Abu Aardvark

APSA alert

I'll be heading out to Boston for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association soon.  If you're going to be there and want to meet up, drop me a line sometime soon (I'll be reachable by email throughout the conference).    I haven't had a minute to scour through the online program to find panels to recommend, but if you're still in town on Sunday morning (!) we'd love to see you at mine:

Sunday, 10:15 AM
18-15 Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq

Chair:  Marc Lynch, George Washington University

Papers: 

• Colin H. Kahl, Georgetown University, "The Other Side of the COIN:  The Evolution of Counter-Insurgency in Iraq"
• Marc Lynch, George Washington University, "Insurgency Online, Awakening Offline:  Explaning the Shift in Iraqi Sunni Political Attitudes, 2005-2007"
• Carter Malkasian, Center for Naval Analysis, "The Changing Tactics of the Iraqi Insurgency in Anbar"
• Matthew Zais, US Military Academy, "Broadswords and Broad Minds:  Sub-Organizational Culture and Military Effectiveness in Iraq."

Discussant:  David Patel, Cornell University

Steve Biddle, the original discussant, and two of the original paper presenters had to drop out along the way, but I think it shaped up into an outstanding panel and one from which I expect to learn a lot.  See some of you there, I hope!

UPDATE:  could anyone already at APSA give me the scoop on wireless access?  Blogging and tagging for the next few days will depend on the answer...

it's that time

... and so, after all the anticipation, the drama, the frantic preparations, the big day has arrived and here we are!  I honestly think that it's tougher on the spectators than the participants.   There certainly has been a big build-up, a trembling, expectant mix of excitement and fear in equal parts... even if we all know that within a few weeks it will all be forgotten.  What?  No, not the convention - who cares about that?  I was talking about the first day of kindergarten...

what was that again?

There's been much debate as to whether Iraqi politicians were talking about a 'timetable' or a 'time horizon' in their various statements on the negotiations with the U.S. over a security agreement.   So Prime Minister Maliki made a point of spelling it out today:  no US-Iraq agreement which does not include a specific deadline for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.  Maliki also claimed that such an agreement had already been reached, although Ambassador Crocker told al-Hayat that it had not been. 

A very high ranking American diplomat with long experience in Iraq recently told me that he expected the Iraqis to take this as close to the brink as they could, since they knew the importance the Bush administration placed on getting a deal -  basically a game of chicken, holding out for the best deal.  That's likely why, for instance, we haven't seen any moves on the part of the Iraqis to prepare the ground for a renewal of the UN mandate which expires at the end of December in case the negotiations fail... when you're playing chicken, you don't wear a seatbelt.

This is obviously a big deal. It clearly affirms the long-held position of Obama and many others in support of a strong, firm, public commitment to a timeline for withdrawal, demonstrating that such an approach is not only realistic but actually manifesting. And it surely shows how totally out of touch McCain is with Iraqi realities, and how wedded to an outdated and irresponsible position.

But here's why I'm less excited by this than some of my colleagues.  As with everything in Iraqi politics, there's likely to be a substantial gap between a political agreement and its implementation.  I assume that even if an agreement actually passes the Iraqi Parliament (which the speaker just said was unlikely), it will contain plenty of 'conditions-based' loopholes.  And I assume that both a Maliki government (and any likely successor) and a McCain administration would have every intention of exploiting those loopholes.   In other words, the upshot could well be to take McCain's 100 years off the table in American politics and enhance Maliki's still-shaky political position while legalizing precisely the long-term U.S. military presence it supposedly rules out.  That's why it's important to scrutinize the details of the agreement, and to get the right leadership in place to get the implementation right.

it hit it while i was gone

A couple of weeks ago, I laid out the case that the problem of the future of the Awakenings was coming to a head.  Well, while I was away, the issue seems to have exploded.   McClatchy, the New York Times, the LA Times, and others have run important stories on what seems to be a concerted campaign by the Maliki government to crack down on the Awakenings movement - with what appears to be grudging American acceptance.   

The Awakenings experience demonstrates the limits of American influence over the Iraqi government - months of sustained, intense pressure on Maliki to integrate the Sons of Iraq into the Security Forces has produced remarkably little results, and now Maliki is cracking down on a pillar of Gen. Petraeus's strategy against al-Qaeda.  This should be another nail in the coffin of the popular idea that improving security will lead the Iraqi government to make political accommodations with its rivals.  Quite the opposite - much more on that coming soon, I promise. 

On a related note, Tareq al-Homayed, editor of the Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, has a widely discussed piece voicing intense displeasure with the 'betrayal' of the Awakening (English version here).  The crackdown could very well put the ice on the recent opening of relations between Arab states and the Iraqi government (which has not, at any rate, yet extended to the Saudis).  I don't think that the Awakenings are as beloved and respected by Arab public opinion as some pretend - they are backed more by governments, the Saudi and Jordanian media, those sorts of sectors - but Homayed's closing lines about the message conveyed will likely resonate more broadly: "Beware of cooperating with the Americans, or you will share the Awakening Councils' fate."

Both reducing America's ability to pressure the Iraqi government to seek political accommodation and creating the perception that the United States betrayed the Awakenings are commonly cited as reasons why the U.S. should not withdraw troops from Iraq.  That both are happening anyway seems to be relevant.

Back to the internal dynamics at play.  Maliki is casting this as another step in the "law and order" campaign, with the refrain of no arms in the hands of militias familiar from earlier campaigns in Basra et al.  Ironically, this framing actually follows what I've advocated for well over a year - establishing effective state sovereignty, which the U.S.-backed Awakenings project undermined.   But I had hoped that this would be done by integrating the Sunni Awakenings into the security forces, not by arresting their leaders and throwing their members back out onto the streets.  This is just one more example of the gap between the formal policy and the implementation which has plagued Iraqi politics - an amnesty law which doesn't seem to let many Sunnis out of jail, a deBaathification reform law which seems to make things harder for its intended beneficiaries, calls for refugee return which do nothing to allow them to successfully return.   

If this is indeed the showdown, and - in the words of the influential ISCI leader Jalal al-Saghir - "the Awakenings have no future in Iraq", then what's going to happen?    It could shape up into a real world test of two competing hypotheses:   'we don't need to accommodate those hoodlums'  (Maliki, Gen. Keane) vs 'they can cause a lot of trouble if not accommodated' (Petraeus and Odierno, among many others).   The first position basically assumes that the Awakenings are the remnants of a spent force, unwilling and unable to go back to the insurgency, which can be easily bought off with jobs or ignored.   The second basically assumes that the Awakenings represented a choice made by the insurgency factions, which could go back to the insurgency if it had to. 

I think that they can go back to the fight, even if they don't really want to. I've never understood the argument that a group which effectively fought the U.S. for years, then voluntarily decided to strike deals with the U.S. to battle a common enemy, can not now switch sides again.   I don't have the faith in biometric data that I hear from U.S. military sources.   

But you can see the Maliki calculation here pretty clearly.  Start from the basic assumption that all other things equal, most of these guys really don't want to go back to the insurgency.  They'd prefer to be integrated into the Iraqi Security Forces, recognized as the power-brokers in the Sunni community, and given de facto control of their local neighborhoods.  But the Maliki government now seems intent on denying them that option.  So what can they do? 

The deals with the U.S. (never yet with the Iraqi government) don't mean that they've given up their guns or forgotten how to fight.   But their extreme fragmentation (some 200 different individual deals with the U.S. military, as Steve Biddle always points out) creates a major collective action problem.  The absence of a unified leadership makes it harder for them both to make and enforce binding deals (pace Jim Fearon), but also to return en masse to the mattresses.  With each local group looking out for itself, Maliki likely believes he can slice and dice them, co-opting some while cracking down on others, counting on their inability to overcome the collective action problem.   Plus, as I was told recently by a senior U.S. military leader, if the Awakenings groups do hit back then Maliki has the excuse he needs to slam down even harder.   

Much of this depends on whether the insurgency factions such as the Islamic Army of Iraq still retain operational control over all these local cells and small groupings - if they do, then they could overcome the collective action problem and initiate a coordinated return to insurgency (though not to any 2005-style alignment with AQI, I don't think - that divorce, from what I've heard from a wide range of sources, is final).   Even if they can't or won't go that route, it doesn't seem like it would take that many individual defectors - even just a few thousand - to seriously ramp up fighting again.

But here's a stumper.  What if that battle is joined, but the "former Awakenings" ("the once and future insurgency?") choose not to turn those guns against their American "friends" but concentrate exclusively on the Iraqi government.  Which side does the U.S. support?  The Awakenings movement which it has built and cultivated, or the Iraqi government which it has built and cultivated?  Could get messy. 

 

back, kind of

I'm back from California (not the sunny, beachy part but the 50 degrees and foggy part). Rather extremely jet-lagged and catching up with last week.   

But I'm thrilled about the pick of Joe Biden.   I never had a strong VP preference, but Biden was by far my favorite of the short-list that emerged over the last week.  Yeah, I savaged his partition plan for Iraq, but since that seems to be off the table these days it shouldn't be a problem.  Smart, experienced and tough guy who will complement Obama in many ways.  Outstanding - and imagine my surprise that I really did learn about it via email and not from CNN!

Should get back up to regular blogging speed soon.

Also, by popular demand, a new comment policy for a new semester, with one simple rule borrowed from some other blog I forget now:  don't be an asshole.  Comments will be moderated for a while until I don't feel like it anymore. 

happy end of summer

This has been a heck of a month.  Much, much work, most of it extremely interesting but sadly unbloggable... and still quite a bit to go in the next few days.  That's why I haven't posted much for the last couple of weeks.  Once all that's done (or even if it isn't), I'm going on my first vacation in three years.  I'm going to be off-line for a while, and don't expect to be posting anything, tagging anything, or checking comments.  I can still be reached by email, but not in the usual real time rapid response fashion!  In other words, I'm closing up shop and will reopen when I get back.   Enjoy the rest of the summer!

not much to show

While I've been too busy to post for the last week, I've been following the saga of the provincial elections law closely.   When the Parliament finally adjourned without reaching agreement, I was not particularly happy to be proven prescient about the political stalemate- I had very much been hoping to see an agreement on the law, followed by elections in December.  Not October, since the Iraqi Higher Election Commission and the UN had both publicly warned that they could not guarantee the integrity of the election on that time frame. For these hotly contentious elections, in which everybody expects to win and pre-emptive allegations of fraud and 'shaping operations' are already rampant, guaranteeing their integrity, preferably with serious international supervision, will be absolutely essential.  Their postponement to December or even a bit longer in order to ensure their integrity is definitely preferable to rushing them in October - but their indefinite postponement promises a world of problems, especially in the Sunni areas.  (*)

The anger among the Awakenings movements is already palpable.  The New York Times quotes Ali Hatem Suleiman saying that “We are running out of patience,” and Sheik Hamid al-Hayis saying  “This is a slap on the face of Iraq... we couldn’t make a big change in the government structure. That pushed us to work to make change in the provincial council. But even that we can’t touch.”  Dr. iRack, just back from Iraq, reports that the notoriously outspoken Ali Hatem "is deadly serious about returning to war against all the Islamic parties (Sunni and Shia) if the Awakening groups are not given the power they think they deserve."  That fits what I've heard from others less prone to hyperbole.

Leaders of the Awakenings have been warning that they are "losing patience" and "the next few months will be decisive" so many times that I suspect some people have stopped taking them seriously.   As with the evident nonchalance about the prospects of the major Sunni insurgency factions flipping back to the other side, this seems to rest on a notion that they have nowhere else to go and that there is neither the ability nor the desire to go back to the insurgency  ("we don't need to accommodate those hoodlums," pace General Keane).   This strikes me as a very dangerous bit of best-case scenario thinking, of a kind which hurt American efforts in the past and has continued to mar the analysis of surge cheerleaders throughout.  There are all kinds of warning lights blinking, from both the Awakenings and from the insurgency factions whose members make up many of their cadres outside of Anbar:

• For the last eight months they have been the target of a systematic campaign of attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq (AQI).  I have not seen any reliable statistics about the toll this has taken, but hardly a day goes by without a report of another attack on a checkpoint manned by Awakenings fighters or a hit on a leader.   This has led to a lot of complaints from the Awakenings of a lack of military support from the US and the Iraqi security forces - they feel that they are being put on the front lines and not being supported.
• Their frustration at not being integrated into the Iraqi security forces has been mounting for months.  The Iraqi government has been slow-rolling this, despite US pressure, and even the upper limit (20%) is far below what the Awakenings want and expect.   Proposals for other employment opportunities - the best American alternative on offer - hold little appeal to these fighters who want the prestige and honor of security jobs. 
• Awakenings men have also been grumbling about being cut off by the Americans, about being targeted by Iraqi security forces, and about being generally disrespected.  The fall from grace of Abu Abed continues to reverberate. 
• Awakenings leaders held out hopes of filling the Sunni positions in the Maliki government vacated by the Iraqi Accordance Front last summer - hopes fanned by Maliki's people and amply recorded in the Iraqi press at the time.   Instead, the positions remained vacant until the IAF finally returned a few weeks ago - almost certainly in order to have state resources at their disposal to help with the provincial elections.
• Their efforts to seize power from the Islamic Party at the local level have led to numerous dangerous clashes and threats, but little progress.  Concerns over these local political struggles and rising security concerns have led to a delay in handing over Anbar to Provincial Iraqi Control (PIC) - which, like so many other things, has recently been pegged to the provincial elections.
• And now, finally, the failure to pass the provincial elections law has left their anticipated route to political power blocked, perhaps indefinitely. 

We are potentially approaching a moment of truth.  The consequences of building up these forces outside of the structures of the Iraqi state, while stringing them along with promises that require Iraqi government acquiesence to deliver may be coming due.   I know well that US military commanders have been far more attentive to these issues than have the cheerleaders, and MNF-I and Ambassador Crocker have been working as hard as they can to resolve them.   Their failure to deliver a compromise on the provincial elections law and their failure to deliver meaningful progress on SOI integration both suggest the limits of American influence in Iraq - a lesson which the advocates of "strategic patience", who continue to view American decisions as the only ones which really matter, never seem to digest.   

(*) sentence edited for clarity.