Center for a New American Security

I have not linked to this provocative article by Nir because I had not had time to read it. It is worth your time.

Sunni civilians have no interest in backing a new insurgency after their own bitter experience – and they no longer feel targeted by Shiite militias.

The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil.

Okay, now that you have that crazy Turkish song about Obama in your head, watch and listen to this five-part interview with Big Jack Keane on NationalReviewTV. Keane looks like he's about to kill the Hoover Institution's Peter Robinson at any moment. I mean, goodness gracious, just look at him. Robinson offers Keane a chance early in the interview to write off the horrors of the first four years of the Iraq War as just the normal learning process that an army goes through in a war and Keane, to his credit, is having none of that.

The videos end rather abruptly. All the videos, though, can be found here.

Update: Man, this Robinson guy is pissing me off with his leading questions. In the third part of the video, he talks about how no one -- Petraeus, George W. Bush, Odierno, Keane himself -- wanted a timetable and yet this damn traitor Kenyan Obama has announced one.

"... General Petraeus, George W. Bush and others used to oppose any timetable announcing our withdrawal. The new commander in chief has just done so. Your review?"

Keane, winning a medal here for intellectual honestly, points out that, uh, Peter, the SOFA agreement negotiated by the George W. Bush Administration contained a timetable and that, actually, Peter, I kinda agree with the current president.

"So what does that do? Did that blow your mind" Keane then doesn't say. "That just happened! Shake and bake!"

Update II: ARGH! Robinson then says the war is "won" and gets Keane to agree with him using what I can only guess is some kind of mind trick. Man, I sure as hell hope this war is "won". (My Jarhead cousin goes over in a month.) I don't think this war is "won" in the least, though.

Update III: Peter Robinson sucks. Now (Part Four) he's criticizing Obama for not using the word "victory" -- which Bush did to apparently great effect -- and asks Keane if that makes the troops sad. Keane patiently explains war among the peoples like he's talking to a five year-old. I really think he might reach over and kill him, so I'm sticking around for Part Five.

Oh, hahahaha, Keane is now saying all kinds of good things about President Obama and how smart he is, and Robinson looks as if someone just told him there is no Santa Claus. If you're a Republican and reading this thread this no doubt seems as if I am being really partisan, and for that I apologize, but this Robinson guy really is reaching high levels of hackery. If it's any consolation, I would be like this for a guy on the left like Jon "The Rangers purposefully killed Pat Tillman" Soltz as well.

Update IV: Oh, now Robinson is name-checking some guy named "Jan Jenn-Tee-Lay". But Keane has some good things to say about Gian's most reasonable worry and some good frets and worries on readiness in general. (Gian has some really good points in his arguments, but shhhh! Don't tell him I said so or it will go to his head.)

Two great "good news" stories, both of which nonetheless raise potentially disturbing questions.

The first is this account of an infantry ambush in the Korengal Valley.

In a matter of minutes, the ambush changed the experience of the surviving soldiers’ tours. The degree of turnabout surprised even some the soldiers who participated.

“It’s the first time most of us have even seen the guys who were shooting at us,” said Sgt. Thomas Horvath, 21.

The next day, elders from the valley would ask permission to collect the villages’ dead. Company B’s commander, Capt. James C. Howell, would grant it.

But already, as the soldiers slid and climbed down the mountain, word of the insurgents’ defeat was traveling through Taliban networks.

Specialist Robert C. Oxman, 21, had put a dead fighter’s phone in his pocket. As the platoon descended, the phone rang and rang, apparently as other fighters called to find out what had happened on Sautalu Sar. By sunrise, it had been ringing for hours.

But what are we doing in the Korengal Valley? Does anyone know? Are we just trying to control the terrain or what?

The second article is on a tour of Iraq by Medal of Honor recipients. And this is just cool. Not cool, though, are the freaking reflective belts they are making soldiers in Iraq wear these days. W. T. F. I heard you now have to walk around Bagram wearing a road guard vest too. Can anyone confirm?

Update: Tom can.

Not too long ago, I bristled when Andrew Bacevich carelessly observed that "The Long War has been good to Dr. [David] Kilcullen."

Good in what sense, I wanted to ask? Professionally? Or personally?

Many of the people who have benefited the most professionally from the war on terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered the most personally. Hidden from the public view are the marriages broken, the close friends lost, and the traumas experienced.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has, over the past six years, become one of the most essential journalists in the English language. Named Britain's most outstanding foreign journalist last year, Ghaith grew up in Baghdad, deserted from Saddam's army, and taught himself English through the BBC World Service. He told me a story once of reading Charles Tripp's history of Iraq concealed in a newspaper at an outdoor cafe in Baghdad where he, a deserter, sat just two tables over from a pair of mukhabarat. In international journalism, Ghaith is a rock star. The guy embedded during the battle of Fallujah ... on the other side. But when a journalist based in London started screaming at me at the end of a long dinner party in Beirut this fall for having served in Iraq, it was Ghaith who stood up for me. Not because he agreed with the war -- but because he believed that no matter how late it happened to be and no matter how much wine had been drunk, certain manners should not be tossed aside. I was his guest, and he was having none of it.

But Ghaith has returned to Baghdad for the Guardian and has filed a series of haunting reports on a city lost to sectarianism. Ghaith is a proud Baghdadi, and he has discovered that there is no such thing left in Iraq. And I get the sense that Ghaith would gladly trade all his laurels and successes for the chance to come home to a city less broken.

This is really funny. Until the end. When it's pretty sad.

I'm not sure I understand (Abu Muqawama reader) Michael Massing's review of The Gamble. Massing spends three pages taking Tom Ricks to task for writing a book about the surge in Iraq without speaking with many Iraqis. But at the end, Massing asks Ricks a question:

In February, I attended a talk Ricks gave at the Carnegie Council in New York, and I asked him if his heavy reliance on military sources had affected his account. "Absolutely," he said. "I cover the US military. I don't cover Iraq as such. At The Washington Post, I have colleagues who do that much better than I ever could -- Anthony Shadid, for example, who wrote the terrific book Night Draws Near." The Gamble, Ricks went on, "is very much a view of the Iraq War through the eyes of the US military."

In that exchange -- and in conversations I have had with him -- Ricks has been open about the limits of his book. A month or so ago, I spent about an hour talking to Massing about The Gamble, the war in Iraq, and counterinsurgency theory. I told Massing that while I greatly enjoyed The Gamble, there were a lot of good books on the Surge remaining to be written. Namely (and this is just off the top of my head):

• The Surge from the perspective of tactical leaders -- squad leaders, platoon leaders, platoon sergeants.
• The Surge as seen by the residents of Baghdad.
• The role played by special operations forces in Iraq in 2007.
• The history of the Surge as seen from 20 years on, when everything is declassified.
  

Does the fact that other good books on the Surge remain to be written detract from Tom's book? I don't think so.

It is soooo quiet outside. When I ask about the reason, they say “It’s a residential area.” I quietly respond, “What’s your point?”

An Iraqi translator for the New York Times writes about arriving in the United States as a refugee.

Many thanks to those of you who stopped by to say hello after yesterday evening's event with David Kilcullen. Dave said a few things last night that I really liked. I did not take extensive notes, but one thing that struck me was his analysis of why a strict counter-terror strategy would not work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you're an intelligence asset on the ground in Pakistan, Dave explained, you don't need to know where your target is at any given time but rather where your target will be in five hours -- or as long as it takes to relay the message to a team of special operators, get approval from the White House, and fly however long it takes to get to the target itself. And if you try it with surface warfare assets, well, forget about it -- you need to know where your target will be tomorrow. Also, if you decide to do CT, you need to base a SOF team somewhere nearby -- and then build a base to protect them and their air assets. So you end up with a) a pretty significant presence on the ground and b) more contact with -- and need to protect -- the local population than you originally bargained for. Dave also said a memorable line about Iraq: "The people in Iraq with the least appetite for fighting right now ... are us."

Tonight, meanwhile, Craig Mullaney has his final book event in the DC area. Craig also has a habit of saying smart things. A few weeks ago, at another book event, I heard him say the following: "You get what you pay for -- and in Afghanistan we have not paid for much."

So go hang out with Craig tonight, get him to sign your book, and then buy him a beer afterward. The details:

7 pm
Barnes and Noble
2800 Clarendon Blvd.
Arlington, VA 22201
Call ahead to reserve a copy: (703) 248-8244 [we've sold out at most events]

Drinks afterward at the Liberty Tavern from ~8:30 or so.

Two chapter excerpts, the Daily Show video, etc are at http://www.craigmmullaney.com

I am a big believer in the theory that even the most sophisticated and well-executed COIN campaign cannot, when executed by a third party (such as the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan), guarantee victory. All a good COIN campaign can do is set the conditions for political reconciliation and compromise.

We Americans wonder why the Iraqi government is not eager to bring reconciled Sunni militiamen into the national security apparatus. But as LTC Doug Ollivant told Linda Robinson in her book, "There are twenty-five hundred years of literature on the bad things that democracies tend to do."

Perhaps, as Ollivant noted, the Iraqi leaders "are well and faithfully implementing the policy preferences of their constituents." How else to explain this? (I don't buy that it's about oil prices.)

After months of promises, only 5,000 Awakening members — just over 5 percent — have been given permanent jobs in the Iraqi security forces. Those promises were made last year when Iraq was flush with oil money.

Now with Iraq’s budget battered by falling oil prices, the government is having trouble paying existing employees, much less bringing in Sunni gunmen already regarded with suspicion by the Shiite-led government.

In interviews with leaders from a dozen local Awakening Councils, nearly all complained that full-time jobs were lacking, that pay was in arrears and that members were being arrested despite promises of amnesty.

Perhaps most ominously, many expressed concern this might drive some followers back to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, at a time when both Iraqi and American military commanders say that the group seems to be making gains, small but worrisome, around Baghdad.

I was still recovering from a broken tibia at Hunter Army Airfield at the time.