Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Commentary: Five Years Later, News From Iraq Not All Bad

By RFE/RL analyst Kathleen Ridolfo

Politics is a dirty business anywhere in the world, but Iraqi politics today rank among the most divisive. While much has been written about Iraq since 2003 -- the early mistakes that continue to impede progress, the bitter rivalries that leave so many innocents dead, the roles of superpowers and neighbors -- few observers have offered a far-sighted view of the state of affairs.

Like all nation-states forged from strife, Iraq is experiencing growing pains. As the country's diverse ethnic and sectarian groups struggle for a piece of the ruling pie, gains, though slow, have been made. But it will take time. The term "political accommodation" has yet to register in the mind-set of many Shi'ite leaders who were swept to power after the fall of the Hussein regime. Kurds, intent on maintaining their autonomy, say they are being asked to accommodate too much, with Baghdad demanding control over the region's oil while offering little in return. Sunni Arabs, the losers in the war, continue to complain of marginalization by the government.

Iraq is not easy and the problems seem never-ending. A reconciliation conference in Baghdad this week, hastily arranged by the government, proved this. The Sunni Arab-led Iraqi Accordance Front boycotted the meeting altogether, while a Shi'ite bloc affiliated with former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi "declined" to attend. One Sadrist parliamentarian called the meeting "government propaganda." The splits run deep, even among supposed allies.

Three major blocs pulled out of the government in 2007 and have yet to return. Two of those blocs, the Al-Fadilah Party and the Sadrists, were onetime allies of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. All boycotting blocs say the government, dominated by the Shi'ite-led United Iraqi Alliance, is bent on consolidating power in the hands of the few. Al-Maliki has been promising for months to reshuffle the cabinet and replace powerful political appointees with qualified technocrats. Still, no changes have come, leaving many to conclude that there is no will behind the rhetoric. Or, perhaps, the prime minister is constrained by his own bloc, which has effectively consolidated its control over the country's security forces over the past five years.

Much has been written about Sunni and Shi'ite militias. Less has been written about the militia-controlled security forces, and their ties to supposed benefactors like Iran. Iraqis living in Shi'ite-populated areas whisper about a government project to eliminate Shi'ite opposition. Journalists acknowledge that this goes on but are hesitant to write about it for fear of retribution. Meanwhile, the government says it is cracking down on insurgents.

'Year Of Reconstruction'

Like 2007, 2008 promises to be a decisive year for Iraq. By naming it the year of reconstruction, al-Maliki hopes to build on security gains through robust foreign investment and job creation. On the political front, the country should see nationwide provincial elections. Set for October, the elections threaten to usher in a radically different local leadership that will challenge the halls of power in Baghdad.

These leaders, comprised of tribesmen and homegrown political parties, have a real base of local support, unlike so many opposition parties that came to power in 2005. For Shi'ite leaders like Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, who returned to Iraq after 20-some years in Iran, and whose onetime militia, the Badr Corps, has now infiltrated the ranks of police and army, the threat of losing power in governorate elections is very real. Sunni Arabs from the Accordance Front will also have to share space with tribal leaders who have turned their awakening councils into political parties. The awakening councils were initially formed by tribesman in 2007 to fight Al-Qaeda.

The Kurdistan Coalition may be the only coalition to stand unchallenged at the local level.

Indeed, progress is slow, and slower than many in the West would want. Iraqi leaders chose in the first three years after the war to postpone the hard decisions until later. And now, there is mounting pressure from within (not to mention from outside Iraq) to deal with them. The government's passage of a general amnesty law last month was a huge step towards reconciliation. Already, more than 3,000 Iraqis have been released from Iraqi detention.

The Accountability and Justice Law, which serves as a revision of the Coalition Provisional Authority-era de-Ba'athification law, is another step forward. It paves the way for thousands of Ba'athists dismissed from their jobs and from the army, to be reinstated. Though the Shi'ite-led government is moving slowly toward implementing the law, the pressure continues, and progress is being made. The move may be less one of political accommodation and more a need for qualified technocrats. As time goes on, and development takes off, that need for qualified technocrats will only rise. Incorporating awakening forces into the security apparatus has met more resistance from the government. Should the awakening councils not be merged into the police and army, the potential for a breakdown on the security front rises considerably.

Other controversial issues remain. The draft oil law has yet to be passed, obstructing development of the dilapidated oil infrastructure. But technical-support agreements are being signed, and exploration agreements are on the horizon. If al-Maliki succeeds in luring in foreign investment, pressure on the oil industry, the revenues from which make up more than 90 percent of the country's budget, will increase. Last year, Iraq had an estimated $21 billion to $25 billion budget surplus from money not spent on reconstruction projects due to insecurity. With greater parts of the country experiencing security, those surpluses should be expected to fall in coming years.

Corruption continues to be a major impediment to al-Maliki's administration. The government recognizes this and has taken steps to curb corruption. But in one recent high-profile case, it turned a blind eye to the issue, leading many to wonder if there is any substance behind the rhetoric. Last week, al-Maliki cleared two former senior Health Ministry officials, both Shi'a, of corruption charges, even though the Commission on Public Integrity had evidence to substantiate the charges.

The former head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, Judge Radi al-Radi, said in testimony before the U.S. Congress on March 11 that out of 3,000 corruption cases successfully investigated by the commission, only 241 cases to date resulted in guilty verdicts. He estimated the cost of ministry corruption uncovered by the commission at $18 billion, citing the Defense, Trade, Electricity, Transport, Health, Interior, Communications, Housing, Finance and Oil ministries as the most corrupt.

The figures do not include cases dismissed by judges after they were threatened or assassinated, and they do not reflect the full extent of oil corruption, which includes smuggling, theft, and other fraud. The level of corruption affecting the industry because of the activities of Sunni and Shi'ite militias has resulted in the Oil Ministry "effectively financing terrorism through these militias," he said. Al-Radi, a career technocrat, has since sought asylum in the United States after the Iraqi government issued counteraccusations against him and issued its own arrest warrant for him. Al-Radi's replacement, Musa Faraj, said in January that pressure from within Prime Minister al-Maliki's administration -- but not from al-Maliki himself -- has restricted the commission's ability to function.

As Iraq enters the sixth year since the fall of the Hussein regime, the challenges remain daunting. Many questions linger as to the effects of the U.S. military surge, and whether security gains can be maintained. The greater question is whether there is a will on the part of the government to maintain those gains. U.S. support for awakening councils is one reason Iraq is more secure today than it was one year ago.

It remains unclear whether the Shi'ite-led government will continue along that path. To date, there are awakening councils in 11 governorates, including in six Shi'ite-populated governorates. Those too, may see little support from the government down the road, depending on where the councils -- or to be more exact, the tribes that comprise them -- stand politically. Indeed, much work lies ahead for Iraq. But the challenges are not insurmountable. All that is needed is a will to move forward equitably and with transparency.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2008 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Five Years In Iraq
Iraqis and Americans Offer Perspectives on the War
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008; A01

For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.

It has been about a year since Army Gen. David H. Petraeus arrived to command U.S. forces in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker took over as the chief U.S. diplomat, and the military deployed 30,000 more troops to protect and rebuild neighborhoods.

Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies -- in particular, sharply reduced violence -- are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife.

"I came to Washington to describe what we're doing," Charles P. Ries, Crocker's senior deputy in charge of reconstruction and the Iraqi economy, said during a visit last week. "At almost every meeting, somebody wants me to describe what we used to do. . . . I know why people raise these questions, but I don't feel it's something I can speak to. The times were different then."

Today's policy is fundamentally different from the impatient mind-set of 2003, in both lowered U.S. expectations and a less imperious approach to dealing with Iraqi authorities. "In those days," Ries said, "we decided what [the Iraqis] needed, and we built it." Today, he said, Iraqis are asked what they want, and then told that while the United States will help, they will have to pay for most of it themselves.

Yet as the administration requests additional war funding and calls for a pause in promised troop withdrawals, some question its right to a second chance. "Like a tourniquet," the troop increase "has stopped the bleeding," Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed said, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become. And even U.S. officials acknowledge that the "surge" has not led to the political reconciliation the administration had hoped for.

Others see the past year's successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. "I think they have it righter than they ever have before," Daniel P. Serwer, an Iraq expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace, said of the administration. "But the fact is that those four other years did exist, and they condition a lot of what can and cannot happen now. There's a history here, there's a lot of blood and guts on the floor -- literally."

The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. While it recognizes the inclination to "relitigate the past" when a milestone such as the fifth anniversary is reached, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "our focus is on the way ahead and making sure that the current situation and the future situation gets better."

In addition to new directions on the ground in Iraq, officials point to a newly effective structure designed to avoid the kind of ad hoc decision-making that led to early bureaucratic gridlock and mistakes, such as decrees dissolving the Iraqi army and banning Baath Party members from government jobs. President Bush's appointment last spring of Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan has "helped streamline the process and made sure that there is . . . a senior-level official who can devote his full, undivided attention" to the subject, Johndroe said.

The once-bickering State Department and Pentagon are reporting new levels of cooperation. Diplomats who recall Donald H. Rumsfeld's insistence that the Defense Department control all aspects of early postwar policy note approvingly that it was his successor as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who recently called on Congress to increase the State Department's budget.

Many U.S. officials participating in the new efforts talk about those years as though they belonged to another administration. "We weren't here five years ago," said one who, like several interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity about past policy on the grounds that it would undermine the present.

"In the early days, they had an idea of something, a plan, of how it was going to be," the official said. "They would remove Saddam, and democracy would flower. They took this plan and rammed it down into the reality of Iraq, which nobody understood. What did they know about Iraq? Who were they listening to?" In the past year, the official said, "there has been a coming to grips across the board with Iraqi reality."

One of the more troublesome realities is that Iraqi leaders have been slow to take advantage of the "breathing space" that the troop increase was supposed to create. The administration has often noted that Washington and Baghdad operate on different clocks, with the U.S. timetable for demonstrable progress running far faster than its Iraqi counterpart. In an interview last week, Petraeus, the U.S. military commander, acknowledged that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation" or in the provision of basic public services.

In congressional testimony scheduled for early next month, both Petraeus and Crocker are expected to make the case that enough forward movement has been made to justify continuing the current strategy, and to warn that an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops could jeopardize the gains of the past year.

But while a strong congressional appearance by the two men last September quieted talk of funding cutoffs and brought a brief rise in public attention, their upcoming testimony appears to have sparked little anticipation.

As the administration struggles to focus on Iraq's future, it is competing with a presidential race locked in debate about how the war began and how to end it, a Democratic Congress determined to fight over every additional dollar, and a weary, distracted public.

Indeed, once a top public concern, Iraq has been muscled aside by the economy and the political campaigns. In a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center, more people knew the names of the head of the Federal Reserve Board and the president of Venezuela than knew the approximate number of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Some public views about the situation in Iraq have eased over the past year. But others, including baseline judgments about the war itself, have hardly budged. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly two-thirds said the war was not worth waging. Less than half, 43 percent, think the United States is making significant progress, and majorities continue to judge the war's benefits as not worth its costs.

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

ANGRY IRANIAN STUDENTS REBEL AGAINST AHMADINEJAD APPOINTEE
March 5, 2008 8:10 AM
Iran’s recent student protests have become too large and too public for the regime to conceal. Ardeshir Arian reports, with videos.
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By Ardeshir Arian
For nearly two weeks, Shiraz University in central Iran has been paralyzed by a student demonstration that refuses to die and appears to be encouraging an atmosphere of protest on campuses around the country.
The protests began on February 24, when more than 500 students in Shiraz University marched from their dormitories into the main campus and demonstrated against the school’s chancellor Mohammed Hadi Sedeghi, demanding that he resign. The angry protests have taken place daily ever since.

In another country, angry student protesters might be considered a campus matter and wouldn’t necessarily have national significance, but the Shiraz students rising up and rebelling against Sadeghi, a former Revolutionary Guard Corps commander who was personally appointed by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in an effort to crack down on campuses and rid them of non-Islamic influences, has wider implications. Sadeghi is clearly a political figure and an Ahmedinejad ally — he was in charge of the upcoming parliamentary election committee in the province of Fars.
The angry students are chafing at the restrictive environment on campus in which campus guards are permitted to enter their dorm rooms without any prior warning. Students believe Sadeghi manipulated the internal election of the university council, rejecting 108 student candidates, which resulted in banning them from entering the race and imposing extreme limitations on student print media and activities. There is also general unhappiness with their food and housing, and underlying the action there is general discontent. Fliers distributed among the students are claiming that Sadeghi embezzled approximately $22 million following the sale of a university building.
It isn’t the first protest against the unpopular chancellor. Last April, students protested against a tightened dress code which included huge bulletin boards at the school’s male dormitories with a statement ordering male students not to wear “shorts and tank tops in the dormitory’s halls or where they sleep.”
From the moment the protests first broke out, government security agents were keeping tabs on the students as they marched towards the chancellor’s office chanting: “This is the final message, the student movement is ready for insurrection,” “The movement continues, even if bullets come,” “Resign, resign,” “Freedom of the print media,” “Long live freedom,” “Support the noble nation, support, support,” and “They close the nuclear file, but where are the students’ files?” — protesting jailed students that are missing since the time of their arrests, without any news or closure of their uncertain situation.
The campus was shut, but citizens gathered at the gates of the university to watch the students’ protest — among them, faculty members and other university employees.
On that first day of demonstrations, Sadeghi managed to quietly slip away from campus. Demonstrators rushed in his direction to capture him, but the campus police prevented them from reaching him. After his departure from campus, students occupied his office and vowed to sit in until he resigned.
After, agents of the IRI, employed by the university, blocked the main gates of the campus and parked buses at the entrance to prevent the outsiders from entering the campus and to contain the demonstrations within. Islamic security forces stood at the gates preventing any contact between the students and the people.
Naturally, little has been heard of the student uprising on official Iranian media. But Radio Farda, a Persian-language, 24/7 radio service financed by the U.S., interviewed some of the demonstrators inside the campus. Its reports have been translated by Radio Free Europe:
Student Mohammad Mehdi Ahmadi complained to Radio Farda on February 26 of “pressures” the university chief, whom he identified as Dr. Sadeqi, was imposing on the campus. He said these included the disqualification of 108 students who had sought to run for seats in a student council, the expulsion of various students from dormitories, the closure or evacuation of dormitories for married students, and pressures on student journals and activists. “These all became a trigger for the … protests,” he said.
As the protest has continued, the numbers of students has grown into the thousands, organizers say, despite attempts to break it up by the authorities, with actions such as shutting down the main water lines into the student dormitories.
Among the student chants: “Sadeghi, the Pinochet, Resign, Resign,” and “This is our last warning, the student movement is ready to rise up.”

Multiple YouTube videos have been posted, including those showing students marching and chanting “The noble people, we are ready, we are ready.” As they gathered on the steps of the administration building, they chanted “The noble people, support, support” and “Freedom and justice is the remedy for our people’s pain.” There was also repeated chanting of “Resign, resign, we don’t want a corrupt chancellor,” “This is our last warning, students’ movement is alive,” or “We don’t want a Pasdar [a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] as our chancellor.”
The pro-government, pro-Sagedhi point of view has not gone unrepresented at the protests, but is not very popular.
At one point, a student took the microphone and said: “Since the western media is reporting about your demonstration, then you are being supported by the United States.” Other students booed him and took the mic back from him.
Another representative of the dean claimed that the embattled administrator was ready to answer students’ questions in the auditorium, but the students shot back that “the only thing that he can do is resign. There is nothing to be said between us.”
As the protests entered their second week on Monday, Iranian secret police reportedly began to take more aggressive action to end the embarrassing incident. Ten student leaders have been contacted and threatened. About 25 families of the striking students have been contacted by the campus agents, pressured, threatened, and forced to get in touch with their children and ask them to call off the protest. Eight students have been named and summoned to the revolutionary court to answer for their conduct.
The student protest movement appears to be widening. There is news that students of another higher educational institution in the city of Shahroud, in the province of Khorasan, more than a thousand kilometers away, have followed suit and some students have been arrested by the secret police.
According to Radio Free Europe: “Citing unnamed activists, Radio Farda reported other ongoing protests or sit-ins in Shahrud University in northeastern Iran and the Teacher Training University in Tehran. Ahmadi told Radio Farda that specific issues were merely triggers for protests in Iran’s increasingly restricted campuses. ‘The atmosphere the … government has created in universities is [one] of protest, and the slightest issue can trigger large protests,’ he said.”
On Wednesday, reports emerged that the student unrest had made it to Iran’s capital: between 100 and 200 students at Allameh Tabatabai Univeristy in Tehran protested against the banning of 40 student leaders who had organized a demonstration against the authorities.
An Iranian activist website also reported that:
Students of Bahonar College held an angry demonstration over a fellow student beaten up by the chief of the school’s security. They shouted: “University is not a military garrison.”
Ardeshir Arian is a special correspondent for Pajamas Media; he covers Iranian affairs.
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In his latest missive on the U.S. endeavor in Iraq (“Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army's Conventional Capabilities”), Army Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile claims that the Surge forces and the new U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine had little effect on the situation in Iraq. Rather, U.S. forces paid off the insurgents, who stopped fighting for cash. Once again, Gian Gentile misreads not just what is happening today in Iraq, but the history of the war.

To borrow a quote from Ronald Reagan, "Gian, there you go again."

Gentile's analysis is incorrect in a number of ways, and his narrative is heavily influenced by the fact that he was a battalion commander in Baghdad in 2006. His unit didn't fail, his thinking goes, therefore recent successes cannot be due to anything accomplished by units that came to Iraq during the Surge.

The facts speak otherwise. Gentile's battalion occupied Ameriyah, which in 2006 was an Al Qaeda safe-haven infested by Sunni insurgents and their Al Qaeda-Iraq allies. I'm certain that he and his soldiers did their best to combat these enemies and to protect the people in their area. But since his battalion lived at Forward Operating Base Falcon and commuted to the neighborhood, they could not accomplish their mission. The soldiers did not fail. The strategy did.

The "big base" strategy only changed when General Dave Petraeus and Lieutenant General Ray Odierno came to Iraq and implemented the new counterinsurgency doctrine in the recently published FM 3-24. Few U.S. Army units were implementing that doctrine as early as 2004, as Gentile claims. Some units were moving in that direction, as Colonel H. R. McMaster's accomplishments with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in 2005 attest. But these units were exceptions to the general rule. Most units were still more intent on finding and killing the enemy than they were on protecting the Iraqi people and making it impossible for the insurgents to survive in their midst.

The Surge succeeded on a number of levels. Lieutenant General Odierno brought the operational level of war back into play with his brilliant plan for securing Baghdad and eliminating Al Qaeda-Iraq sanctuaries in the areas surrounding the capital, the so-called “Baghdad belts.” If the U.S. Army were doing so well in COIN operations from 2004-2006, as Gentile claims, then why wasn't Baghdad secured earlier? Perhaps it was because our forces were poorly positioned on large bases, unable to protect the Iraqi people, as claimed by "a senior Army officer who was [sic, is] a member of Gen. Petraeus's ‘brain trust’."

Gentile’s assertion, that we paid the insurgents off, does not stand up to a close reading of recent history. The fact is that the Surge was a success in securing Baghdad (and Al Anbar) well before we began to grant security contracts in large numbers to "Concerned Local Citizens." The sheiks and other community leaders turned against Al Qaeda-Iraq first, due to terrorist depredations on their communities and also due to their belief that they would be supported by U.S. forces willing to live among their people to protect them. With this 24/7 support, they could get rid of the terrorists of Al Qaeda-Iraq for good. The additional U.S. forces positioned in their communities meant that the terrorists could not return to enact revenge on those who turned against them.

This scenario played out first in the fall of 2006 in Ramadi in Al Anbar Province, where Colonel Sean MacFarland and my old unit, the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, conducted a superb campaign to rid the city of Al Qaeda-Iraq. MacFarland positioned his forces in platoon and company strongpoints that slowly squeezed the area under enemy control. He also backed tribal auxiliary forces that supplemented the local Iraqi police. By the late spring of 2007, U.S. Army troopers and Marines along with local tribesmen eventually eliminated the Al-Qaeda-Iraq presence in Ramadi.

The success in Ramadi served as a template for other areas, to include the enemy stronghold of Ameriyah where Gentile and his battalion served. Once the Iraqi populace understood that U.S. forces would live among them, assist Iraqi security forces in battling the terrorists and other irreconcilable insurgents in their neighborhoods, and ensure their long-term protection, then a number of insurgents came forward to turn against their former allies who had gone too far in their intimidation of the local citizenry. Multi-National Force-Iraq applauded when these reconcilable elements of the insurgency offered to turn their weapons against the terrorists rather than continue to use them against us. They did so initially without being paid for their conversion – that came later.

In short, the turning of the tribes against Al Qaeda-Iraq in Al Anbar came first, then the Surge provided forces to secure Baghdad’s neighborhoods and eliminate enemy sanctuaries surrounding the capital, and then a number of insurgents turned against their former allies in Ameriyah, Ghazalia, and elsewhere. Only later did we start to pay money for the security offered by these reconcilable elements of Iraqi society.

The other cause to which Gentile ascribes the reduction in violence is Sadr's freeze on the operations of Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), which he presents without context. The freeze cannot be understood unless you acknowledge that it came a time when JAM was under tremendous and increasing pressure from U.S. and Iraqi operations enabled by the surge and the new COIN approach. By the late summer of 2007, the Iraqi people increasingly perceived less of a need for JAM to secure their neighborhoods, because U.S. and Iraqi Security Forces had supplanted the role of militias in this regard. The incident in Karbala in August 2007 – when JAM militiamen killed several hundred people during a Shi’ite religious festival – jeopardized much of the remaining popular support for Sadr’s military organization, which Iraqis increasingly viewed as thugs and criminals operating under the otherwise honorable banner of Sadr’s father. Again, the Surge and the operations it enabled came first, and they were causal factors in Sadr’s freeze on JAM operations.

Gentile worries that the U.S. Army has lost the capability to conduct conventional warfighting operations. I disagree. The Army has not lost that capability; today's Army is the most experienced, professional, and capable combined arms force in our nation's history. Since 2003 the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have routinely engaged in conventional warfighting. Battles in Karbala, An Najaf, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Mosul, Baqubah, Baghdad, and elsewhere have proven the capabilities of our ground forces to engage in conventional combat operations. Combat units routinely use armor, artillery, mechanized infantry, attack aviation, close air support, and other assets to accomplish their missions. The fact that our units are doing non-kinetic operations doesn't mean they've stopped doing high-intensity kinetic operations or have forgotten how. Gentile also doesn't mention how much more capable our brigades are now in terms of command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance than they were when the war began in 2003.

The larger concern, in my view, would be if our senior leaders allow our newly developed counterinsurgency capabilities to lapse, and like Gentile, focus instead on preparing the Army to fight the next “big one." After all, why worry about fighting real wars in the Middle East and South Asia when we can instead keep our military forces in the United States to fight imaginary ones? Iraq and Afghanistan are a long way from being over. To paraphrase a certain high ranking former official, let’s fight the wars we have, rather than the ones we want.

Colonel Peter Mansoor, USA, is the executive officer to General David Petraeus in Iraq. Previously he served on a "Council of Colonels" that assisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in reassessing the strategy for the Iraq War, as the founding Director of the US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, and as Commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, in Iraq in 2003-2004. He will retire this summer and assume duties as the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University.

March 19, 2008
In India, Balancing Refugee Care and Relations With China

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
DHARAMSALA, India — The Dalai Lama on Tuesday called on his young and restless followers here to refrain from upsetting their Indian hosts and said he would ask the organizers of a proposed march from here to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, to reconsider their efforts.

He chided, “On border, some clash with Chinese soldiers, what use is that?”

Some of the younger exile groups have advocated independence for Tibet, openly deviating from the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” of greater autonomy but not secession from China. On Tuesday, amid the many protests throughout the day, some of them burned Chinese flags.

The schism within the Tibetan refugee community reflects its awkward position as a guest in India, a country that has long tried to strike a delicate balance between maintaining good relations with China, its powerful neighbor, and allowing the Dalai Lama and his followers, who are based here, to keep their cause alive. The explosion of the Tibetan crisis has made that high-wire act even more difficult to maintain.

India is host to the largest Tibetan refugee population in the world, now about 100,000 people, but has conditioned the refugees’ stay on a promise not to carry out anti-Chinese activities on Indian soil. The two rising world powers have tried to improve relations after decades of mistrust rooted in a brief border war in 1962.

But India’s competing priorities have yielded seemingly contradictory responses to the current crisis.

Last week, hundreds of Tibetan refugees set off on a six-month march from here to Tibet to protest China’s staging of the Olympic Games in August. The Indian police arrested one group of marchers but have allowed a second to continue, to about 90 miles from here; it is unclear how much farther they will be allowed to advance.

An Indian official said the government had expressed concern to the Dalai Lama about the prospect of Tibetan refugees breaking Indian law. At Beijing’s request, it has increased security outside Chinese missions.

India, which has faced a host of separatist movements itself, including in the contested province of Kashmir, has never supported Tibetan independence. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Beijing in January, Tibet was not even mentioned in a joint statement issued by the two countries.

But in a nod to the Dalai Lama’s importance, India’s most senior foreign service official came here to brief him about Mr. Singh’s trip.

India has also provided security for the Dalai Lama, as a guest of the government, and allowed the exile community to highlight Chinese abuses in Tibet. Nor far from the Dalai Lama’s compound here is a museum of the Tibetan struggle, with photographs of Tibetan fighters in the 1950s and testimony from those tortured by Chinese forces in the 1980s.

“India’s position has always been not to let the position of the refugees become an issue between New Delhi and Beijing,” said Salman Haidar, a former Indian envoy to China. “Relations between India and China may be good or bad, but they are not determined by Tibet.”

The Tibet issue is already simmering in domestic politics. Opposition politicians with the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., walked out of Parliament this week, saying the government had failed to condemn the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. The Foreign Ministry said only that it was “distressed” by the violence and urged both sides to “remove the causes of such trouble.”

Ram Jethmalani, an attorney and law minister in the former B.J.P. government, called the current government’s stance “shameful.”

“We were expected to be the conscience of the world,” he said. “Here we don’t have the moral courage to speak the truth.”

The Dalai Lama said Sunday that India had made “maximum” efforts as host, but it faced certain limitations in allowing political activity by Tibetans.

No sooner had he finished speaking than protesters outside the gate of his compound set fire to the first of several Chinese flags, shouting “Death to Hu Jintao,” the Chinese president. It was one of several almost nonstop protests through the day.

The Dalai Lama also acknowledged that his “middle way” had achieved no concrete gains inside Tibet, but he dismissed talk of any other path as impractical. To call for independence, he argued, would be to lose the support of countries like India and the United States. He called violence “suicidal.”

“Last few days I had a sort of feeling, a tiger, of a young deer in a tiger’s hand,” he said. “Deer really can fight the tiger? Can express. But actual fight? Our only weapon, only strength is justice, truth. But effect of truth, justice, sometimes takes longer time.”