Wide Awake

The New York Times' look at Concerned Local Citizens getting blown up and the prospect that some of their recruits are going to start deserting is interesting, but for my money the most interested part is in the eighth graf (emphasis added):

Officials say that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has a two-pronged strategy: directing strikes against Awakening members to intimidate and punish them for cooperating with the Americans, and infiltrating the groups to glean intelligence and discredit the movement in the eyes of an already wary Shiite-led government. “Al Qaeda is trying to assassinate all the Awakening members that support the government, but I believe that criminal militias are also doing this,” Mr. Bolani said during a recent interview in Taji.

This infiltration issue was, as I recall, the fatal flaw in what was really Version 1.0 of the Awakening strategy several years ago when we were first trying to build up the Iraqi police force. We wanted to get Sunni personnel to join the police in Sunni areas, but what would up happening was that Sunni insurgents just signed up to join the police. Our trust-based approach to recruiting and arming our new CLC allies seems to be vulnerable to the precise same flaw. Since the whole point is to sign up former insurgents, there's no real way to screen out tell the difference between an insurgent infiltrating the operation and an ex-insurgent who's decided to change his ways.

Comments

In reality, it's not a "trust-based" approach, of course. It's an approach based on incentives - it works insofar as the Sunnis have an incentive to cooperate. I see two basic kinds of incentives: strategic and economic.

Strategic: if you're a Sunni nationalist or tribal leader caught between Al-Qaeda and a Shiite religious government, throwing in your lot with the Americans (rather than than fighting them) may be the least bad option.

Economic: if you seem unreliable to the US, or provide bad information, the money stops coming in.

As long as the interests of the two sides line up, they don't actually have to trust each other - which is good, because many of our new "allies" undoubtedly hate us and would be happy to kill us. Whether and how those interests can remain aligned over the long term is a different question (the attacks on CLC members are an attempt to change the incentives, by raising the cost of cooperation).

It's not clear to me whether continued attacks are more likely to push Sunni rejectionists into closer cooperation with the American military (for self-preservation), or to push them back into the insurgency. Either way, they undermine efforts to incorporate the Sunni groups into the Iraqi government and official security forces.

Posted by N | January 24, 2008 3:27 PM

Not to take away from any of your points, MY, but my take was that Mr. Bolani was trying to plant the idea that when the natural course of events happens - the Sunni Awakening Councils fight the Shi'ite government forces - it's really the fault of the infiltrators.

Posted by Th | January 24, 2008 4:06 PM

there's no real way to tell the difference between an insurgent infiltrating the operation and an ex-insurgent who's decided to change his ways.

One might wonder if there even is a difference.

The whole "Anbar Awakening" thing tends to get framed as Sunni insurgents switching sides in the fight between the US and Al-Qaeda, but from an Iraqi POV isn't it more like the US switching sides in the fight between the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite government?

Posted by lemuel pitkin | January 24, 2008 4:21 PM

It's all about the money.

The US is paying $300 per person to join these groups. That money is doled out - no doubt with a "management fee" taken off the top - by the leaders of these groups.

So it's simply a con game based on a US welfare program. We're bribing the enemy not to shoot at us. It's that simple.

The US has always "bought" its wars based on its large economy and population, outspending its enemies. This is just a small time, more direct example.

While there is some evidence that some small tribes did indeed want US help against Al Qaeda - see the Asia Times articles I referenced in other threads here on Iraq - the reality is that the Sunnis are simply taking advantage of the US.

They're obviously not going to do this forever. Sooner or later, the realities of the power imbalance between the Shia government and the Sunnis is going to have to be worked out. And nothing there has changed. The existing government has no reason to offer the Sunnis at least an equal partnership, and the Sunnis really want more than that.

A coalition of Iraqi nationalists involving al-Sadr's Shia faction, some other Shia factions, and some Sunni factions is forming. Their intent is to dump Maliki and the US puppet government, maybe try to make some sort of deal with the Sunni insurgents at least long enough to drive out the US, then try to work out their differences one way or the other over who has the power and the oil.

These "Concerned" groups probably include some insurgents, some nationalists, and some criminal organizations. Many of them clearly operate like little more than bandits or warlords. How many of them will agree to work with the nationalist coalition is unknown. But if half of them decide to join the coalition, that will be 50,000 fighters to join al-Sadr's 20,000 or so, plus other groups, against the US forces. The US will lose that game.

In any event, none of this is sustainable from the US point of view. Sooner or later, the Iraqis are going to force the US out. There simply is no such thing for any of these people as a long term US presence in large numbers in Iraq. That is simply unacceptable to the Iraqi population.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 24, 2008 7:45 PM