Center for a New American Security

Check out Charlie's alter-ego's thoughts on tonight's debate over at Intel Dump.

And check back later tonight for reactions from her (and likely also, The Bateman).

Update: Ok, so they did get to foreign policy (after 45 minutes of the most stultifying economic policy discussions Charlie has ever seen). There were no major gaffes. (Though undecided voters seem to think Obama was the "winner.") And even if this election isn't decided on foreign policy, it's clear that these two candidates are much better versed than others in recent memory. Charlie, however, is somewhat more persuaded by Fred Kaplan's assessment:

Scored on debaters' points, the match was close. Judged on the substantive issues, especially on which candidate has the more realistic view of the world, Obama won hands down.

Read the rest of his column to find out why.

There has been some good blogging so far on the bigger picture political dynamics at play in the passage of the provincial elections law yesterday (final text here). Iraqologist wants to talk about something more arcane but still important: the vote allocation system described by the law. While it is commonly reported that the new law uses an "open list" system, in fact it uses something electionologists call "open list, proportional representation (OLPR)" They use a version of this system in Switzerland.

The first two Iraqi elections in 2005 were run under a "closed list (CL)" system. In this system, voters voted not for individual candidates but for lists--coalitions of parties--which were then allocated a number of seats proportional to their votes. These seats were then distributed according to preestablished rankings of individual candidates in each list. These rosters of names were supposed to be available to voters beforehand so they would know who they were voting for. In practice, however, many voters ended up not having access to these lists and thus had very little information about the leaders they elected.

The CL system has since been criticized by Iraqis and outsiders alike for multiple reasons. First, it severed the link between the voter and his elected representative and awarded a dominant role to the political party bosses who, rather than the voters, actually chose the representatives. This selection, unsurprisingly, tended to be based on patronage and loyalty and willingness to toe the line rather than competence or ability to represent constituents. Second, this system also over-encouraged consolidation and disproportionately punished small parties, and thus discouraged the open debate of differing political platforms. These two factors combined contributed to the sectarian-ization of the Iraqi elections and resulted in three big ethnocsectarian blocs--the UIA, Tawafuq, and the Kurds--receiving the lion's share of the votes.

Thus, the July 22 opposition parties have lobbied strongly for an "open list (OL)" system. The way OL is described in the media, and the way many assume it will work, is that, instead of people voting for lists, they will vote for individual candidates and the top vote-getting candidates will get seats. So if there are 41 seats on a provincial council (PC), the top 41 vote-getters will be awarded seats--simple. In this case you would avoid all the problems of the old law: individuals would be judged on their merits and political party affiliation would play much less of a role. Moreover, OL doesn't encourage consolidation at all. In fact, Iraqologist has heard electionologists cite this factor as the major disadvantage to OL, i.e. it results in divided governments that have little basis for unified action.

In any event, the new law is neither OL or CL but "open list, proportional representation (OLPR)." This system can be thought of as a kind of hybrid between OL and CL. First, voters can apply their one vote either to a candidate or a list. Once the voting is done, all the votes for both individuals and lists are then allocated to the lists to which those candidates belong. Seats on the PC are then alloted to the lists based on the percentage of votes the candidates on that list received. So if there are 41 seats on a PC, and ISCI's candidates sum total get 40% of the votes, ISCI will get 16 seats on the PC. Unlike the CL system, however, ISCI party leaders don't get to pick which of its candidates get those 16 seats--they go to the top 16 vote-getters among ISCI's candidates.*

OLPR is certainly much preferable to CL because 1) parties will rise and fall based on the quality of their individual candidates and 2) voters, not the party leaders, get to pick which candidates from the lists represent them. However, OLPR will still reward the big, organized and well-funded lists far more than a strictly OL system would. Iraqologist knows that in any elections anywhere, money, muscle, and organization are the name of the game, but we should at least go into these elections with our eyes open about how the PTB--ISCI, Da'wa, the PUK and the KDP--are still very likely going to end up on top, despite all the hopes the PTA have put into these elections, and about how the OLPR system is going to contribute to that outcome.

Let's use a hypothetical example to illustrate this. ISCI and Da'wa (running separately this go-round) both are going to go into, say, Nasiriya which will have, say, 35 provincial council seats up for election. They are both going to field strong lists of 35 candidates chosen (and likely paid) for their ability to deliver votes from their constituencies all the way down to the 35th guy. All 35 of each party's candidates are going to be strong and contribute a big chunk to ISCI and Da'wa's respective vote totals. Their opposition, by contrast, is a bunch of individuals and very small parties who are not united with each other (at least not yet).

So while if you had an OL system and therefore a straight contest for the votes in Nasiryia Village X between a local tribal leader, an ISCI guy, and a Da'wa guy, the local tribal leader might very well win on the strength of his qualifications, no matter how much financial support or organizational advantages his opponents had. But what is relevant in OLPR is the sum total of votes the party's candidates are able to garner. In other words, while the local leader in Nasiryia Village X may get enough votes that would rank him 14th on ISCI's list, #15 on the ISCI list is riding on the strength of the 20 ISCI candidates below him, i.e. on ISCI's ability to recruit and buy off good candidates down the ticket. In an OL system the guy wins a seat, but in an OLPR system where he's running against two well-funded, 35-candidate-strong lists, he loses. (The system for dealing with remainder votes/vacant seats also benefits the big parties, although those details are a bit too gnarly to get into in this post.)

The solution to this, of course, is for the random PTA independents and small parties to band together, recruit 35-candidate-strong tickets that will beef up their totals, and develop common anti-PTB platforms. Indeed, this is an intended outcome of OLPR, that it provides incentives for coalition formation in advance of the elections so you get a government that isn't just a bunch of 35 individuals with different agendas that could be produced by a strictly OL system. But is this going to happen in Iraq? Or is every little party going to stay little and be conquered, divided?** Iraq simply does not have mature, organized political parties besides the PTB. Civil society in Iraq is basically five years old and societal fragmentation is high. All of this is compounded by the fact that it all this organizing must now occur by January 31. Moreover, as discussed in the comments of an earlier post, the PTB own the security forces in many of the provinces and have already "shaped" the local political dynamics to their liking, and by their very presence intimidate the PTA and provide a disincentive to anti-PTB coalition building.

In any event, OLPR may work well in Switzerland, but it very well might not work in Iraq given its peculiar circumstances. Wouldn't a straight OL system have been better if the idea is to expand participation in Iraq's provincial governments? The result of OLPR could very likely be a lot of failed PTA expectations, the cementing of PTB dominance in the provinces, and, for all the hype and hope, an equally narrow and non-inclusive political order. Hopefully the PTA parties that have negotiated the passage of the law have thought through the implications of OLPR and are prepared to strategize accordingly. But Iraqologist is worried that the PTB have pulled a fast one. We'll see.

*The new law includes a provision (Article 11) designed to guarantee the representation of women that was absent in the 7/22 law. In this case, when ISCI is allotting its seats, it must appoint the top vote-getting woman to every third spot, regardless of many votes she got compared to the men. It's effectively two different lists, one for the men and one for the women.

**The first deadline for parties to band together in lists has passed, and IHEC doesn't have them up on its website yet, so Iraqologist believes this deadline has been extended. Once we see those lists, we'll have a much better sense of how things will play.

Charlie apologizes for her absence...she's only recently returned from The Flatlands and has just begun to unbury herself. But the last week has brought two Bill Caldwell related notes that she just *had* to share with her loyal readers. (It should be said that we here at Abu M are officially in the bag for LTG Caldwell.)

First, while the good general is well known as an advocate of increased (and improved) blogging by soldiers, it turns out he's turned this into a graduation requirement for the majors attending CGSC at Ft. Leavenworth. At least, that's what he told Charlie. If she can figure out a way for you fine field grade officers to get credit for blogging here, she'll be sure to let you know.

Second, one deep bit of inside baseball from the world of professional-military education (affectionately known as PME) is the difficulty in recruiting foreign services officers as students in the intermediate courses (like CGSC or its Marine equivalent at Quantico). While these schools are geared toward military officers, there is a noticable interagency presence as well. FSO's, however, are more commonly found only at the "top-level schools" like the National War College). Now, astute readers of this blog will know that's because State is miserably under-staffed. (Insert military band comparison here.)

So, LTG Caldwell has once again put his money where his mouth is: he's offered to cough up one officer for each FSO the State Dept. sends to CGSC. (Charlie's guessing these officers take up slack at Main State, not in the Embassies, but she's willing to be corrected on this score.) This is exactly the kind of wealth transfer Secretary Gates has been calling for: using the vast resources of DoD to enable more flexibility at State.

Bill Caldwell: our favorite three star.

The news item Iraqologist discussed in his last post, plus SNLII's interesting analysis in the comments, have called to mind something we should think about in the context of Iraqi provincial and national elections: the loyalty of the security forces.

Conventional wisdom (which Iraqologist has no reason to doubt) has it that many of the various Iraqi security forces have loyalties that trump their loyalty to the Iraqi state. For example, we can point to ISCI/Badr's infiltration of the ISF from their inception, Maliki's recent efforts to cultivate forces and agencies loyal to him personally, and supposedly entire divisions of the Iraqi Army that Iraqologist has heard are merely re-hatted peshmerga. What happens to these security forces if the ruling parties who own them get voted out in the national elections? Is it really possible to believe that peshmerga will be loyal to a central government in which the Kurdish parties are not part of the ruling coalition, or that, the moment they're ordered to do something the Kurds don't like, Arbil won't veto it? (cf. Khanaqin). Same goes for ISCI/Badr and Maliki as well. People often refer to Maliki's strongman efforts as "coup-proofing," but they also potentially amount to "peaceful transition-of-power-proofing" as well.

This problem is most obvious with regard to national elections, but it's relevant on the provincial level as well. Provincial governors have command of provincial police (Article 31.10 of the PPL), except the provinces where the central government has denied "police primacy" and created essentially a state of emergency in which all police are subordinate to the Iraqi Army (perhaps four or five provinces currently). Theoretically at least, therefore, a great deal is at stake with provincial elections on the security level. Again, to whom are these police in the provinces currently loyal? Mike Knights and Eamon McCarthy, in their indispensable report on provincial governance, describe how militias have infiltrated the Iraqi Police and are often implicated with the dominant parties in each province and are essentially free of MOI oversight, even though MOI is paying the bills (see pg. 20-30). It's probably a different case for every province, more of an issue in some provinces than others, but the police's "changing administrations" is likely going to be problematic.

Is Iraqologist missing something here? This is potentially a big, big problem, and there must be a big debate going on about it somewhere. What good are these provincial and national elections that so many have invested such hope in if the people who win them don't get control of the security forces? There is no transition of power if there is, well, no transition of power. (How do you like that bit of wisdom?) Maybe this is just a gaping lacuna in Iraqologist's knowledge and the COIN-savvy readers will fill him in.

Iraqologist doesn't know the details of how the training mission in Iraq works, although he has heard quite a bit about purging "sectarian" officers from the security apparatus. "Sectarian" may just be shorthand for people who are loyal to someone or something other than the state, but if all they're looking for is sectarianism in the Sunni/Shi'a sense, they're going to miss a lot. It's like a chicken and egg problem--you can't have a state without security forces, but you also can't have security forces that function the way you want them to without first having a state for them to be loyal to. Anyway, rather than blathering on in this fashion, Iraqologist is ready to be enlightened by those in the know.

***Post Time Adjusted In Celebration of the Namesake's Return***

Iraqologist has been challenged in the comments to address Iraqi nationalism, which is, according to his critics, "the major factor" in Iraqi politics right now. Iraqologist is not a political scientist and lacks the comparative perspective to address this question properly, but he will try to say something coherent on the subject anyway.

As it is commonly used, Iraqi nationalism refers to three separate but related phenomena: 1) commitment to national unity and a common, national identity that transcends identities like sect, tribe, self-interested faction, etc. 2) rejection of foreign influence (especially US and Iranian) and the assertion of national autonomy and agency and 3) support for the administrative unity of the state and a strong central government or, if decentralized, not organized along identity lines (geographic federalism).

That the third factor is currently in ascendance cannot be denied. The center has emerged and it is the locus of political action. ISCI by all appearances has abandoned its support of sectarian federalism. Kurd/Arab tensions have been thrown into relief: now that Arab Iraq is becoming more peaceful and organized, Arab Iraqis are making their displeasure at the Kurdish overreach of the past five years known. The July 22 coalition has thrown up a road block to premature settling of the Kirkuk question as part of the provincial elections debate in the COR, and Maliki has sent the message in Khanaqin that Kurdish military efforts to annex territory will not be tolerated. In addition to PTB/PTA power sharing issues, this Arab/Kurd tension is the second main axis along which political disputes in Iraq fall.

Iraqologist has dealt with the federalism issue at length in other posts, so better to focus on the other two aspects of nationalism he has so far ignored: national unity/identity (Part 1 of this post) and the rejection of foreign influence (Part 2).

Much public debate about Iraq in the US and in the media betrays a very simplistic understanding of Iraqi identity. Specifically, casual observers tend to view Iraqi identity through the lens of whatever identities are currently ascendant in Iraq, and then draw conclusions about what Iraq is in its essence from that. When sectarian identity was raging and Iraq was in the midst of a Sunni-Shi'a civil war, sectarian partition ideas were popular in the US and in the media, people would say things like "it takes a dictatorship to keep Sunnis and Shi'a from killing each other," and did not consider that there might be other identities that were more fundamental or even competed with sectarian identity. Soon after, tribalism became ascendant with the Awakening, meaning Iraqis started to be able to make money by claiming to be tribal leaders, and "nationalist" insurgents wanted a new, more flexible identity hat to put on to be able to cooperate with the US and the GOI. At this point, casual observers of Iraq began to say, "This is a tribal society and will never function as a modern state."

All this, despite the fact that, if you actually talk to non-Kurdish Iraqis, probably 90% will tell you they consider "Iraqi" to be their dominant identity, the other 10% answering "Muslim" or "Arab," with sect and tribe far down the list. More importantly, the idea of “Iraqi unity” is of central, defining importance in Iraqi political rhetoric and in the Iraqi political imagination. Very few, if any, Arab Iraqis will ever openly acknowledge that their political ambitions are not directed toward the unity of Iraq. Even when the Hakims--the bete noire of Iraqi nationalists--used to advocate the RCS, they (somewhat bizarrely) claimed that this initiative would guarantee the unity of Iraq. “Iraqi unity” is an absolute red line for Sunni and Shi'a Iraqis, and they are correspondingly inclined to bewail factionalism and sectarianism. It is thus understandable that Iraqis and Iraq scholars get frustrated when US policymakers, journalists and analysts ignore a factor that is so obviously part of how Iraqis describe themselves politically. A very common complaint of many Iraqis against the US is that the US has, in its policies, undermined Iraqi unity.*

However, despite this superficial commitment to unity and constant appeals to a common Iraqi identity, underlying factional and sectarian divisions continue to make themselves known, as anyone could see over the past five years. It is simply part of the unusual and seemingly paradoxical nature of Iraqi politics that, as bad as sectarian and factional violence can get, no one will ever admit to putting his own group first. (Except for the Kurds, who are the exception that proves the rule.) Iraqi Ba'thists are nationalist in rhetoric and sectarian and factional in practice. Sadrists are nationalist in rhetoric and sectarian and factional in practice.** Nationalist rhetoric is very often a fig-leaf for very narrowly-defined political ambitions. Again, Iraqologist lacks the proper comparative perspective, but he doubts you will find another similarly conflict-ridden country where such a vast multitude of opposed and fragmented groups all claim to be devoted to national unity.

So if, when you say that Iraqi nationalism is "the major factor" in Iraqi politics, you mean commitment to Iraqi identity and Iraqi unity, you have to mean more than politicians appealing to these ideas and the Iraqi public holding these ideas dear. That has always been the case and always will be the case. But is this identity motivating political action? Are there signs that Iraq's famous panoply of fragmented groups are sublimating their individual ambitions to the cause of national unity? Does nationalism account for leaders acting in ways that couldn't be just as easily explained, if not better explained, by narrow, factional self-interest?

The answer is, for the most part, no. Fragmentation of the Iraqi political class (especially the PTA) proceeds apace (cf. Lynch/Katulis). Accounts of political groups breaking apart proliferate; accounts of political groups merging or otherwise finding common cause are very few, if they're happening at all. Tawafuq is splintering. The Sadrists, always more fragmented than commonly understood, remain so, and are registered to run in the provincial elections as separate parties even in single provinces. The Awakenings, though there are some efforts to align them as a unified political force, remain divided, a division reinforced (to some extent, but not totally, created) by the CLC/SoI program. Allawi's Iraqiya list--despite all that the constituent groups manifestly have in common in the context of Iraqi politics--remains divided. Take a look at the vast number of parties registered for the provincial elections (great link here). These groups may yet get past their differences, form coalition lists, and make a run at the PTB, but the current level of division is staggering. You can go on and on with the examples. If nationalism is in fact on the rise, this cannot mean the meaningful commitment to national unity or the expression of a common national identity.***

Champions of Iraqi nationalism as a unifying force often point to the efforts of what has been called the July 22 coalition. As Reidar Visser has helpfully pointed out in the comments to Iraqologist's last post, this group (both before and after it acquired the 7/22 moniker) has achieved a very small number of parliamentary successes. These include the passage of provincial elections legislation (ultimately vetoed), a unified front on oil legislation that was deemed too favorable to foreign interests, and concerted opposition to the law enabling the formation of new federal regions.

The latter two certainly qualify as nationalism in action: a cross-factional coalition finding unity in their rejection of foreign influence in Iraq and in their commitment to the administrative unity of the Iraqi state. The July 22 coalition's efforts on provincial elections, on the other hand, are only partly nationalist in nature, insofar as they have recently become a vehicle for challenging the Kurds on Kirkuk. The efforts to force early elections--after nearly 2 years of PTB foot-dragging on the subject--were largely driven by the self-interest of PTA parties underrepresented in provincial governments and was, in that sense, a tactical alliance largely unconnected to nationalism. In total, you have one effort that failed (regions), another effort that ended up dying for other reasons (oil), and a largely successful effort (provincial elections) that was bound not merely by commitment to national unity but by the sturdy, trusty glue of mutual self-interest. This is not nothing, but it's hardly much evidence for the rise of Iraqi nationalism taken in the balance with everything else.

Much of the rest of political progress, such as it is, in the COR the past two years--De-Ba'thification, the budget, the provincial powers law, amnesty--arguably has nothing to do with nationalism, but rather tactical horse-trading in which factions make tradeoffs and compromise and find a muddled-through middle ground. To Iraqologist's way of thinking, this method of political progress is certainly much firmer footing on which to build a polity in a democracy than appeals to national unity grounded in a common identity. Interests trump ideology. The concrete trumps the abstract. The good-enough trumps the ideal.

This is why Iraqologist is always yammering on about why PTA/PTB is a good way to understand Iraqi politics. It is in the self-interest of the PTA parties to get unified and challenge the PTB because the PTA have so many common interests. It's a shame they haven't been more successful in uniting. But ideology--nationalism per se--however present it is in rhetoric, is proving to be a weak force in actually uniting Iraqis. In fact, a greater realization among the PTA party leaders of common interests as a uniting force and compromise as a means of satisfying them would probably yield much more in the way of actual concessions from the PTB.

Part 2 on the much weightier and more significant aspect of nationalism—the rejection of foreign interference—to come.


*This complaint is justified in some cases and ridiculous in others. Iraqologist may get into that in another post.

**An absurd but telling example of this phenomenon was when AQI recast itself as the "Islamic State of Iraq" in late 2006, gave itself an Iraqi leader, put Iraq in the name (which before had been Al-Qaida in the "Land of the Two Rivers"), and so forth, and this is for a group whose whole raison d'etre is the abolishment of the "Sykes-Picot" states of the Middle East!

***Just to be clear, Iraqologist is not saying, as Lynch/Katulis appear to, that all fragmentation is bad or means a lack of political progress. Certainly the disintegration of the UIA in parliament is a good thing, since it reflects a weakening of Shi'a identity as unifying political force. Tawafuq was always a shell coalition dominated by the IIP and served as kind of a proxy for "Sunni" interests. The fact that groups are breaking away from it to form their own parties is at least in part a sign that they are invested in the political process and are trying to more accurately represent and appeal to their constituencies.

Thanks to Ken for pointing out this Reuters story on who the world thinks was behind the 9/11 attacks.

Londonstani thinks the whole idea of 9/11 conspiracy theories is idiotic since AQ has admitted its responsibility. Even if we assume Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to US interrogators was a result of torture, we still have his comments to Al Jazeera. Along with endless Zawahiri comments alluding to knowing the attackers. There's also testimony from former jihadis who left the AQ world because they did not believe killing civilians was sanctioned by Islam.

But the real surprise here is the numbers. According to the WorldPublicOpinion.org statistics, 44 percent of Brits and Italians DIDNT think it was AQ.

The story says; "Respondents in the Middle East were especially likely to name a perpetrator other than al Qaeda, the poll found," but Londonstani was surprised that "only" 43 percent of those polled in Egypt thought it was Isreal.

Londonstani was in Cairo on 9/11 and went around interviewing many, many people for his story on the public response. Only one guy said Israel probably had nothing to do with it.

And only 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories blamed Israel??

How many in these places actually blamed AQ? Through some extrapolating, 46 percent of people in the Palestinian Territories blamed Israel and the US government. Does that mean 50-something percent of Palestinians and Brits blame AQ?

Probably not.. if you think that is a little too much amateur statistical analysis, look at the last line.

Many more Nigerians than British citizens blame AQ for 9/11.

These were the words yesterday of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

He also said that while victory is becoming more elusive, we still can win.

At the same time, the President and Chiefs announced that 4500 additional troops will be sent this winter. Kip, however, doesn't quite understand the math as the 24 Marine Expeditionary Unit is being withdrawn and replaced with a single battalion of Marines and an Army brigade (whether the Brigade will serve in Farah and Helmand or elsewhere, Kip isn't sure). This seems like an actual addition of just over 2000 troops rather than 4500 from current force levels (if someone reads it differently, feel free to correct in the comments, and I'll update).

This would leave a shortage of more than 5000 troops over what is currently being requested in Afghanistan by the senior leadership. Those requests don't take into account the decision--not yet funded--to increase the Afghan National Army from 80,000 to 120,000. The current acknowledged advisor shortage in Afghanistan--based on too small teams--is acknowledged as 2500. The addition of 40,000 Afghan Army troops should add a requirement for at least 1000 advisors. Our overall troop shortage is then closer to 11,000, and this increase will still leave us short close to 9,000 troops. Meanwhile, Kip thinks that the actual (as opposed to requested) troop need is two-to-three times larger.

Increasingly it has become clear that the amount of risk we take in Iraq and the amount of risk we take in Afghanistan are linked. For those interested, NPR ran an article this past July that explains the math behind strategic calculations of how many troops we can add to Afghanistan. Bottom Line: the Army and Marines are tapped out. Only with reductions in Iraq, can we succeed in Afghanistan.

With time running out, the question becomes, how much are we willing to run out the clock in Afghanistan in order to maintain less strategic uncertainty in Iraq?

Iraqologist wants to call readers' attention to the excellent new report on Iraqi politics from the Center for American Progress by Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch and Peter Juul, "Iraq's Political Transition after the Surge."* This report gives a very thorough and accurate account of the current political dynamics in Iraq, identifies the critical issues going forward, and will no doubt serve as a helpful primer and reference for policymakers and academics who want to understand what political progress in Iraq would look like.

However, Iraqologist strongly disagrees with one of the paper's primary arguments:

"The reductions in violence in 2007 and 2008 have, in fact, made political accommodation more elusive, contrary to the central theory of the surge."

This argument is wrong because it is ahistorical: it lacks a realistic comparison to the dire pre-surge political reality of 2006. To be sure, as the authors accurately describe, the political gridlock Iraq now faces is daunting. Without accommodation by the PTB on critical issues like provincial elections and Sahwa integration, and without peaceful resolution of Kirkuk and the disputed territories, Iraq will either descend back into chaos or, in the best case, become an authoritarian regime with a narrow social base that will depend on both internal repression and massive external support by the US and/or Iran to stay alive, all the while continuing to be a source of instability in the region. Some degree of one or both outcomes is still quite likely, whether political accommodation occurs or not. But, compared to 2006, the current political challenges are very good problems to have, seen in the context of US interests.

In 2006, chaos reigned in Iraq. The Iraqi government was little more than a set of corrupt factions who could not deliver anything, the constitutional order was broadly perceived by many Iraqis and much of the world as illegitimate and ephemeral, and large swaths of Iraqis were using violence to try to destroy this new order. The maelstrom of violence created centrifugal political forces that made efforts to build the state, particularly the Iraqi security forces, basically impossible. The political process was bankrupt and useless. There was no locus in which political development could occur. Indeed, in this environment, it was very difficult to say what “reconciliation” or “accommodation” would even look like. There was no agreed upon set of issues to be resolved, and no way to have confidence that sufficient numbers of Iraqi parties and the Iraqi people would buy into the political process in the long term, for political development to have any meaning.

Because of the reduction in violence, the Iraqi “center” has begun to emerge: Iraqi officials started going to work, service provision (though still uneven) markedly improved, oil revenues flowed in, and the Iraqi Security Forces got a chance to stand up. The government is coming into being, and it seems more and more likely that it is here to stay. Iraqi political actors increasingly appear to believe that it is only a question of who will control this government and the vast resources at its disposal. The insurgency, both Sunni and Shi'a, has now (at least for the moment) become political: the insurgents and supporters of the insurgency want a seat at the table. To their credit, the authors of the report acknowledge this fact as "a genuinely positive political development." However, it's important to realize the magnitude of this shift in a way the authors don't: If you had told any Iraq analyst in late 2006 that most of the forces currently fighting to bring down Iraq's new political order would, in two years time, want to take part in that very political order, he would have said you were crazy and he would have been right.

The reduction in violence of the past two years has provided what could be described as "breathing space" for the political process, although not in the sense that General Petraeus and the architects of the surge likely meant that phrase. "Breathing space," as it was commonly presented in justifying the surge, meant leaders coming to accommodation and compromise. But the problem with that conception was always that it missed a step. There first had to be a playing field that all or nearly all Iraqi actors agreed to play on. The reduction in violence over the past two years has provided this playing field, and was the essential precursor for the political accommodation that must now occur. It is now possible, in a way that it wasn't in 2006, to identify specific steps toward accommodation that one can reasonably expect will have the effect of reducing violence in the long term, and that will broaden the base of the regime and the portion of Iraqi society that views the political process as legitimate. The centrifugal political forces generated by the violence of 2006 that made political development and state building impossible, have now, because of the reduction in violence, been redirected (at least for the moment) towards the center.

For clarity's sake, we should understand that the surge--meaning the increase in troops and adoption of a viable counterinsurgency strategy--was only one, and perhaps not even the most important, element in the reduction of violence. By late 2006, it had become clear that the US public and US leaders and policy-makers had run out of patience in Iraq. By that point, large-scale withdrawal of US forces from Iraq had become a serious, immediate possibility. It's hard to know for sure how much this development actually played a role in Iraq and the region. Nonetheless, it's quite plausible that the growing impatience in the US, coupled with nightmarish violence across Iraq, led to a change in a number of actors' calculi about the need to damage the US and pursue their own narrow advantages on the one hand, versus the desirability of making pragmatic changes and compromises toward a basically livable, self-sustaining stability on the other.

This broad trend is visible in a number of specific, positive developments. The most obvious is the "Awakening" of broad swaths of Iraq's Sunni community against AQI, the partnership of many of these groups with the US military forces they formerly fought, and an attendant turn towards politics. Iraq's Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, have supported these efforts and have a large stake in making sure the Sunnis that they have backed against AQI do not get left out in the cold. Similarly, Iran, as is evident by its intervention in the fighting of early 2008, appears to have dialed down its support for violence and tilted its support toward the Iraqi government, where it enjoys good relations with nearly all of the PTB. One could also include improved performance by the government and steps toward compromise in parliament, halting and superficial though they may be. Overall, this dynamic ended up being interwoven with the surge, and together they resulted in the dramatic reduction of violence of the past two years and the improvement in the Iraqi political environment.

Again, whether necessary political accommodation will actually happen, as the authors rightly point out, is highly in doubt. Making it happen should be the central, defining political goal around which the US constructs its military strategy in Iraq. Moreover, as these authors advise us, expectations have become so high on all sides that, even if the steps toward political accommodation that they and others have identified do occur, reality will likely fall short. This last point is a critical one that is not made enough.

We should not discount these challenges, and the authors do us all a service in describing how difficult they will be. But the authors' argument that true political accommodation is now less likely than it was before the surge cannot be defended until they explain why it was more likely in the maelstrom of 2006.

Iraqologist will leave it here for now and will address some other important and provocative arguments made in this paper in a subsequent post.

*For full disclosure, the authors kindly gave Iraqologist the opportunity to comment on an earlier draft.

Whatever the outcome of our conflict in Iraq, Kip is certain that the no-longer-so-secret history of the "Joint Task Force" will merit writing. Untold in the basic narrative of the surge, the Joint Task Force described this Saturday in the Washington Post has been a model of innovation, transforming among other things the response rate to "actionable" intelligence.

This and other tales like it reflect an often overlooked discussion on Abu Muqawama--the incredible importance of innovation in organizational design. What has characterized our recent efforts in Iraq is spectacular innovation, which has cut the Gordian knot on bureaucratic infighting, e.g., cutting a service-which-will-not-be-named out of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle loop to develop an incredibly potent offensive counter-IED force. Kip believes that without this innovation, the basic "hammer" of the modular US Army could not have turned all the "screws" it confronted in Iraq (and continues to encounter--Kip knows it ain't near over yet).

Kip is also certain that we will learn more from and better resource similar efforts in Afghanistan as the next President, regardless of party, focuses significantly more attention on that vital arena. While efforts to eliminate the political and military infrastructure of the Taliban are vital, however, the most urgent attention must now be given to a far less sexy problem in which no one will get to kill things and break sh*t.

Kip has no idea what happened in some of the key incidents in which civilian casualties have been alleged in recent months. It is all very confusing. Carlotta Gall, the UN (disturbingly out-of-sink with the UN Security Council mandated effort under ISAF to provide security), and the Afghan government (in an investigation led initially by the Minister of Religious Affairs of all people) say that 90 civilians were killed in Shindand, and the shaky cell phone video released to the Associated Press among other things shook up GEN McKiernan's confidence in the official version enough to request a more independent investigation. On the other hand, reporting by Ollie North who was embedded on the scene reports that US and Afghan forces took fire, and a military investigation, which Kip would not underestimate as readily as the media, found similarly.

To be frank, Kip also doesn't care what happened on the ground. What matters it that the Afghan people believe we killed civilians and are now covering it up.

The United States and its Allies are losing the fight to influence the Afghan population, and that no one in Afghanistan has believed our version of events from the get-go. We have been losing for a long time (just look at the decline in poll numbers of support for our efforts over the past several years and the increasing criticism of Coalition air strikes by President Karzai since 2006).

At this point, it is no suprise that we are going to use airpower at times in Afghanistan. It is also no surprise that civilians at times are going to be killed. It is even less of a surprise that regardless of how many Taliban are killed, the Taliban will release significant estimates of civilian casualties and claim their fighters were not involved. Indeed,this all seems like deja vu. A year before the current incident in Shindand, the Taliban claimed large numbers of civilian casualties in a similar strike in the same valley, causing President Karzai to go on TV and condemn aerial bombing of Afghan villages. In fact, ISAF wrote an unclassified assessment outlining the attack as a tactical success and information operations failure.

So why do we look like a deer in the frieking headlights...again?

Well, the first step is acknowledging you have a problem. It's a vital step, and everyone has acknowledged the problem. But it can't be the only step--and we have fallen far, far off the wagon.

Our efforts to inform the Afghan populace, to respond to events, and to execute influence operations within the enemy's decision cycle require the kind of organizational innovation akin to these task forces that so successfully eliminate our enemies with great violence. It requires organizing the best, brightest, and most capable people, developing SOPs, and developing "actionable" information initiatives, just as surely as we would respond to "actionable" intelligence. How many uniformed spokesmen are speaking in Pashto and Dari to the Afghan press? Why don't we have a press release released at the same time we have a bomb released? Where is the footage from the scene on iReporter, YouTube and a half-dozen other places (vetted just as rapidly to protect OPSEC)? Where is the reporting on Taliban intimidation, moral corruption, and civilian casualties? How many Pajwok or Tolo reporters embed into Afghan Army or Police units? Where is our effort to influence the mosque? Where are the Afghan National Security Force DVDs to counter the Taliban-produced propaganda? How much effort and responses is expended on an ISAF newspaper generally used to wrap kebabs in lieu of tackling these far more difficult issues? How are we coordinating tailored messages for each of the ISAF contributor nations? What's our influence strategy into FATA, Baluchistan, and Waziristan?

Kip doesn't have all the answers, but he is certain that if we don't make developing these answers our most urgent priority, we may rapidly reach a tipping point with the Afghan population, regardless of our best (and increasingly meaningless) efforts to ensure we don't kill civilians.

A lot of fuss has been made, and conspiracies theorized, about ISCI member and Iraqi VP Adil Abd al-Mahdi’s so-called warnings of a coup (and subsequent trip to Tehran). In the full transcript of the Arabiya interview, you can see that the host herself specifically raises the question of whether “Iraq should fear a military coup,” and he says yes, because Iraqi society is militarized and because Iraq has a long history of military coups, about which he goes into some detail. This is a far cry from going around intentionally spreading rumors about or threatening a coup. It’s a general answer to a generally worded question, whose terms he accepts. This media speculation is about 1% substance and 99% hype.

That said, in an address to the Iraqi NSC yesterday, ISCI heir-apparent Ammar al-Hakim used very similar wording warning against the militarization of society and stressing the importance of civilians holding national security positions. Now, considering that he made this statement to civilians in the Iraqi security apparatus, we probably shouldn’t draw too much from this either. But it’s a data point, and an increase in emphasis on this theme in ISCI rhetoric could indicate a growing displeasure with Maliki’s military assertiveness and an effort to send a message. But let’s hold our horses on this one for now.

Iraqologist has noted with interest Greg Gause's recent essay on Maliki the strongman and Abu Aardvark's commentary on it. As Abu Aardvark points out, Gause is making a similar argument to the one Iraqologist's alter ego made a few months ago about the aspiring authoritarians of the Powers that Be and the disenfranchised Powers that Aren't (the PTB and the PTA).

First, just to get it out of the way, the PTB/PTA terminology has received some criticism, some legit (it is kind of corny) and some not so legit (it's not as simple as "government vs. opposition"--see footnote). Iraqologist is not a political scientist--he's an iraqologist. As such, he is perfectly willingly to scrap this terminology in favor of a more sophisticated and accurate alternative. But for now, anyway, until something better comes along, he will stick with the basically adequate PTB/PTA.

The PTB--ISCI, Da'wa, the two Kurdish parties, and the IIP (a very junior and exploited partner)--have their differences, to be sure. As indicated in the original PTB/PTA post, these primarily stem from the Kurdish desire for autonomy. A number of important issues revolve around this: Kirkuk and the other "disputed" territories, oil legislation, and constitutional revision. Accordingly, the Kurds want more territory, more control over oil in their territory, and maximum legal autonomy for the Kurdistan region. Of these three, Kirkuk and the disputed territories are by far the most important. The Kurds' Arab partners in the PTB have no interest in giving them much (if any) of this, since it's effectively a zero sum game. What the Kurds get, for the most part, the central government must give up.

For some time, these issues never really came to a head among the PTB, because they all benefited too much from their alliance to stir the pot. The much more critical priority for the PTB was shutting down the political process and locking out the PTA in order to keep maximum power for themselves. Specifically, this has taken the form of delaying elections; avoiding integration of the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF); building up the security apparatus to crack down on the Awakenings, the Sadris, and other political opponents; slow-rolling amnesty; and preventing the meaningful reentry of former regime stakeholders into government positions. In short, this is the political continuation of the insurgency, both the Sunni and Shi'a members of which now want a seat at the table.*

It may seem to some like these are primarily Arab issues, but they're not. The Kurds stand to lose much of their representation in elections in critical provinces like Kirkuk and Mosul. They also have a vital interest in preventing national elections that would produce a government not as friendly about long-term Kurdish priorities as the PTB have been up to now, especially not before they get Kirkuk and whatever other territory they can. A similar logic undergirds their support for the Maliki government's other efforts to keep the PTA down and out.

The question remains: "Is the PTB alliance built to last?" The Arab PTB, now that ISCI's regional-forming ambitions appear to have faded, have mostly a near-term tactical interest in the alliance with the Kurds. They have been weak and fragmented, and the Kurds have played a critical role in shoring them up in parliament, maintaining the illusion of a "national unity" government, providing governance expertise to the GOI, and keeping things nice with the Americans. Barham Salih's high-visibility role in Baghdad has been a good example of the last two factors. More knowledgeable readers can confirm, but Iraqologist has also heard that the peshmerga units that were re-hatted to be part of the Iraqi Army have played an important security role for the PTB.

But at some point, once the central government gets strong enough and the PTA are sufficiently neutralized, the Arab PTB's dependence on the Kurds starts to decrease. The Arab PTB have less and less interest in guaranteeing Kurdish autonomy or even paying lip service to it.** This is arguably what we're seeing the beginnings of now. Hence Maliki's famous confidence and the Kurds' growing anxiety that Kirkuk is going to slip away from them. In response, as Joost Hiltermann has pointed out, the Kurds stonewall everything they can in Baghdad until they get Kirkuk, and Maliki, in turn, rattles the saber in Khanaqin and cuts Hoshyar Zebari and Barham Salih out of the SOFA negotiations.

It's natural to conclude from this, as Gause appears to, that Maliki is making a bid to be a strongman. The big problem with this argument, as Abu Aardvark points out, is that 1) the PTA are down but not out and 2) Maliki is not strong enough yet to be a strongman. In other words, the PTB still need each other and Maliki still needs the PTB. The reason they need each other is that there is not yet a real "national" security force that is both strong enough and loyal enough to any one group or person for any one of them to emerge dominant. When it comes to beating down the PTA, the PTB and their armies are unified and all on the same side. But if the PTB try to go after each other, it would be a total bloodbath, especially with the rest of the country not pacified yet. Gause's strongman theory and the implications he draws from it are correct, if instead of a single strongman you think of the PTB as an emerging authoritarian regime but one that, at least for now, depends on the alliance of the PTB.

At the very least, based on Iraqologist's very limited understanding of the ISF, Mallki unquestionably still needs ISCI, if not the Kurds, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. This is the real nail in the strongman theory coffin. ISCI's attitude toward this whole situation remains mysterious, and will be the subject of Iraqologist's next post. Adil Abd al-Mahdi's recent warnings of a coup are certainly interesting in this context. Though ISCI's definitely not as on board with the Kurds as they used to be, and though they are expressing more interest in a strong central government, it's hard to imagine their endorsing Maliki's current erratic and risky behavior.

However clear Malki's actual position might be to us, he sure is acting like he's a lot stronger than he is. Maybe the attaboy VTC's really have gone to his head. Maybe he's just waiting for the Americans to reign him in--the Kurds probably are! (Although apparently they went to Tehran to try to get Maliki to back off in Khanaqin. Tells you something about the new Iraqi order.) Ultimately, though, all this is idle speculation unless you know which of the PTB armies are loyal to whom. Much Iraqi politics is just the outward manifestation of that fundamental truth.

*Finally--Iraqologist's first point on AM that is remotely COIN-related!

**Incidentally, you can see from all this why the Kurds had such an interest in getting ISCI to go for a southern federal region. A "symmetrical federalist" system of three regions plus Baghdad would create a balance of power and distribute interests in such a way that the central government could never pose much of a threat to the Kurds. If indeed ISCI has given up on this initiative and thrown its lot in with the central government, the balance of power is much more uneven, and thus raises the stakes on Kirkuk, oil and constitutional reform. Thus Hiltermann's line, "The Kurds have seen the future and they don't like it."