I've long argued that our surge offensive was not a change in the big picture of clear, hold, and build. In part, the surge was a major offensive against al Qaeda that was not much different from past campaigns to kill the enemy.
The major military change in our strategy was that instead of relying on the Iraqis to hold the gains we made, we used our extra troop strength to hold the ground taken. The problem was that the Iraqis could not cope with the brutal and well-armed and -financed enemies who scattered and then moved back in. The Iraqis lacked the skill and experience to hold the ground.
As we look for our errors (normal in all wars), I think we can focus on our failure to bolster the Iraqis for the hold mission in the pre-surge era:
We had just gone through the second battle of Fallujah. Our forces were still in the mindset of killing the enemy. Finding the enemy and killing the enemy. Even though President Bush's Secretary of Defense were saying that training the Iraqis and standing them up was the primary mission now, that mentality had not seeped down to the ground level. We were still focused on just killing the enemy. To them all Iraqis were the enemy, were potential enemies. So when we showed up, we advisors showed up with Iraqis, we were working with potentially the enemy. So obviously there were problems there, we couldn't a lot of support, training, they didn't want to do joint missions at first. They had to be ordered basically from "on high" which were coming from Security of Defense all the way down to us. Combat units had to be ordered to do joint missions. To tell one story, we did a cordon and search with the Army's 1st of the 506th Infantry. The way you are suppose to do a joint mission with the Iraqis is the American leadership is supposed to talk with the Iraqi leadership, give them an idea of the overall plan and then allow the Iraqi leadership to lead their Iraqis through their part of the plan. That's not what happened. All the Americans did was have the Iraqis there say they were there, and they would just direct the Iraqis. They didn't conduct any recon with the the Iraqi squad leader -- just told him "go into that house we need to go question that person." That's not the way you are suppose to do a mission. The Iraqis didn't know really what they were supposed to be doing there.
For a strategy that rightly relied on getting Iraqis to eventually replace our forces, we did a piss poor job of actually helping the Iraqis to carry out that job. It isn't enough to provide minimal training and weapons and send them into the field. These green Iraqi forces always needed American advisors to stiffen them and guide them as they learned to crawl, then walk, and hopefully run. Over the last year, with American advisors newly sprinkled throughout the Iraqi military, we have seen the Iraqi army grow in numbers, skill, and experience. And our military offensive in Baghdad and the Baghdad Belt crippled al Qaeda and made them too weak to defeat the stronger Iraqi forces. The defection of the Anbar Sunni Arab tribes (the Anbar Awakening), which provided a spark for Sunni Arabs in central Iraq to abandon al Qaeda and the Baathist resistance, has been an important piece, of course.
Our troops seem to have once viewed working with Iraqi units as a nuisance rather than as the path to victory. In the short run, yes, just letting American units conduct a mission would mean the mission would go better. But the basic truth of counter-insurgency is that it is better for the local allies to do the job well enough than for our troops to do the same job perfectly.
The surge of Americans won the Battle for Baghdad. In the end, it is the surge of Iraqis that will win the war. The surge put American troops in the "hold" role because Iraqis could not carry out that role. It seems apparent that it was our fault that the Iraqis could not carry out that critical role even as we were unwilling to do the job ourselves.
Even without the Anbar Awakening, I think that further scrutiny of the Iraq campaign will show that we might have been able to win the war years earlier if we hadn't viewed green and uneven Iraqi security forces as a burden rather than the key to success that they are, and as we now treat them.
