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81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25
What are these numbers? This week’s Powerball winners? ... No, they’re the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.
But it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?
215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)
Okay, okay, so insurgents aren’t engaging us; they’re turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?
70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30
Civilians then. They’re just garroting poor civilians.
527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).
My point here is not that everything is peachy in Iraq. It isn’t. My point isn’t that the insurgency is in its last throes. It isn’t. My point here isn’t even to argue that we’re winning. I’m at best cautiously-pessimistic-to-neutral about how things are going there. ... My only point is that ... I was unequivocally shocked when I saw this. Completely the opposite of what I’d expected. My non-scientific sample of three friends, all of whom are considerably more bullish about the prospects in Iraq than I am, revealed three people similarly surprised by these numbers.
Myelectionanalysis expected to find the reverse of the actual numbers, as you would be led to think if you confined your reading to the International Crisis Group, who in their February 15, 2006 report, entitled "In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency" describe an insurgency that is going from strength to strength.
This report, based on close analysis of the insurgents’ own discourse, reveals relatively few groups ... whose strategy and tactics have evolved (in response to U.S. actions and to maximise acceptance by Sunni Arabs), and whose confidence in defeating the occupation is rising. ... The emergence of a more confident, better organised, coordinated, information-savvy insurgency, ... has survived, even thrived, despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, suggests the limitations of the current counter-insurgency campaign.
But it's hard to reconcile the International Crisis Group's report with the second link. An Armed Forces Journal article entitled "It will be better when you leave" says it has become so comparatively quiet in former Iraqi hotspots that the troops are wondering what to make of it.
There are more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 of whom are Marines. But even in the most insurgent-infested places in Iraq, the troops aren’t doing much. The Fallujahs and Mosuls and Tall Afars are history. The insurgents seem to be lying low. They’re not coming out in great numbers to confront U.S. troops. They’re not mounting as many effective IED attacks.
Sometimes it seems the American forces are searching for things to do — going on patrol for the sake of going on patrol. At some point that patrol is going to hit an IED — it’s a numbers game. But it’s unlikely that a patrol was specifically targeted. It’s just bad luck.
Could the insurgents be executing a similar strategy to the Taliban in Afghanistan? As Sean D. Naylor reported in the February issue of AFJ, Special Forces officers who work closely with tribal militias in Afghanistan’s most remote provinces warn that the former regime that protected al-Qaida is lying in wait, marshalling resources for the day America leaves.
George Packer has a good piece in this week's New Yorker "Why the Pentagon ignores its Own Success Story," concerning the "pacification" of Tel Afar employing Counter-Insurgency Tactics first invented in Malaya during the Communist insurrection of the 1950's.
Packer's "theme" is that Rumsfeld and Cheney were so much in love with their electronic warfare souped-up to destroy the enemy without really engaging the enemy that they forbade the use of the word "insurgency" because that would imply the need for Counter-Insurgency methods, time-tested and traditional, with a lot of hands-on engagement of US assets on the ground.
Packer contrasts the Tal Afar success, where US forces remain on the ground and do not allow insurgency forces back after an engagement, with the "search and destroy" methods of Fallujah, which kicked out insurgents with a high death toll, only to see them return after US forces departed.
Packer says that Rumsfeld just wants to get out of Iraq so his highly-expensive upgrading of armaments can continue, or he implies that strongly. The on-the-ground success of the Counter-Insurgency tactics means that a new textbook on CI is being written and will be ready next year, "just in time for the last GIs leaving Iraq to get a copy as they board the plane going stateside" as one cynical US commander notes.
Once again, the last war [Gulf War] was refought in Iraq, and the lessons learned in the war before that one [Vietnam], were disregarded as doctrine prevailed over intelligence [both G2 and brain-based].
1 comment :
I don't know how they got 446 as the number of civilian fatalities for March. Icasualties has gathered reports of more than twice as many (901).
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