Five hundred American and 300 Iraq troops came up empty in Mosul when they went hunting for al Qaeda:
This push 225 miles north of Baghdad in southeastern Mosul — where five U.S. soldiers died on Jan. 28 after an improvised explosive device tore through their Humvee — didn't find the fight it had hoped for. The 53 al-Qaeda cell leaders and IED makers the troops had targeted were nowhere to be found.
We suspect Iraqis leaked the information, but that's an easy answer. It may be the answer but it might not be. Regardless of the failure to kill or capture jihadis in the mission, we did what we intended to do:
Despite the frustrations, the chief objective was realized. U.S. soldiers established a command outpost in an al-Qaeda-controlled neighborhood — a building block of the counterinsurgency strategy.
This isn't just an excuse to cover failure. This was not a search and destroy mission. It was a clear and hold mission. While it would have been nice to kill or capture a bunch of jihadis while moving in, the mission was to clear the area to establish a long-term presence with the combat outpost. Over time, the outpose will enable Iraqi and American patrols to make friends in the neighborhoods and target the jihadis lying low or trying to reinfiltrate the area. This will strangle the enemy and kill them, capture them, or drive them away over time.
The enemy cleared out on its own which makes the area no less cleared for having the enemy's unwilling cooperation. There was a time the enemy would have tried to stand and fight, but they apparently didn't have the heart for it. Or they learned the futility of a stand-up fight after months of getting smashed up.
And always remember that the basic idea is to get the Iraqis able to do this on their own. That's counter-insurgency 101.
