January 6, 2008
U.S. Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan

By STEVEN LEE MYERS, DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
This article is by Steven Lee Myers, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt.

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government, several senior administration officials said.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a number of President Bush’s top national security advisers met Friday at the White House to discuss the proposal, which is part of a broad reassessment of American strategy after the assassination 10 days ago of the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. There was also talk of how to handle the period from now to the Feb. 18 elections, and the aftermath of those elections.

Several of the participants in the meeting argued that the threat to the government of President Pervez Musharraf was now so grave that both Mr. Musharraf and Pakistan’s new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude, officials said. But no decisions were made, said the officials, who declined to speak for attribution because of the highly delicate nature of the discussions.

Many of the specific options under discussion are unclear and highly classified. Officials said that the options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces.

The Bush administration has not formally presented any new proposals to Mr. Musharraf, who gave up his military role last month, or to his successor as the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who the White House thinks will be more sympathetic to the American position than Mr. Musharraf. Early in his career, General Kayani was an aide to Ms. Bhutto while she was prime minister and later led the Pakistani intelligence service.

But at the White House and the Pentagon, officials see an opportunity in the changing power structure for the Americans to advocate for the expanded authority in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country. “After years of focusing on Afghanistan, we think the extremists now see a chance for the big prize — creating chaos in Pakistan itself,” one senior official said.

The new options for expanded covert operations include loosening restrictions on the C.I.A. to strike selected targets in Pakistan, in some cases using intelligence provided by Pakistani sources, officials said. Most counterterrorism operations in Pakistan have been conducted by the C.I.A.; in Afghanistan, where military operations are under way, including some with NATO forces, the military can take the lead.

The legal status would not change if the administration decided to act more aggressively. However, if the C.I.A. were given broader authority, it could call for help from the military or deputize some forces of the Special Operations Command to act under the authority of the agency.

The United States now has about 50 soldiers in Pakistan. Any expanded operations using C.I.A. operatives or Special Operations forces, like the Navy Seals, would be small and tailored to specific missions, military officials said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who was on vacation last week and did not attend the White House meeting, said in late December that “Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people.”

In the past, the administration has largely stayed out of the tribal areas, in part for fear that exposure of any American-led operations there would so embarrass the Musharraf government that it could further empower his critics, who have declared he was too close to Washington.

Even now, officials say, some American diplomats and military officials, as well as outside experts, argue that American-led military operations on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan could result in a tremendous backlash and ultimately do more harm than good. That is particularly true, they say, if Americans were captured or killed in the territory.

In part, the White House discussions may be driven by a desire for another effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. Currently, C.I.A. operatives and Special Operations forces have limited authority to conduct counterterrorism missions in Pakistan based on specific intelligence about the whereabouts of those two men, who have eluded the Bush administration for more than six years, or of other members of their terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, hiding in or near the tribal areas.

The C.I.A. has launched missiles from Predator aircraft in the tribal areas several times, with varying degrees of success. Intelligence officials said they believed that in January 2006 an airstrike narrowly missed killing Mr. Zawahri, who had attended a dinner in Damadola, a Pakistani village. But that apparently was the last real evidence American officials had about the whereabouts of their chief targets.

Critics said more direct American military action would be ineffective, anger the Pakistani Army and increase support for the militants. “I’m not arguing that you leave Al Qaeda and the Taliban unmolested, but I’d be very, very cautious about approaches that could play into hands of enemies and be counterproductive,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. Some American diplomats and military officials have also issued strong warnings against expanded direct American action, officials said.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani military and political analyst, said raids by American troops would prompt a powerful popular backlash against Mr. Musharraf and the United States.

In the wake of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, many Pakistanis suspect that the United States is trying to dominate Pakistan as well, Mr. Rizvi said. Mr. Musharraf — who is already widely unpopular — would lose even more popular support.

“At the moment when Musharraf is extremely unpopular, he will face more crisis,” Mr. Rizvi said. “This will weaken Musharraf in a Pakistani context.” He said such raids would be seen as an overall vote of no confidence in the Pakistani military, including General Kayani.

The meeting on Friday, which was not publicly announced, included Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and top intelligence officials.

Spokesmen for the White House, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon declined to discuss the meeting, citing a policy against doing so. But the session reflected an urgent concern that a new Qaeda haven was solidifying in parts of Pakistan and needed to be countered, one official said.

Although some officials and experts have criticized Mr. Musharraf and questioned his ability to take on extremists, Mr. Bush has remained steadfast in his support, and it is unlikely any new measures, including direct American military action inside Pakistan, will be approved without Mr. Musharraf’s consent.

“He understands clearly the risks of dealing with extremists and terrorists,” Mr. Bush said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday. “After all, they’ve tried to kill him.”

The Pakistan government has identified a militant leader with links to Al Qaeda, Baitullah Mehsud, who holds sway in tribal areas near the Afghanistan border, as the chief suspect behind the attack on Ms. Bhutto. American officials are not certain about Mr. Mehsud’s complicity but say the threat he and other militants pose is a new focus. He is considered, they said, an “Al Qaeda associate.”

In an interview with foreign journalists on Thursday, Mr. Musharraf warned of the risk any counterterrorism forces — American or Pakistani — faced in confronting Mr. Mehsud in his native tribal areas.

“He is in South Waziristan agency, and let me tell you, getting him in that place means battling against thousands of people, hundreds of people who are his followers, the Mehsud tribe, if you get to him, and it will mean collateral damage,” Mr. Musharraf said.

The weeks before parliamentary elections — which were originally scheduled for Tuesday — are seen as critical because of threats by extremists to disrupt the vote. But it seemed unlikely that any additional American effort would be approved and put in place in that time frame.

Administration aides said that Pakistani and American officials shared the concern about a resurgent Qaeda, and that American diplomats and senior military officers had been working closely with their Pakistani counterparts to help bolster Pakistan’s counterterrorism operations.

Shortly after Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, Adm. William J. Fallon, who oversees American military operations in Southwest Asia, telephoned his Pakistani counterparts to ensure that counterterrorism and logistics operations remained on track.

In early December, Adm. Eric T. Olson, the new leader of the Special Operations Command, paid his second visit to Pakistan in three months to meet with senior Pakistani officers, including Lt. Gen. Muhammad Masood Aslam, commander of the military and paramilitary troops in northwest Pakistan. Admiral Olson also visited the headquarters of the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 members recruited from border tribes that the United States is planning to help train and equip.

But the Pakistanis are still years away from fielding an effective counterinsurgency force. And some American officials, including Defense Secretary Gates, have said the United States may have to take direct action against militants in the tribal areas.

American officials said the crisis surrounding Ms. Bhutto’s assassination had not diminished the Pakistani counterterrorism operations, and there were no signs that Mr. Musharraf had pulled out any of his 100,000 forces in the tribal areas and brought them to the cities to help control the urban unrest.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Islamabad, and David Rohde from New York.

A Darker Shade Of Green Zone
In Baghdad, Low Expectations Have Supplanted High Ideals
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 5, 2008; A01

BAGHDAD -- Several dozen soldiers and embassy staff members relaxed on the patio around Saddam Hussein's old swimming pool, shivering in the desert chill, as a boombox blared Latin rhythms over the racket of low-flying helicopters. It was Salsa Night in the Green Zone, but on a Friday evening in late November, only a few bundled-up couples shuffled awkwardly to the beat.

Suddenly, a 30-something woman and a 20-something man, both in Air Force uniform, took the dance floor, their camouflage jackets and holstered sidearms swinging with each smooth, expert turn. The bored patio denizens perked up, transfixed by a rare moment of magic.

The moment was a fleeting reminder of the good times in the war's early days, when the pool patio was the Green Zone's social hub and young conservative staffers, eager to remake Iraq, danced away the cares of nation-building. Those times and people are long gone, replaced by sober diplomats and soldiers with lower expectations, slogging diligently through their duties, collecting combat pay, and envisioning an Iraq where the electricity works and where a trip to the market does not court death.

When the music stopped, Tech Sgt. Heather Warr of Miami smiled and left the floor. She had been here three months, and the best thing about the Green Zone, she said, is that she has a "wet trailer" -- one with an inside bathroom.

Her dance partner, Capt. Jaime Bastidas of Albuquerque, had arrived three days earlier, and he said the best thing so far had been finding someone else who could dance. The next day, they would return to work -- Warr assisting Iraq's Air Force, Bastidas working with the Defense Ministry, and both counting the days until their tours end.

Always more MASH than Malibu, today's Green Zone is "not nearly as social as it used to be," said Richard H. Houghton III, a three-year resident. "It's now our own isolated little jail cell."

Good Intentions
Shortly after triumphant U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad in April 2003, they took over Hussein's Presidential Palace along the Tigris River, enclosed the surrounding 5.9 square miles with concrete walls and concertina wire, and declared it the seat of their occupation government. In those days, soldiers thought they would return home within months. Many U.S. civilian staff members who arrived in the military's wake were young conservatives working up the Republican Party ladder. They saw Iraq as a place to transfer their ideals to a grateful nation, fight terrorism and have an exciting time.

They set up no fewer than six bars, a disco, a cafe, two Chinese restaurants and an outdoor shopping arcade. Personnel stationed inside the zone would jog on the sidewalks and relax in the garden behind the Republican Palace.

But before the first year ended, violence exploded in the Red Zone -- the 437,000 square miles that make up the rest of Iraq -- and the soldiers settled in for a long fight against a growing insurgency. As the attacks against U.S. forces escalated, Iraqis proved resistant to American ideas of how to organize their government and lives, and they began to fight among themselves.

Inside the Green Zone, fear replaced enthusiasm as mortar shells rained from the sky during 2006 and 2007, and many hours were spent inside concrete bunkers. Over the past several months, the attacks have largely stopped, except for a burst of two dozen shells on Thanksgiving, but the walls grew higher and civilian trips outside the wire became infrequent.

"When I got here, it was just getting to the end of the time when you could go out in the city. You could hop into a cab or walk across the bridge," said Houghton. "The watershed was the bombing of Samarra" in February 2006, when the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq destroyed the historic Askariya Shiite shrine in that city north of Baghdad, sparking all-out sectarian war.

With the muscled bulk and haircut of a Marine, Houghton, 48, came here in early 2005 with the nongovernmental International Republican Institute. He quit after a close colleague was killed last January in a Baghdad ambush, but he stayed on with the State Department. Houghton now advises Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker on U.S. legislative affairs and serves as organizer and guide for congressional delegations -- in 2007, a record 57, bringing 208 lawmakers -- passing through Iraq.

Rankled by how little Americans here knew about the fortress in which they lived, Houghton has written a 41-page "Visitor's Guide to Baghdad's Green Zone," complete with color photos of zone landmarks from the Monument to the Unknown Soldier to the Believer's Palace -- actually a fake shell of a building Hussein had constructed to conceal an underground bunker.

"There was no institutional memory," Houghton lamented, adding that he has "been through 12 Air Force rotations, three State Department rotations" and numerous other turnovers.

For example, on a recent driving tour of what is officially known as the International Zone, or the IZ, he stopped inside a traffic circle at the junction of al-Kindi Avenue and the Qadissiyah Expressway, empty boulevards once a part of busy central Baghdad.

"Nobody knows what that statue is," he said, referring to a huge pedestal at the center of the circle showing three bronze soldiers with a dead comrade at their feet. He explained that it commemorates the July 14, 1958, military coup that overthrew the Iraqi Hashemite monarchy. The coup created the Republic of Iraq and paved the way for Hussein's takeover.

Farther down al-Kindi, behind a U.S. military base and surrounded by war litter, stood a small, exquisite building with a blue tiled dome. The tomb of Michel 'Aflaq, who was the ideological founder of Baathism, it was home to a U.S. Marine unit, Houghton said, until he told the Marines they were sleeping on the sarcophagus. They soon vacated, leaving behind four portable toilets.

Thousands of Iraqis live inside the zone, which also contains the offices of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, several ministries and the Iraqi parliament.

A city within a city, the Green Zone encompasses a geographic area that was once the center of Iraqi government power and a residential neighborhood crisscrossed by major highways. It is as if an occupying army had built a wall around federal Washington, including Pennsylvania Avenue, the monuments and a substantial part of the housing on Capitol Hill. The few entrances are heavily guarded by coalition forces from the Republic of Georgia. There are signs in English and Arabic that read "Do Not Enter or You Will Be Shot."

Inside, it is divided into compounds -- one for the embassy, others for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Iraqi government installations, a hospital, and numerous military installations -- each with its own walls, checkpoints and guards. Movement between compounds can take minutes or hours. A recent overcast afternoon found Houghton standing in a parking lot outside a bunker, while Peruvian checkpoint guards searched a car that a bomb-sniffing dog had found suspicious.

Houghton had just seen Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) on his way out of Iraq after a one-day visit. As the sun set and the temperature dropped, he spent his time on a cellphone. Most zone residents carry around two or three phones -- an Iraqi local, a U.S.-listed mobile and a BlackBerry.

The embassy itself, with its huge blue palace dome, was just spitting distance away, but the Peruvians were adamant that no one pass. After a 90-minute wait, Houghton organized a mile-long march to another checkpoint.

Looking Diplomatic
The zone feels more gray than green. At the end of Iraq's long dry season, scattered palm trees stand limp under the dust that covers every surface. Head-high walls of sandbags wrapped in gray canvas line the walls and pathways; they are used as protection against mortar attacks. The clusters of metal boxes that provide embassy housing, whimsically signposted with such names as "The Oasis" and "The Palms," are surrounded with stacks of the fat, gray bags, worn with age and dripping sand. The makeshift wooden stairs that reach the high palace back door are painted gray.

When Crocker arrived as ambassador last spring, a goal was to turn the embassy -- established in June 2004 but still permeated with a feeling of catch-as-catch-can impermanence -- into a "normal" diplomatic posting. Khakis and T-shirts were deemed unacceptable, and young women now stumble along the potholed sidewalks in stiletto heels.

The U.S. government has done its best to make Hussein's Presidential Palace, a half-mile-long behemoth at the heart of the zone, look like an embassy. Drab drywall and metal slabs divide its extravagant rooms into cubicles. The furnishings are U.S. government-issue desks and chairs, but pieces of the palace's past remain -- the immense rotunda at its entrance, marble floors and a scattering of gaudy, Hussein-era sofas and chairs, upholstered in heavy fabric. The bathrooms, where sinks and toilets are painted with pink flowers, are bigger than most offices.

A walk through the wide, dim, marble corridors reveals a surreal mix of people. A mid-level Foreign Service officer whispers that the entire Iraq enterprise is "screwed," and that somebody in Washington ought to do something about it. A public diplomacy expert explains the gift of democracy that Iraqis have been given, while a senior diplomat reflects on the difficulties of persuading the Iraqi government to do what Washington wants, saying, "This is really, really hard."

Filipino cleaners sweep through the dust, while a rumpled soldier snores on a black leather couch in the Starbucks-imitation coffee shop. An aide to commanding Gen. David H. Petraeus, working late into the night, eats from a foam box as he proudly clicks through a slide show of the general's visit to a prison that day.

On the poolside patio, Peruvian guards dressed in camel-colored jackets, rifles slung over their chest, stand chatting in the dark, watching Sgt. Warr and Capt. Bastidas salsa-dance.

Alcohol is forbidden in public areas of the zone, but food is free and plentiful, imported to guard against sabotage and to ensure that Americans and foreign workers have their fill of iceberg lettuce and Jell-O mold. No cooking is allowed in the trailers, and the air in the huge, boxlike Dining Facility, known as the D-Fac, is laced with the scent of hamburger grease. Servers try to spice up the menu with entree themes -- "Louisiana night" or Salisbury steak -- but it is easy to imagine the drudgery of eating in the company cafeteria three times a day, every day, all year.

No spouses or families are allowed. After dinner, there is nothing to do but work, sit by the pool or watch U.S. cable television. Status and job classification determine if a trailer is shared. Some fix up their "hooches" -- standard boxes of about 20 feet by 10 feet with linoleum floors, plywood bed frames and huge televisions -- with carpets or cabinetry, but most seem not to try.

Military activity in the Red Zone picks up after dark, and the embassy compound is on the landing path for a constant flow of helicopters carrying battle wounded to the nearby hospital. There are booms and gunfire in the distance, and the occasional loudspeaker yell of "Incoming" jolts one from sleep onto the cold floor to wedge beneath the bed.

So Close, So Far
The last stop on Houghton's tour is a stretch of hulking buildings behind high, ocher walls on a broad highway outside the existing embassy compound. The NEC, or New Embassy Compound, is the most expensive U.S. embassy in history, costing more than $600 million. Scheduled for completion last September, it is still unoccupied.

Built to standard State Department specifications, it includes a modern child-care center unlikely to be used any year soon. Originally designed to provide work and living space for 600 people, it must now must accommodate at least 1,000. Like Manhattan efficiencies, its one-bedroom apartments are being divided with drywall to accommodate more. There is no D-Fac, and no one has figured out how hordes of hungry diplomats will commute three times a day, through the Peruvian checkpoint, to the facility in the old compound.

Strategy that's making Iraq safer was snubbed for years
It sounds simple: Get help from locals to stop bombmakers. But a USA TODAY investigation shows the Bush administration was slow to accept the idea.
By Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison and Tom Vanden Brook
USA TODAY

When Army Capt. Jeremy Gwinn's company patrolled Baghdad in 2005, the approach toward roadside bombs was simple: avoid them or die.

By early 2006, that strategy had begun to shift: Instead of hunting for the bombs, the soldiers hunted for bombmakers. "We started to know a lot of people in the community and develop contacts," recalls Gwinn, now a major. "There was a noticeable change … in the way we were doing things."

Today, that change has swept across Iraq, and attacks using improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have declined steadily for eight months. Casualties from the bombs are at their lowest point since 2003, the first year of the war. Troops have seized twice as many weapons caches this year as they did all of last.

"Just about every single night, we are identifying and engaging one or more cells caught in the act of planting IEDs," Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, said in an interview.

Efforts to stop IEDs by targeting the insurgent networks that finance, build and plant the bombs showed results only after the Bush administration adopted a broader counterinsurgency strategy this year — and sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq to support it.

But a USA TODAY investigation shows that the strategy now used to defeat the bombmaking networks and stabilize Iraq was ignored or rejected for years by key decision-makers. As early as 2004, when roadside bombs already were killing scores of troops, a top military consultant invited to address two dozen generals offered a "strategic alternative" for beating the insurgency and IEDs.

That plan and others mirroring the counterinsurgency blueprint that the Pentagon now hails as a success were pitched repeatedly in memos and presentations during the following two years, at meetings that included then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The core of the strategy: Clear insurgents from key areas and provide security to win over Iraqis, who would respond by helping U.S. forces break IED networks and defeat the insurgency.

Bush administration officials, however, remained wedded to the idea that training the Iraqi army and leaving the country would suffice. Officials, including Cheney, insisted the insurgency was dying. Those pronouncements delayed the Pentagon from embracing new plans to stop IEDs and investing in better armored vehicles that allow troops to patrol more freely, documents and interviews show.

Even after the Pentagon began committing substantial resources to combat IEDs, USA TODAY found, its spending focused mostly on high-tech devices with limited utility. Some silver-bullet solutions, such as microwave beams designed to destroy IEDs before they blew up, never worked.

By the time the Pentagon moved to a counterinsurgency strategy at the end of last year, the bombs had been the top killer of U.S. troops for three years, claiming more than 1,160 lives. To date, they are responsible for more than 60% of combat deaths.

"What's astounding is how long we spent not applying traditional counterinsurgency principles to fighting what obviously was an insurgency," says Fred Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and former West Point instructor. "It's not that we've solved the IED problem, per se. It's that we've begun to have success in defeating the insurgents."

Andrew Krepinevich, the consultant who addressed the generals in 2004 and met with Libby in 2005, says the price of that failure was profound.

"One is the human cost, both in terms of the suffering of Iraqis and the Americans killed and wounded," he says. "Second is the material cost. And third is the failure to accomplish the mission."

Krepinevich, who has advised several secretaries of Defense and the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, says "the American military is on the clock in this war, and the American people, in a sense, gave the administration several years to make progress. Those years, to a significant extent, were wasted."

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe says the administration weighed all strategy options and made "appropriate decisions."

"Throughout the war, many people have come forward with various suggestions and ideas, from 'more troops' to 'get out now,' " he says. "The president has listened to the commanders on the ground and the Defense Department."

Rumsfeld declined to comment.

Rumsfeld and other civilian and uniformed war planners "had this mind-set of the short war, a liberation vs. an occupation," says retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command.

He says many combat commanders were frustrated by the Pentagon's failure to recognize that a force larger than the 120,000 U.S. ground troops in the initial invasion was needed to secure the country — and its ammunition dumps, which held the explosives that insurgents continue to use to build IEDs.

Officials also failed to send the right kind of vehicles.

In July, USA TODAY reported that until 2006, the Pentagon balked at pleas from battlefield commanders to send safer armor to protect U.S. troops from IEDs. The armored vehicles, called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, weren't fully embraced by the Pentagon until mid-2007, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's successor, made them his top procurement priority.

Today, 11,941 MRAPs have been ordered, and about 1,200 of those are being used by troops in Iraq. "These are a vast improvement in terms of protection," Petraeus says.

Petraeus cites other crucial steps — among them the 30,000-troop "surge" — that have led to a decline in violence and a better chance to secure the country. Most are key components of the strategy favored by Krepinevich and others during the first months of the war.

Petraeus won't discuss why the Bush administration didn't pursue a counterinsurgency strategy earlier. Rather, he focuses on what's happening now — and its apparent successes. "It's not just the additional forces. It's also how they are used," Petraeus says. "The deployment of our forces and Iraqi forces into the neighborhoods, to the areas where the bad guys are located, is key. You have to live with the population to help secure it. "

He says that "in the past couple of months, we have been finding greater than 50% of the IEDs (before they go off), which is a first."

Zinni credits Petraeus with shifting U.S. fortunes. "It's about Americans being out there and being visible, providing security, building confidence among the people," he says. "It's paying off."

For years, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials resisted just such an approach. Although generals such as Petraeus put their theories into action on a small scale in Iraq as early as 2003, the military still lacked a detailed, nationwide plan for battling the insurgency.

In September 2004, 18 months into the war, Krepinevich flew to Nashville at the invitation of top generals. Krepinevich, then 54, wore a jacket and tie; except for the spouses many generals brought to the session, he was one of few in the hotel conference room not in uniform. It added to his trepidation.

Krepinevich had the credentials: A graduate of West Point, he had been an officer for 20 years and now ran the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank. What he didn't have was the experience: He hadn't been to Iraq. Moreover, he was about to tell the generals that the Pentagon's approach to the war made no sense.

He would be embarrassed if they told him he didn't understand the situation in Iraq, he recalls thinking. But if they agreed with his assessment, it meant trouble for U.S. efforts to secure the country.

"It is difficult to discern a coherent U.S. strategy for defeating the insurgency," he told them. The solution: "Win the hearts and minds, and … deny insurgents easy access to the population, thereby enhancing intelligence on the enemy."

Krepinevich's call for a new direction drew no criticism. "It told me they didn't have an approach" for winning the war, he says.

Retired Army major general Paul Eaton, who was at the meeting and had been directing the training of Iraqi forces, said Krepinevich "was saying what had become increasingly obvious to many of us."

"What we had was a secretary of Defense who denied (the insurgency existed) … and the senior leadership of the Army would not challenge him," Eaton says. "But Krepinevich could. A lot of us were thinking, 'He gets it; maybe he can reach some of the leadership.' "

Krepinevich would become one of several analysts and retired military officers who helped develop the counterinsurgency strategies. But their ideas wouldn't gain footing with decision-makers for years.

Meantime, the Pentagon had spent billions of dollars on technology to detect or defeat IEDs.

Most of the money went toward "jammers" — devices to block the electronic signals used to detonate IEDs by remote control. Jammers remain one of the more successful electronic IED countermeasures. As insurgents shifted to new types of detonators, new jammers were introduced. This year, the Pentagon has spent $2 billion on them.

Other high-tech initiatives in the IED fight have failed entirely:

•Forerunner, a remote-controlled truck, was to be driven ahead of convoys to detect IEDs. It was scrapped after almost $7 million in spending. It didn't work.

•BlowTorch was designed to use microwaves to fry the circuitry in IEDs from afar. It was abandoned after more than $8 million was invested. It didn't work either.

Defense officials acknowledged that technology alone would not defeat IEDs, but spending soared. In 2006, the Pentagon's counter-IED office, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, spent 67% of its $3.5 billion budget on jammers and other technology to "defeat the device."

But IED deaths kept rising.

Retired Army general Montgomery Meigs, who took over the IED office at the end of 2005 and led it until this month, began pushing for a new focus in 2006. "We made attacking the network No. 1" on the priority list, he says.

Krepinevich had continued to push the same message. In an Aug. 23, 2005, memo to Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, Krepinevich warned that technology wasn't the answer.

Instead, as Krepinevich says today, U.S. forces needed to provide "enduring" security that would make it "risky for people to go out and plant" IEDs. "You needed to think not just about technology; you needed to think about how you defeated the overall problem. The key … was intelligence."

Krepinevich says he told that to Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, during a July 2005 meeting in Libby's office. In May, just two months earlier, Cheney had declared that the Iraqi insurgency was in "its last throes." Now, Krepinevich was suggesting the administration refocus its approach around that insurgency. Libby "took it all in and asked a few questions," Krepinevich recalls, but that was it.

Krepinevich says the only meaningful support he got came from Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who was briefed by Krepinevich just before heading to Baghdad in June 2005. Despite Khalilzad's apparent interest, there was no overall change in the administration's war plan.

Khalilzad, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, declined through a spokesman to comment.

Turning over security to newly trained Iraqi forces remained the hallmark of U.S. strategy in Iraq until early 2007. Army Gen. George Casey, who led coalition forces in Iraq until February, often said the goal was to have U.S. forces stand down as Iraqi forces stood up.

In June 2006, Kagan and three other military experts visited Camp David for a meeting with the president's war Cabinet. Each took a turn addressing the officials, who included Rumsfeld, Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Kagan's message — "We've got to do some counterinsurgency on these guys" — didn't take.

Within weeks, the Pentagon launched "Operation Together Forward." Coalition forces would "clear" an insurgent stronghold and Iraqi forces would "hold" it. When Iraqi forces failed to hold, violence soared. After two months, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell acknowledged that Together Forward had "not met our overall expectations."

In November 2006 — a day after Democrats won control of Congress — Bush accepted the resignation of Rumsfeld, who had backed the stand-up, stand-down strategy. Bush chose former CIA director Gates to replace him. By December, the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy had begun.

Iraq was boiling over: 69 U.S. troops would be killed that December by IEDs, the most IED deaths in any month since the war began. On Dec. 6, the Iraq Study Group, a panel of military and political thinkers, issued a report calling the Iraq situation "grave and deteriorating" and urging a phased U.S. withdrawal.

The next Monday, Dec. 11, Bush met with retired generals and top military analysts. One, retired Army general Jack Keane, pushed hard for a "surge" of U.S. troops coupled with a secure-and-hold strategy for Baghdad and other key areas.

Keane and other experts had developed the idea with Kagan, who was invited to the White House later that week to meet with Hadley. It was one of several strategy options, and the only one calling for a big increase in U.S. troops. Keane and Kagan proved persuasive.

Even so, it took what Kagan calls "a perfect storm" to put it in place. The deteriorating situation in Iraq, the grim report from the study group and growing calls for U.S. withdrawal made the administration more flexible, he says.

On Jan. 5, Bush chose Petraeus, who had finished writing the military's counterinsurgency doctrine, to take charge in Iraq. Five days later, Bush outlined a new strategy: "to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods … protect the local population, and … ensure that the Iraqi forces … are capable of providing" security.

It was precisely what his administration had rejected — and counterinsurgency advocates had championed — for years

Rival Shiites in Iraq try to make peace
By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 20 minutes ago
Representatives of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr met Thursday with officials from his chief rival's party in an effort to cement a tenuous peace agreement the two signed in October after violent clashes between their followers.

It was at least the second formal overture al-Sadr has made to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and his Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest Shiite political party, in less than a week.

Peace between the two — who each control powerful militias — is seen as key to preventing the outbreak of widespread fighting in oil-rich southern Iraq, where the British military recently handed over responsibility for security to Iraq's government in Basra, the last province it controlled.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of three of its soldiers. Two were killed and a third wounded in a small arms attack Thursday in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. A soldier was killed the previous day in south Baghdad when his dismounted patrol hit a roadside bomb, the military said.

A delegation from al-Sadr's office in Kufa, led by Sheik Muhanned al-Gharrawi, met with the Dhi Qar provincial governor Aziz Kadhim Alwan, a member of al-Hakim's party, and other local officials in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad. In the past, al-Sadr followers have had violent clashes with the governor's guards.

"The province should live in peace and security without armed violence and disorder," Alwan said after the meeting. Al-Gharrawi said the talks were meant to "end political and military" violence in the province and "to protect citizens' lives."

In August, followers of al-Sadr and fighters loyal to al-Hakim clashed in the holy city of Karbala during a religious festival, killing 52 people. In October, the two leaders signed their truce, which has largely held.

On Saturday, al-Sadr called for a reconciliation with Iraqi security forces in Karbala, where authorities have cracked down on his followers since the August violence.

Shortly after the Karbala fighting, al-Sadr announced he was freezing the activities of his Mahdi Army militia for six months — a move that both Iraqi and American officials say has been a major factor in the sharp decrease in violence.

The differences between the two camps, however, are too complex and deep to be resolved at the level of Thursday's meeting. Their rivalry mirrors class distinctions within the Shiite community as well as the longtime competition of the al-Sadr and al-Hakim families for the religious leadership of the holy city of Najaf, Shiite Islam's primary seat of learning.

The rivalry is likely to come to a head when local elections are held nationwide, possibly this year. The two camps will spare no effort to dominate provincial councils in nine provinces south of Baghdad. Beside the oil reserves, southern Iraq has a prize in the wealth and prestige of the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, visited by millions every year.

Separately on Thursday, al-Hakim called for unity among Shiites, arguing that closing ranks would benefit the whole of Iraq since they are the majority.

"Every one must work to support and boost this unity," he told supporters in Najaf.

He also acknowledged the contribution of Sunni militias, which have more than 70,000 members, to the decline in violence and called for their use in the continuing fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.

"Today, we are witnessing the decline of terrorism and the progress of reconciliation on the popular level with Sunni-Shiite solidarity," he said, alluding to the government's perceived failure to achieve political reconciliation among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish groups.

U.S. commanders have also credited the Sunni militias with playing a major role in the decline in violence over the past six months.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has been deeply uneasy about the potential for the Sunni fighters — now better-organized and armed — to switch sides again, posing a threat to stability and the Shiite domination that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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November 22, 2007
BORDER CROSSINGS
Western Union Empire Moves Migrant Cash Home

By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — To glimpse how migration is changing the world, consider Western Union, a fixture of American lore that went bankrupt selling telegrams at the dawn of the Internet age but now earns nearly $1 billion a year helping poor migrants across the globe send money home.

Migration is so central to Western Union that forecasts of border movements drive the company’s stock. Its researchers outpace the Census Bureau in tracking migrant locations. Long synonymous with Morse code, the company now advertises in Tagalog and Twi and runs promotions for holidays as obscure as Phagwa and Fiji Day. Its executives hail migrants as “heroes” and once tried to oust a congressman because of his push for tougher immigration laws.

“Global migration is the cornerstone of how we’ve grown,” said Christina A. Gold, Western Union’s chief executive.

With five times as many locations worldwide as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King and Wal-Mart combined, Western Union is the lone behemoth among hundreds of money transfer companies. Little noticed by the public and seldom studied by scholars, these businesses form the infrastructure of global migration, a force remaking economics, politics and cultures across the world.

Last year migrants from poor countries sent home $300 billion, nearly three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined.

Western Union’s dominance of the industry casts it in a host of unlikely new roles: as a force in development economics, a player in American immigration debates and a target of contrasting attacks.

Its unparalleled reach gives millions of migrants a safe way to transmit money, and may even increase the amounts sent. But critics have long complained about its fees, which can run from about 4 percent to 20 percent or more. And the company’s lobbying for immigrant-friendly laws has raised the ire of people who say it profits from, or even promotes, illegal immigration.

Western Union tracks migrants so closely that it has made pitches to illegal immigrants just released from detention camps. Its agent in Panama offered customers legal aid to keep them from being deported.

After settling a damaging lawsuit that accused it of hiding large fees, Western Union set out a few years ago to recast its image, portraying itself as the migrants’ trusted friend. It has spent more than $1 billion on marketing over the past four years, selectively cut prices and charged into American politics, donating to immigrants’ rights groups and advocating a path to legalization for illegal immigrants.

While some migrant groups still complain of predatory pricing, the company has won unlikely praise.

“Western Union has become a company that values and protects its customers,” said Matthew J. Piers, the Chicago lawyer who sued the company over its fees. “Nobody was more surprised at the change than me, because I was Western Union critic Numero Uno.”

Western Union’s zealous pursuit of migrants can be seen in a government office in Manila, where a half million Filipinos a year wait to have their papers processed before leaving for overseas jobs. Everything in the waiting room is labeled “Western Union”: the backs of the chairs, the tops of the desks, the bottom of the queue sign and the front of the menu in the adjacent cafeteria. The walls are even painted Western Union yellow.

The Philippines requires each outbound migrant to attend a predeparture seminar. Western Union paid to offer migrants instructions on sending money home. “We tell them about the services of Western Union,” said Steve Peregrino, the marketing director in the Philippines, “with the basic idea of seeking out Western Union when they go abroad.” In and around the waiting room, reviews are positive.

Ernald Vincent Mendoza, a restaurant supervisor in Saudi Arabia, dismissed his wife’s argument that the company’s pricing hurt the poor. Though banks are cheaper, the money can take a week to arrive, he said, while Western Union sends it instantly. “If they have good quality and service, you have to pay for that,” he said.

Emmanuel Ellorian, a waiter in Dubai, said Western Union agents came to the hotel where he worked and processed the transfers there. “If any of the Filipino clubs have an event,” he said, “one of the sponsors is Western Union.”

A Telegraph Giant Evolves

Western Union’s founders set out in 1851 to build the first telegraph giant. A decade later, they had linked the coasts, a feat celebrated in a Zane Grey novel and a Hollywood film, both called “Western Union.” Airmail and faxes left telegrams obsolete, and the company went bankrupt in 1992.

It emerged two years later with a focus on its money transfer service and was acquired in 1995 by the Colorado corporation First Data. Flush times followed. Fueled by the surge in migration, international money transfers were growing by 20 percent a year.

In 1998, Mr. Piers sued the company, alleging that Western Union and a rival, MoneyGram, deceived customers with advertisements like “Send $300 to Mexico for $15,” since the companies typically made much more (in this case an additional $25) by setting foreign exchange rates to their advantage. While denying any wrongdoing, the companies paid millions to settle the case.

Western Union appeared “money oriented” and “cold,” warned an internal marketing document that called for a more empathetic image. The goal, as one plan put it, was to capture a “share of mind” and a “share of heart” to preserve a “share of wallet.”

Having once stressed efficiency (“the fastest way to send money”), Western Union now emphasizes the devotion the money represents. One poster pairs a Filipino nurse in London with her daughter back home in cap and gown, making Western Union an implicit partner in the family’s achievements. “Sending so much more than money” is a common tag line.

The company sponsors hundreds of ethnic festivals, concerts and sporting events, from cricket matches for Indians in Dubai to sack races for Jamaicans in Queens. Last year it paid a Filipino pop star, Jim Paredes, to record a Tagalog song urging migrants to send money home. It paid the producers of a Bollywood film, “Namastey London,” for a scene in which a Western Union wire transfer helps rescue the heroine.

The Western Union agent in Panama played the rescuer’s role himself. With many of his customers illegal immigrants — mostly from Colombia — he put three lawyers on retainer and started a radio show. The lawyers answered callers’ questions and scheduled free appointments to get them legalized.

“Every time an immigrant is forced outside the country, we lose a potential customer,” said the agent, Jaime Lacayo, who provided the legal services for two years and still runs the radio show. “We have participated in many marriages of foreigners marrying Panamanian ladies, because that is the best way to legalize your status.”

A Global Operation

Western Union boasts of 320,000 locations worldwide. Many agents are large organizations, like the Chinese postal system or grocery store chains. (About 60 percent of Western Union’s person-to-person transfers occur wholly outside the United States.) But companies also battle block by block for trusted local figures.

Among them is Michael Lee, 35, who owns an electronics store called World Top Communications in New York’s Chinatown. Sharing a building with a “lupus and tumor consultant,” on a block of East Broadway that smells of dried shrimp, he was told by Western Union to expect a few hundred transactions a month.

He now does 100,000 a year, he said. Mr. Lee, who earns about $2.50 per transaction, is so enthusiastic he persuaded his landlord to paint the building yellow, and the company donated $16,000 worth of paint.

Many of his customers are in the country illegally. Mr. Lee, who was once an illegal immigrant, said his business fell by about 40 percent last spring after a series of nationwide immigration raids. “A lot of people don’t have green cards — they are afraid,” he said.

Salo Eduardo Levy, Western Union’s Mexico director, echoed that theme at a September meeting of industry executives. “We have customers calling agents before they go: ‘Is it safe? Is La Migra around?’”

A 2006 survey by the Inter-American Development Bank found that illegal immigrants made up 41 percent of the Latin Americans in the United States who used money transfer companies.

Western Union says it does not know what share of its customers are illegal immigrants, but at times it has made pitches directly to them. As Central Americans surged across the Texas border in 1999, an overflowing federal detention center bused them to a homeless shelter in Brownsville, the Ozanam Center. Western Union sponsored a lunch there, dispensing T-shirts, bandannas and fliers in Spanish with the company’s toll-free telephone number.

Western Union also held marketing events around the same time for people deported from the United States to Honduras and El Salvador.

“They would arrive in a special holding area, and we would have an agent in there — a young lady in tight jeans, tight T-shirt” to promote Western Union products, said a former company official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “We knew that within a week they would be back on their way to the U.S.”

Fred Niehaus, a company vice president, said, “I can tell you that’s something the company would not do now.”

Immigration and Politics

Western Union’s views on immigration have brought conflicts with Tom Tancredo, the Republican congressman who represents the Denver suburb where the company has its headquarters. Three years ago, when Mr. Tancredo, a fierce critic of illegal immigration, proposed taxing the money that migrants send, First Data formed a political action committee to drive him from office.

“We’re tired of his antics,” Mr. Niehaus told The Rocky Mountain News. “We’re opting for change.”

After winning re-election, Mr. Tancredo attacked Western Union for co-sponsoring a Spanish guide that he said promoted illegal immigration. The guide said that schools and clinics would not check migrants’ papers and advised them to “always carry the name and number of an attorney.”

Mr. Tancredo, who is running for president, said the company’s activities occupied “a gray area” between aggressive marketing and “aiding and abetting illegal immigration.”

“Western Union wants to encourage illegal immigration in order to expand the number of people in their market,” he said. “Believe me, if I were president, I would ask the Justice Department to look into it.”

In 2004, Charles T. Fote, then First Data’s chairman, gave a speech calling for “comprehensive” reform, a term used by supporters of legalization plans for illegal immigrants.

The company sponsored public forums to promote the idea and donated $100,000 to a group unsuccessfully fighting Proposition 200 in Arizona, which requires proof of citizenship from people seeking to vote or collect certain public benefits.

As the debate moved to Washington, Western Union gave money to many groups supporting legalization plans. The United States Chamber of Commerce received “in the high six figures,” a Chamber official said, while an Illinois group used some Western Union money to bring busloads of immigrants to Capitol Hill. When a bipartisan Senate bill emerged last spring, company officials flew to Washington to lobby directly, urging Senator Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, to support the measure. He did, though it ultimately failed.

“Most companies are afraid to speak up,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which has received $40,000 from Western Union in the past three years. “When it got hot, they stayed with it.”

But proponents of stricter border controls see commerce, not courage, at play. “Western Union has decided that its business model depends on a continuing flow of illegal immigrants,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates low levels of immigration.

Western Union’s latest battle is with the Arizona attorney general, Terry Goddard, who in 2004 began seizing money transfers into Arizona that he suspected were meant to pay human smugglers. The effort led to hundreds of arrests but also froze legitimate transfers and scared away customers, costing Western Union millions.

After two years of cooperation, the company resisted in court last year when Mr. Goddard, a Democrat, expanded his request to cover transfers from across the United States to Sonora, Mexico. In September, an Arizona court ruled for Western Union.

The company’s resistance won plaudits from migrant groups but left Mr. Goddard angry. The company is “protecting an illegal enterprise in human smuggling,” he said. “It’s outrageous.”

The company spun off from First Data a year ago, and it has an estimated global market share of 14 percent, versus 3 percent for its closest competitor, MoneyGram. Though Western Union has responded to increased competition by cutting its charges, it typically remains the most expensive service.

An Oakland group, the Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action, began a boycott campaign in September, demanding that Western Union lower its prices and increase its corporate giving. But it has gained little traction, in part because of the company’s recent courtship of migrant groups.

One critic who now gives Western Union grudging credit is Donald F. Terry, an official at the Inter-American Development Bank. He has spent years trying to get more migrants to use banks, so they could establish financial histories and qualify for loans.

But banks have not fully welcomed migrants, he said, while Western Union and other money transfer companies have more locations, better hours and agents who know their customers’ language and culture.

“You could say they were ripping people off, or you could also say they’re providing a service that poor people desperately needed and were willing to pay for,” Mr. Terry said. “Any consumer company in the world would like to have the customer loyalty they have. They’re doing something right.”

Margot Williams contributed research.