A Report From Iraq

While hard fighting lies ahead in west Mosul, the noose is tightening. Anbar has advanced the most, with local police replacing the army in the cities. In the belts outside Baghdad, the Americans have allied with CLCs that perform the duties of local police. The same is true inside Baghdad, where the Iraqi commander, Lietenant General Aboud Ganbar, has gained the popularity of a rock star by frequently visiting his units in the districts.

At the same time, Maliki has emerged as a truculent and divisive figure, setting up ad hoc committees to solidify Shiite dominance while bypassing the ministries. The prime minister’s office is hard-line sectarian and an impediment to reconciliation. Distrusting the army, Maliki has installed a vulpine general inside his own office in the so-called Office of the Commander-in-Chief, so that he can counter orders of the Ministry of Defense.

The Kurds recently warned Maliki that he could either share power with the three other senior elected leaders—the president (a Kurd) and two vice presidents (a Shiite and a Sunni)—or face a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly. Maliki reluctantly agreed to share power, while allegedly bragging that he had the confidence of President Bush and was thus irreplaceable.

Senior Americans in Iraq are frustrated, lacking options. If Maliki is voted out, there could be months of paralysis before another prime minister is selected. The leading candidate, Vice President Adil al Mahdi, is a likeable politician who represents the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. ISCI is suspect because of the strength of its Badr Corps militia and its close relations with Iran.

The Iraqi government needs to show significant progress before Petraeus testifies again in Washington in March or April. Maliki has held up passage of legislation providing for provincial elections that will result in losses to his Dawa Party. He may permit that legislation to keep the White House’s support, or persist in sectarian obfuscations, gambling that Bush doesn’t have the nerve to withdraw his support and absorb the fire of the Democrats.

Overlooked thus far in most accounts of the Iraq War is the remarkable imbalance between insurgents killed versus captured. In Vietnam, about nine Viet Cong guerrillas were killed for each one captured. In Iraq, about one insurgent is killed for every three captured. Most insurgents surrender, contrary to what one might think from press accounts that emphasize the minority who fight to the death. Fewer than one in 10 is an al-Qaeda fanatic. Most are poor young men paid a pittance to risk their lives, or they are resisting the American occupation and the new balance of power in Iraq. The result is a double-barreled problem for the coalition: a large prison population, where the majority are probably not a long-term threat but do require individual assessments before being released.

Currently, the U.S. is holding about 25,000 Iraqis, charged with being "imperative risks," meaning that our soldiers arrested them with sufficient evidence to withstand the three levels of review by lawyers required before imprisoning them for more than six months. Since 2003, the coalition has imprisoned 77,000 and released 53,000. With the average prison term being less than a year, recidivism is a highly controversial issue. Field commanders complain that they are fighting the same insurgents twice, while staffs in Baghdad point to astonishingly low rates of re-arrest—3 percent to 9 percent—as an indicator of the shallow roots of the insurgency, rather than police incompetence.

Eighty percent of the detainees are Sunni. The government of Iraq, with neither the prison space nor the desire to accept a whole-scale transfer, is apt to release the wrong prisoners or abuse them. It is possible that, thanks to the Sunni awakening, many now in prison would not attack American or Iraqi forces a second time if released. In the past year, a task force under Major General Douglas Stone has sorted out and isolated the hard core—about 5,000—and initiated short classes to reeducate most of the other prisoners. The task force will recommend who should be released, totaling about 16,000 prisoners in 2008. This would reduce the prison population to about17,000, assuming 8,000 "new" insurgents are imprisoned during the year.

Commanders in the field have expressed skepticism. In a conventional war those captured are held until the war is over. Last year, there was an uproar in the ranks about the “catch and release” system. This year, each week the brigades are sending about 140 "new" insurgents to prison, while being required to release 450. To set up a probation system— a new task for our military—in the midst of a war demands substantial time of the field commanders, while running the risks that some returnees will kill Americans or attack the Iraqi residents who informed on them in the first place.

Given that there are tens of thousands of violent criminals—murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and robbers—and thousands of al-Qaeda followers running loose in Iraq, it’s hard to see how we can work our way out of being a prison warden. The Bush administration proclaimed that the U.S. was not the world’s jailer. But not having established a systematic means of transferring penal responsibilities years ago, the U.S. must now remain a jailer in Iraq for years to come.

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Slideshow: Life at Guantánamo
View more images of the detention center, along with audio commentary by photographer Louie Palu.

Imprisonment is a problem without any fast or good solution. It’s doubtful, though, that Iraq will succeed Guantánamo as a talisman for those in the States who believe the worst about the American military and the war on terror. There will soon be a new administration, and any group advocating a mass, indiscriminate release would invoke the political wrath of all who have served in Iraq.

Midway through our trip, we visited Kirkuk, where the market was thriving and people were jamming the streets. Colonel Malik Khder, the commander of a brigade in the Fourth Iraqi Division, explained how he had recently employed Iraqi air power in an operation, an indicator of how much the Iraqi army has improved tactically.

"Cooperation with the coalition," Colonel Malik said, "is responsible for the development of my brigade."

He described how, when his brigade was first formed in 2004, its nine officers and 200 soldiers who were taken under the wing of a battalion commander by the name of Carraclio.

I went back through notes scribbled inside an obscure patrol base in Yusufiah the previous week. Carraclio had brought us to the base to meet the Iraqi units he was training to take over the Triangle of Death. In the course of the meeting, the Iraqi battalion commander, Major Kais, had spoken without embarrassment or flourish.

The Author in market in Kirkuk

"The American soldiers and my soldiers have given their blood to feed these fields," Kais said, "and now we harvest the good crops."

What is startling about Iraq is not our internal political divisiveness on the issue, but rather how our soldiers have adapted to quell an insurgency and prevent a civil war. Tens of thousands like Carraclio have carried out Petraeus’s strategy of protecting the population and developing the Iraqi army. It is not an exaggeration to compare Petraeus with General Matthew Ridgeway, who turned around our army in Korea in 1950.

Petraeus called his campaign "the Anaconda Strategy," a reference to General Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy in the closing stages of the Civil War. Similarly, Iraq will take years to sort out and settle down, requiring American steadfastness with progressively fewer American troops.

From 2003 through 2006, the insurgency drew its sustenance from the support of an embittered and disenfranchised Sunni population. Having antagonized the Sunni population, al-Qaeda in Iraq has become the common enemy and is now being slowly crushed. Although interminable bargaining goes on with expatriate resistance leaders who want to cut separate deals, most of the mainline resistance has stopped fighting. The battleground has shifted.

Once Mosul is secured—most likely by this summer—the major components of Petraeus’s Anaconda campaign will be in place. By August, five of the 20 American brigades will depart Iraq. Petraeus may then pause to assess things before proceeding with more reductions. While it is an exaggeration to assert that the counterinsurgency is "only 20 percent military and 80 percent political," the time is fast approaching when politics in America and in Iraq will determine the outcome of the war.

The military success is tinged with irony, because the ally placed in power by American and British force has become more recalcitrant as its enemies have become more reasonable. The odds are that the Sunni CLC, vital to stability, will still be an American appendage resisted by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. Negotiations with Maliki during the summer about the legal status of the coalition promise to be vexatious. Despite his sectarian incompetence, Maliki wants to directly control both the Iraqi army and American operations, including the detention of prisoners. If Maliki tries to assume overweening military command or if he cannot put aside his sectarian bias and provide for all of his people, he should be replaced.

Because of the military momentum, Iraq has faded as a hot-button issue in the presidential campaign. Any public tussle about Maliki, though, is likely to be played for partisan advantage and to reignite fevered pledges of an abrupt withdrawal that would destroy our recent gains. For that reason, Maliki is likely to remain prime minister. But he is walking a very fine line.