were blocked by a crane placing cement blast barriers in front of the municipal building. All eastbound vehicles were being diverted into one of the westbound lanes. After a few hundred yards, traffic snarled.
From the eastern end of the street, near a mosque that was about 500 yards away, a crowd was marching toward the convoy. At the same time, pops of gunfire were heard; they quickly became a fusillade, like Chinese New Year with bullets, though the firing was vertical -- the gunmen were shooting into the air. In a sign that violence beckoned, shopkeepers began pulling down the shutters of their stores and women and children along the street began to run.
Because the convoy was stuck, bumper to bumper, Colonel Swisher, in the Humvee ahead of Nagl's, ordered his men to drive their vehicles over the median to the unfilled lanes on the other side and get out of town immediately. The median was high, about two feet. Nagl's driver, Specialist James Regester, who goes by the nickname Reggie, backed up a few inches -- that was all the space he had -- and revved the engine, throwing it into first and jumping the median in a lurching heave that rocked Nagl back and forth in the cabin. The other Humvees did the same, but Colonel Swisher's got stuck on the median, its front wheels in the air.
The soldiers left their vehicles and set up a perimeter, keeping their eyes on the crowd and rooftops, their weapons pointed at the protesters, who by now had encircled the Americans. The Iraqis were gripped with anger, jeering and shouting slogans in favor of the recently captured Saddam Hussein. They thrust their fists toward the Americans, they waved the soles of their shoes -- a particularly low insult in the Arab world -- and some of them spat toward the G.I.'s. Gunfire was everywhere.
Nagl tried to get brigade headquarters on the radio but couldn't get through. He was talking with Colonel Swisher about alerting the base's Quick Reaction Force to rescue the trapped convoy. Although the convoy had two .50-caliber machine guns, whose carrot-size bullets can cut through several rows of massed people, there were fewer than 20 American soldiers on hand, and one of them was a chaplain. A gun battle would leave many dead on both sides; and the crowd, about a thousand strong, controlled the rooftops.
Nagl recognized that although the protesters were furious, most of them were not insurgents. In typical insurgencies, fighters make up just a small part of the population, which is why winning the loyalty of the population is just as important as killing insurgents. The crowd's mood might have revealed that their hearts and minds, on that day at least, were beyond the grasp of the Americans. But no one was shooting at Nagl's men -- at least not yet.
The moment was perilous. If the G.I.'s were fired on and returned fire, or if they fired first, the inevitable results -- dead civilians with American bullets in their bodies -- would be broadcast by Al Jazeera throughout Iraq and the Arab world, delivering a useful propaganda victory to the insurgents. The insurgency has so far favored the tactics of detonate-and-run, but any quick-thinking fighter in the crowd might realize that he could instigate a bloodbath by firing a round at the sitting ducks by their Humvees.
Nagl tried to ease the tension with a wisecrack. ''Ever see 'Black Hawk Down'?'' he asked me.
After five minutes that seemed much longer, the colonel's Humvee was freed from its marooned perch. The soldiers jumped into their vehicles and began moving out. All along the street, men jeered and threw rocks. Then heavy gunfire -- boom-boom-boom -- erupted. It was only later that Nagl learned the fire came from one of his Humvees; its gunner saw someone with an AK-47 shooting -- or preparing to shoot -- at the convoy and responded with a burst of .50-caliber fire.
As the convoy raced toward home, young men along the highway jeered the passing Americans. As our Humvee reached the outskirts of Khaldiya, Nagl could see, not far from the bombed police station, a crowd on the road, waving flags and chanting slogans that included ''Saddam is in our blood and soul.'' A smoke bomb, detonated by the protesters, covered the road with an orange haze.
Children in the crowd threw rocks and stepped into the road to stop or slow down the Humvees; the kids jumped out of the way when Reggie gunned the engine. In such situations, with projectiles striking Humvees and the soldiers inside them, the rules of engagement allow soldiers to fire, because it is hard to determine whether an object that is thrown at them is a rock or a grenade. Nagl was worried that Reggie, who was steering the Humvee with his left hand and aiming his M-16 out the window with his right, might put a bullet between the eyes of one of the rock-throwing youths.
''Don't shoot them!'' he shouted. ''Don't shoot kids!''
''No, sir, I'm on safe, I'm on safe,'' Reggie
replied.
That evening, back in his office, Nagl told me that military intelligence had informed him that the demonstration we encountered was in fact against Saddam Hussein and in favor of his capture. It seemed hard to believe that the crowd, in the Sunni heartland, was happy about Hussein's capture, especially given the chants I heard supporting Hussein. But when I said so to Nagl, he insisted the people were happy about Hussein; their anger, he said, revolved only around the fact of occupation.
I later learned that similar anticapture protests had occurred in Tikrit and Samarra, also Sunni strongholds. And Nagl told me that there had been more bloodshed in Ramadi after our convoy escaped the city. In our wake, American reinforcements showed up at the municipal center, which was besieged by the crowd. According to a press release from the United States military, members of the crowd fired on the G.I.'s, wounding one of them. The soldiers shot back, killing two Iraqis and wounding one. Another American convoy was attacked by several dozen Iraqis; the Americans returned fire and killed one Iraqi, according to the press release.
The best explanation for the fact that insurgents in the crowd didn't open fire on Nagl's convoy was simple self-defense: they knew that although they could kill some of the trapped G.I.'s, they would be killed, too. But they acted that way because the Americans had threatened and used lethal force on many occasions, and this had not won their hearts or minds. It's a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Would the crowd, or any crowd in the Sunni Triangle, be less hostile if they hadn't previously been threatened with lethal force and, on occasion, shot at?
John Paul Vann assumed there was a calibration of lethal power that would work in Vietnam or in any counterinsurgency effort -- the right amount of force, the right number of friendly waves. I began to wonder whether such perfection is attainable. Nagl, sounding a bit more hard-line than before the events in Ramadi and the car bomb in Khaldiya, said he thought a balance was being struck.
''I'm not really all that concerned about their hearts right now,'' he said that evening. ''We're into the behavior-modification phase. I want their minds right now. Maybe we'll get their hearts later, as we spend $100,000 on their schools and health clinics this week and another $100,000 on their schools and health clinics next week and $100,000 on their schools and health clinics the week after that. Over time I'll start winning some hearts. Right now I just want them to stop shooting at us, stop planting I.E.D.'s. If they're not involved in these activities, they should start turning in the people who are. Whatever techniques that are legal and moral that I have to use to accomplish that, I will. Counterinsurgency is not always a pretty thing.''
In what I had planned as my last day with Nagl's unit, I walked to the tactical operations center at 9:30 in the morning to say goodbye and get a ride to the front gate, where my driver was waiting for me. From a few hundred yards away I noticed that a line of Humvees was idling in front of the center, about to move out. I ran the rest of the way, and as I neared Nagl's Humvee he opened the back door and said: ''Get in. We took a hit.''
As the convoy raced out the front gate Nagl explained that an attack on a checkpoint from a rocket-propelled grenade had just wounded and perhaps killed two of his soldiers. We soon arrived at the scene: an armored personnel carrier that had been parked next to an unfinished cinder-block hut was surrounded by blast debris and bloody bandages; the wounded soldiers had already been taken away for treatment. Soldiers immediately set up checkpoints on the road -- a tank, with the words ''Assault & Battery'' on the barrel of its gun, stood on the median -- and began questioning the residents of nearby houses.
Nagl strode to the nearest house. In its courtyard, a man held a glass of tea in his hand. His family members -- several adult women and about a half dozen children -- had gathered a few feet away, next to a wall, with terror in their eyes.
''Did someone say they saw the guys?'' Nagl asked a soldier who had sequestered the family.
''No one says they saw the guys,'' the soldier replied.
Nagl stared at the man with the glass of tea.
''This guy is coming with us now,'' he said, sharply.
Nagl walked to a yard in front of the house and found footprints that he suspected belonged to the insurgent who had fired the grenade. The Army had never trained Nagl to be a crime-scene investigator, but that's one of the things he has become. He walked briskly across the street, back to the cinder-block hut. There was a small crater next to the damaged armored personnel carrier, the inside of which was stained with blood. Nagl began digging in the rubble and soon found fist-size chunks of shrapnel, too large for a rocket-propelled grenade.
''It was an I.E.D.,'' he shouted -- an improvised explosive device.
Nagl continued digging, unearthing the burned remains of a motorcycle battery. There are two types of detonation devices for I.E.D.'s in Iraq: either a wire is attached to a detonator held by the insurgent, who might be 50 to 100 yards away, or an electrical detonator, attached to a small battery, is triggered by a remote control, like a repurposed garage-door opener. Nagl had found the remnants of the electrical detonator.
A few feet from Nagl, in a corner of the cinder-block hut, his soldiers had flexicuffed a middle-aged, overweight man and pulled his kaffiyeh over his eyes. The Iraqi said he didn't know who set off the I.E.D. He was trembling and said he was sick and wanted to sit down. He was told to remain standing. On the street, soldiers were stopping cars and searching them; there was no friendliness in any soldier's demeanor this day.
Nagl had figured out what happened. The insurgents had buried the I.E.D. -- two artillery shells wired together -- and waited for a patrol to pull up to the hut. When that happened, an insurgent who was across the street, in the front yard of the house, pushed the remote control. Nagl knew that the Americans could have avoided the attack. They had provided an easy target because they had used the hut before as a resting spot for patrols and checkpoints. The insurgents, conducting ''pattern analysis,'' had noticed this.
An order went out immediately to the battalion: do not stop at the same place for patrols or checkpoints. The only good news of the day was that this lesson had not been learned at a fatal cost. The wounded soldiers would survive.
The insurgency has weaknesses. Its ranks are composed of ex-Baathists, Islamists, small numbers of foreign fighters, criminals and dirt-poor men who agree to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a passing convoy for $500. It is not cohesive. Nor does it have a positive vision, or any vision, of how Iraq should be governed if the occupiers are driven out. Particularly with the capture of Saddam Hussein and close associates of his, whatever central leadership may have existed has been badly crippled. The American military is hoping that a headless insurgency with dwindling finances will melt away under the pressure of continued raids and precise airstrikes.
Yet the insurgency's weaknesses are, in a looking-glass fashion, also its strengths. A senior adviser to Gen. John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, advised me to read an article in the winter issue of The Washington Quarterly by Steven Metz, the director of research at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. Metz is highly regarded in military circles. In the 1990's he presciently warned that insurgencies would soon return to challenge the United States.
In his article, Metz wrote that disunity among the Iraqi insurgents is not as much of a disadvantage as it might seem: ''Unifying the various strands of the Iraqi insurgency behind any one strategy or objective, at least in the short term, will certainly be difficult if not impossible. Yet, this same complexity means that quashing the insurgency will be just as difficult or impossible.'' Metz also noted that insurgencies, like those in Colombia and Sierra Leone, often use money to attract fighters, rather than ideology.
In the end, it is not the guile or ingenuity of the insurgents that will determine whether they succeed -- their hit-and-run tactics are similar to those seen by Julius Caesar, after all, and they employ an attritional strategy that guerrillas have used for centuries. Instead, the deciding factor will be the guile and ingenuity of the counterinsurgents. If the history of counterinsurgency demonstrates anything, it is that Nagl and officers like him will have to be wily, tenacious and perhaps a little lucky to win. In Iraq today, it would not be unreasonable to consider the American counterinsurgents -- though they are equipped with enough firepower to destroy every building in Iraq and enough technology to listen to any whispered conversation -- the underdogs.
Even if the insurgency is kept at a low boil, what will happen when an interim government takes control of Iraq in July? Will the government have enough legitimacy? If American forces take a back seat to Iraqi security forces, as they hope to do, will fighting break out among Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds? Will the security forces be strong enough to keep order? Or will they be so strong that they turn Iraq into a dictatorship that exterminates insurgents and civilians alike?
These are risks that Nagl, at least, is willing to run. When I asked, one morning, whether the war was worth its human and financial costs, he described the goal of the occupation as freedom for blighted Iraq. He concluded by enthusiastically using a four-letter word that soldiers utter more frequently than ''the'' or ''and,'' followed by, ''yeah, it's worth it.''
Nagl is a gifted officer with the common sense not to confuse hopes with facts. He says he believes he is winning his war, and his grasp of the present, as well as of the past and the future, is as sharp as anyone's. He knows, though, that the war will be messy and slow, as T.E. Lawrence warned, and he knows enough about wars to realize that the outcome is not assured. That is the nature of guerrilla wars, especially -- they are chaotic and confused and only fools predict their results.
Yet if predicting the future is a hopeless endeavor, learning from the past is not. The counterinsurgency books that Nagl studied do impart an important lesson. The goal the United States hopes to reach in Iraq -- a successful counterinsurgency that does not drag on for years and does not involve a large amount of killing -- has never been achieved by any army.
Peter Maass, a contributing writer, is the author of ''Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.'' He has reported extensively for the magazine from Iraq.
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