March 21, 2006
My Charming Naivete
I had mixed feelings last night when I read this NY Times article:
Mr. Bush recounted how American and Iraqi forces initiated a major military offensive against the insurgents last fall, including the construction of an eight-foot dirt wall around the city to cut off escape routes. After successful combat operations were over, he said, more than 1,000 Iraqi forces were deployed to keep order. "In short, you see a city coming back to life," he said.
First off, it's good to hear that somewhere in Iraq isn't rife with violence, and that, however much of a mess the place has become there are points of light.
But.
But seriously - this happened twice in 2005. The initial "liberation" of Tal Afar in 2004 was almost immediately undone when American troops cycled out again to fight insurgents elsewhere. And it was undone again after the campaign in the summer of 2005.
Two and a half years, people. It took two years for us to re-figure out that insurgents don't stand and fight, and the way to beat them is to deny them access to the population by maintaining a presence, not just chasing them all over creation. We've known how to do this at least since Vietnam, we have just absolutely refused to remember it. Of course, it doesn't help that we've never had enough troops to actually implement the sort of "oil spot" tactics that are required to fight an insurgency.
So, mixed feelings. But of course, this morning I'm reminded that, whenever I give this Administration an ounce of credit, I regret it. From today's Washington Post:
[professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College Ahmed] Hashim said he has also seen indications lately that the insurgents have begun "seeping back in" to Tall Afar now that the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment has rotated home and been replaced by another Army unit.[...]
"Al-Qaeda has started to come back again," said Jaafar al-Khawat, 33, a tailor. "They have started to kill Shiites and Sunnis who cooperate with the Americans. Last Wednesday, they killed a truck driver because he worked with the Americans."
Yasir al-Efri, 23, a law student at Mosul University, said al-Qaeda pamphlets began appearing on the biggest mosque in Tall Afar in the past two months claiming credit for attacks. "The Tall Afar mission failed," he said. "The city will turn back to how it was before the battle within two months. The Americans are busy putting cement barriers and barbed wire around their bases and no one is taking care of the infrastructure."
Sebti, the mechanic, was more fearful of sectarian conflict. "People now are afraid to send their kids to school," he said. "I have to take my son to and from the school every day. There are two gangs in Tall Afar now that specialize in kidnapping children. Police can do nothing against that."
So, so much for that. Combine this with the fact that those Iraqi forces guarding Tal Afar are just rebranded Kurdish peshmerga and that Tal Afar is majority Sunni Turkmen, and Tal Afar doesn't sound so different from the rest of Iraq at all. That'll teach me (yet again) not to believe word one out of an Administration press conference.
Posted by ben at March 21, 2006 11:10 AM