On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual “surge of operations”. I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.
These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.
When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.
When these operations began, it was clear that the press didn't have a clue about the significance. The press now seems to understand something big is happening, but there still seems to be a cluelessness about the operation (witness questions about our higher casualties recently that fail to comprehend that offensives will do that) that spills over into our political class declaring defeat.
This is a long-term operation and as I've mentioned before, our job is to both build up the Iraqi security forces and atomize the enemy forces so that Iraqi forces are good enough to do the job with no or minimal help from us. I just hope the program of sifting the population to strain out the enemies works better than it did in Fallujah after November 2004.
The author also notes the fallacy of thinking that we should "unleash" our forces to just kill them all. Our approach that seeks to protect the population is the militarily correct way to defeat terrorists and insurgents.
This is the risk of a high-profile surge. We may be forced by the public and our press to use a bad metric for judging the operation and we may have dangerously depleted our already waning patience, which is the real resource we need.
I will say that we are using the extra forces of the surge appropriately. I feared we'd fail to use them correctly and just plant them in more of the same which would have only increased our casualties. I thought our approach needed to change more than we needed more troops. We've done both, so I'll wait to see how this unfolds. I suggest our political and chattering classes do the same.
Defeat should really be the last option we consider when all other options are exhausted. Let's not be in such a rush to anti-war. Amazingly, many aren't even waiting for the September reports on Iraq to declare defeat and run away.
