Green Berets and regular Army in Anbar
In a Volatile Region of Iraq, U.S. Military Takes Two Paths - washingtonpost.com
Green Berets skilled in working closely with indigenous forces have enlisted one of the largest and most influential tribes in Iraq to launch a regional police force — a rarity in this Sunni insurgent stronghold. Working deals and favors over endless cups of spiced tea, they built up their wasta — or pull — with the ancient tribe, which boasts more than 300,000 members. They then began empowering the tribe to safeguard its territory and help interdict desert routes for insurgents and weapons. The goal, they say, is to spread security outward to envelop urban trouble spots such as Hit.
But the initial progress has been tempered by friction between the team of elite troops and the U.S. Army’s battalion that oversees the region. At one point this year, the battalion’s commander, uncomfortable with his lack of control over a team he saw as dangerously undisciplined, sought to expel it from his turf, officers on both sides acknowledged.
While interesting, this article is, in some ways, misleading; it tends to convey a sense of “it’s just that easy.” Both approaches are needed. Certainly the 3ID needs to incorporate elements of the Special Forces approach; but that should be done before they arrive in Iraq. Also, there’s plenty to be said for holding the center of Hit (or any other city) with regular forces and denying the insurgents a victory and a refuge. As usual in Iraq security issues, more troops (trained and focused on a counterinsurgency mission) would have been helpful.
There’s another misleading aspect to this article. As written, the casual reader might ask, “Hey, why not do this? Get the Special Forces in there, work with the tribes, embrace the local culture, achieve stability that way, and then we can get the hell outta town.”
Oops. That sounds good, but that’s not what we were trying to do. Not on April 9, 2003. We were going to build democracy. Paul Bremer and the CPA knew better. Who is Sheikh Jubair of the Albu Nimr tribe on the upper Euphrates? Under the American plan, I suppose he was nobody, unless and until he could get himself elected. (It’s a compounding factor that we delayed elections for months and months.) The point is that we didn’t start from a classic, British imperialist approach of working through traditional, local power structures. We were going to bring in democracy, in our own image.
Three years later, plain old stability, under autocratic tribal sheikhs looks pretty damn good. More mission shrink? Or was that always the idea?
Vulcan in Vancouver
Good news from Anbar
WaPo reporting from Iraq
Let’s do the time warp again
iowahawk returns