Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq

Aug 6 02:18 PM US/Eastern
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) - AP Video The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.
In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year.

It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory.

Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.

It's been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and—more importantly at this juncture—able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement—evenhandedness and reliability—that is furthest from being fulfilled.

There is no magic formula for success.

And magic is what it may take to turn military gains into the strategy's ultimate goal: a political process that moves Iraq's rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from the brink of civil war to the threshold of peace—and to get there on a timetable that takes account of growing war fatigue in the United States.

Efforts at Iraqi reconciliation saw another blow Monday: Five Cabinet ministers loyal to Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein leader decided to boycott government meetings, further deepening a crisis that threatens Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The boycott would leave the Shiite-led government with no Sunni participants, at least temporarily.

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.

Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying—to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security.

The idea, after all, is not to kill or capture every terrorist and insurgent. That can't be done. The idea is to create a security environment more favorable to political action by the government, to provide breathing space for leaders of rival factions to work out a peaceful way to share power.

The U.S. military, partnering in many instances with Iraqi forces, is now creating that security cushion—not everywhere, but in much of the north, the west and most importantly in key areas of Baghdad.

Sectarian killings continue and extremist groups remain a threat, yet they are being squeezed harder. The U.S. military has caught some momentum, thanks to the extra 30,000 troops—for a total of 159,000 on the ground—that Bush agreed to send as part of the new counterinsurgency strategy announced in January. The troops are interacting more with the local people and are protecting them more effectively.

At this stage, however, there is precious little evidence that Iraqi leaders are inclined to take advantage of that.

Even so, U.S. officers seem convinced that it is too soon to stop, that by tamping down the sectarian violence, at least in Baghdad, they are giving the Iraqis a chance to come together. They insist it is unrealistic to expect the Iraqis to resolve their problems in a matter of months. And they argue that withdrawing would only lead to bigger problems, for the U.S. and for Iraq.

That is likely to be the message that Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. officials in Iraq, convey to Congress and to Bush in September. They are in no position to predict how long it might take the Iraqi government to achieve reconciliation, but they are likely to concede, if asked, that if the Iraqis do not take key steps in the months ahead the entire U.S. approach may unravel.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose views on how to proceed in Iraq also will figure prominently in Bush's decisions, says the administration, in hoping for movement toward political reconciliation this year, underestimated the depth of mistrust between rival sects.

The culture of fear in Baghdad is ingrained.

The Shiites, now in power after decades of being dominated by the minority Sunnis during Saddam Hussein's rule, remain fearful of a Sunni revival. The Sunnis see their own survival at stake.

Kurds have enjoyed more than a decade of semi-autonomy in the north, where control over oil wealth is in play.

Which gets to two matters that underlie much of the conviction in Congress that it is time to get out of Iraq.

First: Do the potential benefits of sticking with the war strategy outweigh the cost, in American blood and treasure? Total U.S. war deaths now exceed 3,665 and are climbing by more than two per day, on average.

And second: Would Iraqi political leaders be more likely to settle their sectarian differences if they knew that America's patience was ending and that its troops were leaving—at least the combat forces?

There is clearly a consensus among senior U.S. commanders in Iraq that the answer to the first question is yes. They feel that so much has been sacrificed already that it makes no sense to quit now. Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in charge of training and equipping Iraqi forces, said the counterinsurgency strategy, not fully implemented until June, has finally wrested the initiative from the insurgents.

"It was fought over and died for, and there's no reason to give it back right now," Dubik told AP.

On compelling Iraq's political leaders to move toward reconciliation, few American officers appear to believe that an early pullout would do the trick. They think it would propel the country further into chaos.

Crocker is explicit on that point.

"A massive human catastrophe (could follow), with the bloodshed among the Iraqi civilians on a scale we have not seen and may find hard to imagine," he told AP.

Nonetheless, leaving—in at least a limited way—appears likely to begin in 2008. Petraeus might be inclined to send home, perhaps as early as January, one of the extra five Army brigades that Bush sent to Baghdad. Some of the roughly 4,000 extra Marines in Anbar province might head out by then, too.

If that happens, and if Bush overcomes congressional pressure to get out faster in a presidential election year, Petraeus probably would stretch out the troop drawdown over many months. He might also switch some units from one part of the country to another, reflecting an uneven pace of security progress, while leaving the bulk of the force in place at least until 2009, when a new president will be in the White House.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE—AP Military Writer Robert Burns, on his 18th reporting trip to Iraq since the start of the war in 2003, has written about U.S. military involvement in Iraq and the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War, mostly from his base in Washington.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Hat in Hand
By Daniel M. Zucker
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/1/2007

After a hiatus of 28 years, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran finally held an openly acknowledged dialogue[1]. Actually to date there have been two such meetings, both held in Baghdad, (May 28, 2007 and July 24, 2007) and both specifically dealt with the security situation in Iraq, and were ostensibly limited to that subject alone.

Although newsworthy because of their unusual occurrence within the last 28 years, these meetings and any future follow-ups should be reviewed for their significance, efficacy, and political repercussions. The following essay is a first attempt to do such.

Before continuing, it should be pointed out that dialogue has been taking place during much of these nearly three decades; however it has been at a low level in the diplomatic hierarchy and well away from the spotlight. One should not think that all dialogue had been curtailed; it simply was limited to what is termed “back channels” or through third party mediation and assistance.

Why did the US choose to reverse its policy, and why did Iran’s leadership agree to hold such public meetings? The continuing difficulties for the Bush administration in Iraq, coupled with mounting internal American pressure for success or withdrawal, led the administration to look to the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group[2] report which it had initially rejected. As dialogue was a major component of that report’s recommendations,[3] and international pressure pushed for such, the administration acquiesced. For its part, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) saw at least two positive outcomes from a renewal of formal contacts. First was the propaganda coup to be scored by the US publicly recognizing Iran’s importance to regional stability. The second concern of the IRI was to reiterate[4] its demand that the US dismantle the Iranian resistance group the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK),[5] or at least that the US and her allies maintain the MeK and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) on the State Department and EU “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (FTO) lists as pre-condition to any discussions.[6] Given the rising rate of dissatisfaction within the general Iranian population with the theocratic regime in general, and with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular, the Iranian government desperately wants to keep its number one enemy, the MeK, hobbled by the “terrorist” label so as to immobilize it and prevent it from galvanizing the Iranian people to revolt and overthrow the regime.

Now that the two meetings have occurred, what if anything has been accomplished? From the Iranian side, their two goals appear to have been met, at least for now. From the American side the immediate goal of preventing further bloodshed and violence in Iraq clearly has failed—violence instigated by Iran actually increased after the May 28th meeting.[7] The evidence of Iranian support for attacks on coalition forces by both radical Sunni and Shi‘ite insurgents mounts daily.[8] The July 24th meeting apparently allowed US Ambassador Ryan Crocker to tell his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, that the US is not happy with the Iranian lack of cooperation on that score.[9] Reports indicate that Qomi neither acknowledged the charges nor accepted them gracefully.[10] Nonetheless, new reports indicate that the US and Iran have agreed to establish a joint subcommittee to address issues relating to security in Iraq.[11] Whether the joint subcommittee’s discussions will generate any positive results for US interests remains to be seen, but more than one regional expert already has suggested the unlikelihood of such,[12] given the fact that Iran definitely has significant influence with the al-Maliki government[13] and control of southern Iraq at present[14] and has little incentive to cooperate with the US.

In one area the Iranians definitely did not win; in fact they are rolling backwards. I am referring to Iranian attempts to upgrade the dialogue to a higher level—one between US Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Iranian Foreign Minister Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki. Not only did the administration rebuff Iranian attempts at the upgrade,[15] but it is also reported that sometime after Crocker’s first meeting with Qomi, Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burn’s assessment that the US would still be in dialogue over Iran’s nuclear program as of January 2009, caused Bush to take the Iran portfolio away from Condi and gave it back to Cheney.[16] That definitely was a blow to Iran’s sense of security.

When one factors in the recent harassment and imprisonment of the four Iranian-born American citizens[17] on charges of endangering national security and anti-regime activity as a poorly disguised attempt to acquire hostages to swap for the five Sepah-e Qods agents of Iran’s Islamic Revolution's Guards Corp(IRGC / Sepah-e Pasdaran) that were arrested in Irbil on January 11, 2007,[18] it should be self-evident that Iran is not acting as a partner in Iraq but rather as a dangerous adversary, one with no scruples.

As regards the political repercussions of the US-Iran talks, Max Boot gave a fine analysis in his July 12, 2007 presentation to the House Armed Services Committee. I quote that report now (emphasis mine):

Iran [is] skillfully waging a proxy war against the United States in Iraq that, if current trends continue, could well leave Iran as the dominant player in most of the country. The Iranians are doing with the Jaish al Mahdi and other front groups in Iraq what they have already done with Hezbollah in Lebanon: expanding their sphere of influence. Why Ayatollah Khameini and his inner circle would voluntarily want to end this policy, which is achieving their objectives at relatively low cost, remains a mystery. The thing most likely to dissuade them from their current path would be the threat of serious military and economic retaliation, ranging from air strikes to an embargo of refined petroleum imports to Iran. …

Failing some pretty hefty carrots and sticks, talks with the Iranians…are extremely unlikely to find a negotiated solution of the kind envisioned by the ISG and by such eminent other voices as Senators Richard Lugar and Hillary Clinton.[19]

So, what types of carrots would get Iran to both cease its interference in Iraq and end its drive for nuclear weapons? Well, how about an offer of the keys to the White House to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a similar offer of the keys to the US Capitol Building and the US Supreme Court to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? That, along with a similar offer of Buckingham Palace, etc. in London just might do the trick.

If it isn’t clear so far, I will spell it out now: in this writer’s view, the current US-Iran dialogue will do nothing to serve US interests in the long term; Iran will only use such talks to its advantage, a delay tactic to buy more time to go nuclear. The Islamic Republic of Iran cannot afford to have a successful secular democratic government on its doorstep as its own population would demand a similar government at home. The current Iran regime therefore will never work in good faith to help the United States in Iraq. To do so would be an act of suicide for the mullahs. If still not sure, just see what Ahmadinejad and Khamenei had to say following the Crocker-Qomi meeting lat week: Iran will never stop its nuclear program (Ahmadinejad)[20], and the United States remains Iran’s principle enemy (Khamenei)[21]. With a track record of twenty-eight years of lies, deceit, obfuscation and terror, the Iranian regime’s modus operandi should be clear to all with decent vision. For those still failing to see it, my glasses are available for the asking.

NOTES:
[1] Actually there have been earlier meetings such as that of National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane in what developed into the infamous “: Iran-Contra Scandal” as well as those held starting in November 2002 and running to the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 in which the US attempted to secure an Iranian promise to stay out of Iraq. These meetings were clandestine at the time but later on were acknowledged.

August 1, 2007
Amid War, Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols

By BARRY BEARAK
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 25 — Seven years ago, during a very different time in a very different Afghanistan, a medical student named Daoud Sediqi was bicycling from campus when he was stopped by the Taliban’s whip-wielding religious police. The young man immediately felt an avalanche of regret, for he was in violation of at least two laws.

One obvious offense was the length of his hair. While the ruling Taliban insisted that men sprout untrimmed beards, they were otherwise opposed to scruffiness and the student had allowed his locks to grow shaggy. His other transgression was more serious. If his captors searched his possessions, they would find a CD with an X-rated movie.

“Fortunately, they didn’t look; my only punishment was to have my head shaved because of my long hair,” recalled Mr. Sediqi, now at age 26 one of this nation’s best-known men, someone sprung from a new wellspring of fame — not a warlord or a mullah, but a television celebrity, the host of “Afghan Star,” this nation’s “American Idol.”

Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan has been developing in fits and starts. Among the unchanging circumstances that still leave people fitful: continuing war, inept leaders, corrupt police officers and woeful living conditions. According to the government’s latest surveys, only 43 percent of all households have nonleaking windows and roofs, 31 percent have safe drinking water and 7 percent have sanitary toilets.

But television is off to a phenomenal start, with Afghans now engrossed, for better or worse, in much of the same escapist fare that seduces the rest of the world: soap operas that pit the unbearably conniving against the implausibly virtuous, chefs preparing meals that most people would never eat in kitchens they could never afford, talk show hosts wheedling secrets from those too shameless to keep their troubles to themselves.

The latest national survey, which dates from 2005, shows that 19 percent of Afghan households own a television, a remarkable total considering not only that owning a TV was a crime under the Taliban but that a mere 14 percent of the population has access to public electricity. In a study this year of Afghanistan’s five most urban provinces, two-thirds of all people said they watched TV every day or almost every day.

“Maybe Afghanistan is not so different from other places,” said Muhammad Qaseem Akhgar, a prominent social analyst and newspaper editor. “People watch television because there is nothing else to do.”

Reading is certainly less an option; only 28 percent of the population is literate. “Where else can one find amusement?” Mr. Akhgar asked.

Each night, people in Kabul obey the beckoning of prime time much as they might otherwise answer the call to prayer. “As you can see, there is truth on the television, because all over the world the mother-in-law is always provoking a fight,” said Muhammad Farid, a man sitting in a run-down restaurant beside the Pul-i-Khishti Mosque, his attention fixed on an Indian soap opera that had been dubbed into Dari.

Women, whose public outings are constrained by custom, most often watch their favorite shows at home. Men, on the other hand, are free to make TV a communal ritual. In one restaurant after another, with deft fingers dipping into mounds of steaming rice, patrons sit cross-legged on carpeted platforms, their eyes fixed on a television set perched near the ceiling. Profound metaphysical questions hover in the dim light: Will Prerna find happiness with Mr. Bajaj, who is after all not the father of her child?

“These are problems that teach you about life,” said Sayed Agha, who sells fresh vegetables from a pushcart by day and views warmed-over melodramas by night.

What to watch is rarely contested. At 7:30, the dial is turned to Tolo TV for “Prerna,” a soap opera colloquially known by the name of its female protagonist. At 8, the channel is switched for “The Thief of Baghdad.” At 8:30, it is back to Tolo for the intrafamily and extramarital warfare waged on “Tulsi,” the nickname for a show whose title literally means “Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once the Daughter-in-Law.”

Kabul has eight local television stations, including one feebly operated by the government. “The key time slots are from 6 to 9 p.m. because that’s when people switch on their generators for electrical power,” said Saad Mohseni, who runs Tolo, the channel that dominates the market in most of the country. “People love the soap operas.”

“We’ve just bought the rights to ‘24,’ the American show,” he said. “We had some concerns. Most of the bad guys are Muslims, but we did focus groups and it turns out most people didn’t care about that so long as the villains weren’t Afghans.”

Mr. Mohseni, a former investment banker, and his three siblings started Tolo TV (Tolo means “dawn” in Dari) in 2004, assisted by a grant from the United States Agency for International Development. After living most of their adult lives in exile in Australia, the Mohsenis returned to post-Taliban Kabul looking for investment opportunities and discovered a nearly prehistoric television wilderness ready for settlement. A used color TV cost only $75.

But what did they want to watch? Afghan tastes had not been allowed to gestate over decades, passing from Milton Berle to Johnny Carson to Bart Simpson. Everything would be brand-new. “We let ourselves be guided by what we liked,” Mr. Mohseni said.

For the most part, that means that Tolo has harvested the hackneyed from television’s vast international landscape. True-crime shows introduce Afghans to the sensationalism of their own pederasts and serial killers. Reality shows pluck everyday people off the streets and transform them with spiffed-up wardrobes. Quiz shows reward the knowledgeable: how many pounds of mushrooms did Afghanistan export last year? A contestant who answers correctly earns a free gallon of cooking oil.

Some foreign shows, like those featuring disasters and police chases, are so nonverbal that Tolo is able to rebroadcast them without translation. Other formats require only slight retooling.

Mr. Sediqi is about to begin his third season with “Afghan Star.” He has never seen “American Idol” and said he had never heard of his American counterpart, Ryan Seacrest. Nevertheless, he ably manages to introduce the competing vocalists and coax the audience to vote for their favorites via cellphone.

“I must tell you that I am having very good fun,” Mr. Sediqi said, employing his limited English. He is one of several young stars at Tolo whose hipness is exotic enough to seem almost extraterrestrial to an average Afghan. Older men who prefer soap operas to singing competitions are likely to want to give Mr. Sediqi a good thrashing. “People in the countryside and the mosques say that the show is ruining society,” Mr. Sediqi admitted.

Tolo has drawn a huge audience while testing the bounds of certain taboos. Zaid Mohseni, Saad’s younger brother, said: “When we first put a man and woman on the air together, we had complaints: this isn’t legal, this isn’t Islamic, blah, blah, blah. Then the criticism softened. It was O.K. as long as they don’t talk to each other. Finally, it softened more: O.K., they can talk as long as they don’t laugh.”

The bounds are pushed but not broken. A live talk show called “Woman” is co-moderated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Muhammad Yasin Babrak. While female callers are frank in their laments, the therapist limits himself to being Dear Abby to the lovelorn rather than Dr. Ruth to the sexually frustrated. “I won’t talk about incest or homosexuality,” he said.

Music videos, primarily imports from India, are broadcast regularly. With a nod to Afghan tradition, the bare arms and midriffs of female dancers are obscured with a milky strip of electronic camouflage. And yet, sporting events are somehow deemed less erotic. Maria Sharapova was shown at Wimbledon with the full flesh of her limbs unconcealed.

Whatever the constraints, some observers consider TV a portal to promiscuity. “Forty million people are living with H.I.V.-AIDS, and television is finally helping Afghanistan contribute to those figures,” the Ayatollah Asif Mohseni said with sarcasm.

He is an elderly white-bearded man, and while he is not related to the family who runs Tolo TV, he, too, has entered the television business, starting a station more inclined to showcase Islamic chanting. “We have an economy that is in ruins,” Ayatollah Mohseni said. “Do you think rubbish Indian serials with half-naked people are the answer?”

But the strongest complaints against Tolo have come from politicians, including members of the government. Tolo’s news coverage, while increasingly professional, is very often unflattering and even irreverent. Members of Parliament have been shown asleep at their desks or in overheated debate throwing water bottles. One lawmaker was photographed picking his nose and then guiltily cleaning his finger.

In April, when Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet thought he had been quoted out of context, he sent policemen to Tolo’s headquarters to arrest the news staff. The ensuing contretemps had to be mediated by the United Nations mission in Kabul.

“It has been quite odd,” said Saad Mohseni, Tolo’s chief. “This is Afghanistan, a young democracy, and we don’t have problems with the drug dealers or the Taliban or even the local populace. Our problems are all with the government, either because of red tape or attempted censorship or someone with a vested interest trying to extract money.”

He paused for effect.

“With democracy comes television. It’s hard for some people to get used to.”