After Falluja

Falluja has fallen. Now For the Hard part.

The lesser insurgent strongholds of the "Sunni Triangle" will stand little chance against the U.S. juggernaut. But that is not the issue. In a war against guerrillas, the question is not taking ground: The question is keeping it.

With the political constraints of the U.S. election season gone and the political pressure of Iraq's January elections on, George W. Bush and his commanders chose to go for the throat of the insurgency: Falluja. Yet even as marines and soldiers swept through the city, insurgents--including many who slipped out of Falluja--launched a counteroffensive of their own in Mosul and across northern Iraq. In the face of massed American firepower, the guerrillas have little chance of capturing towns faster than they lose them, or indeed of establishing a new Falluja-style safe haven. But they have demonstrated an elusiveness and an agility that will bedevil the U.S. military and the Iraqi government long after the last "no-go" zone is gone.

"Winning in any given 'no-go' zone is only a prelude to providing security," said Anthony Cordesman, who holds a chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Most of the actual incidents--for obvious reasons--occur in the 'go' zones," he added, because that is where U.S. and Iraqi government forces are around to be attacked. Indeed, even as troops massed to take Falluja, a new round of mortar and bomb attacks in the city of Samarra, a former "no-go" zone retaken by U.S.-Iraqi forces in early October, left at least 30 people dead, many of them Iraqi police.

Such sporadic attacks hardly amount to the insurgents' regaining control; but they do mean that the Iraqi government has not established control, either. And the U.S. and Iraqi forces need to make cities like Falluja, Mosul, and Samarra secure enough that the locals can not only go about their daily lives, but also participate in unprecedented nationwide elections less than three months away.

Terrorist insurgents have regularly car-bombed Iraqis lined up to enlist in government security forces. They will have few compunctions about attacking Iraqis lined up to vote. Like the Vietcong four decades ago, the insurgents in Iraq have pursued a systematic strategy of intimidating, kidnapping, or killing anyone seen as aiding foreign forces, from would-be police recruits to local officials to aid workers. "While I was there, no marines that were very close to me were killed," said Maj. Ed Sullivan, a Marine Corps Middle East specialist who worked as a liaison with Fallujans from March through August. "But many Iraqis that I worked with regularly were killed. When I have bad dreams, that's what I feel bad about."

Falluja has been a prime exporter of violence across Iraq, but hardly the sole source. And the struggle to impose security nationwide goes up against the classic Catch-22 of counterinsurgency: Inaction gives rebellion room to grow, but aggressive action alienates neutrals and recruits new rebels.

Even within the U.S. military, according to a forthcoming paper by Army Reserve Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, commander of the first civil-affairs battalion deployed for the invasion of Iraq, a debate began to rage earlier this year over "whether the presence of U.S. troops in Iraqi neighborhoods was actually fueling rather than quelling the insurgency." Not only has urban combat killed innocent civilians, but even routine house-to-house searches--kicking down doors, searching women, throwing men to the floor--violate the traditional Arab sense of honor to a degree that few Americans understand. "Families had no choice," Holshek writes, "but to seek retribution--for example, by planting a roadside bomb."

Yet many Iraqis clearly long for an iron hand to restore order. The appointment of Ayad Allawi as interim prime minister inspired almost-wistful rumors that he had personally gunned down criminals and terrorists. And during the aborted assault on Falluja last April, as civilians streamed out of the city, Sullivan said, "I had several people who grabbed me by the arm and said, 'You should have done this a year ago.' The sentiment seems to be: If you're going to do something, frickin' do it, all the way--or go away."

Instead, the U.S. vacillated, bloodily: The Army's 82nd Airborne Division fired on protesters when it first entered Falluja in April 2003, soon after the invasion, then largely pulled out of the city; a year later, the 1st Marine Division took over with low-key foot patrols, then was ordered into an all-out assault, then was told to halt. The U.S. had pushed hard enough to inflame resistance but not hard enough to crush it.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds rather than the worst, to defeat enemies without making new ones? Many officers argue that this circle can be squared--but not by the U.S. alone. "Iraqis don't complain when Iraqi security forces raid a mosque and discover a treasure trove of weapons. They do complain when our troops do it," said Marine Maj. Patrick Carroll, who served as aide-de-camp to Paul Bremer when Bremer was head of the Coalition Provision Authority. And it was Iraqi forces, with heavy U.S. support, that seized such key targets as Samarra's Golden Mosque last month and Falluja's hospital this month.

So building up Iraqi forces is doubly crucial. Iraqis are not simply second-rate substitutes for better-trained but overstretched U.S. troops. The rawest Iraqi is actually superior to an elite American in one fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency: knowledge of local culture. Even a Shiite Arab or a Kurd patrolling a Sunni Arab town can at least speak the language. "As the quintessential outsider," said retired Army Col. Kenneth Allard, speaking of American troops, "you have absolutely no idea who you're even talking to. They do. They live there."

The catch is, of course, that the Iraqi forces are still critically short on numbers, equipment, training, and above all, reliability: Entire units dissolved during last summer's uprising by the Shiite "Mahdi Army." Before the attack on Samarra in October, some 300 soldiers of a 750-man Iraqi unit reportedly deserted. "No one can be sure," Cordesman writes in a recent report on the training of Iraqi soldiers, "but Iraqi forces will only be heavy enough to take over most demanding missions in late 2005"--at the earliest. That means that the campaign to secure the country in time for January's elections will be led, once again, by Americans. But how?

Military Measures

It's not about the body count. It's about territory. "The key is to take away safe havens" such as Falluja, said Brig. Gen. Erwin Lessel, an Air Force officer who is deputy chief of operations for what is now known as "Multi-National Force--Iraq." Lessel explained, "The goal is not to kill all the anti-Iraqi forces and their supporters: The Iraqi government's strategy is to draw disenfranchised groups into the political process."

The problem, though, is that if insurgents are not killed, captured, or co-opted, they might come right back to re-contest territory considered "cleared." Running away to fight another day, or simply blending into the civilian population without going anywhere, are defining tactics of guerrilla warfare. Admittedly, relocating any base of operations is not easy, even for peaceful office workers--much less for armed outlaws and especially for the hard-core foreign fighters without local accents or local relatives to help them hide. "Put yourself in the shoes of some Jordanian or Moroccan fighting in Falluja," said Carroll. "How easy is it going to be to exfiltrate to another city and resume the fight?"

Although keeping guerrillas on the move is disruptive, it is not decisive. The two classic tactics to catch elusive rebels are to cordon off an area before seizing it, so the bad guys can't get away, and to garrison the area afterward, so they can't come back. In Iraq, success in both endeavors has so far been mixed. The 5,000-strong U.S.-Iraqi force that seized Samarra could spare only a single battalion, about 1,000 troops, to cordon off the city, and many insurgents could have escaped; today, some car bombers still get past the U.S.-Iraqi garrison and into the city. Sweeps south of Baghdad by the Army's highly mobile Stryker Brigade came across villages where almost every man of fighting age had vanished. And as many as half of Falluja's insurgents were reportedly ordered to leave town by their commanders in advance of the U.S. attack. "We didn't engage their main forces," said retired Army Col. Patrick Lang, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section. "They departed, and we've got Sunni Arab attacks going on throughout the northern half of Iraq."

Part of the problem is the lack of numbers: Too few U.S. and allied forces are on the ground to control every Iraqi city, as critics have bitterly repeated since the initial invasion in 2003. But at least as important is the lack of intelligence--inadequate inside information to get the drop on insurgents before they try to flee, and to pick them out when they try to hide.

In fact, a few experts argue that adding more troops without improving intelligence would only inflame the insurgency: "We don't need more warm bodies in Iraq with no area skills," writes CSIS's Cordesman. "The more untrained and inexperienced forces on the street or in contact with Iraqis, the greater the Iraqi popular hostility." Ignorance of Iraqi mores--the lack of what the Marine Corps calls "cultural intelligence"--has often made American troops their own worst enemy.

Our Own Worst Enemy?

There is no nice way to win a war. That's doubly true of a war against guerrillas. "Almost all the actions you take to directly defeat the insurgency make you unpopular," Cordesman warned in an interview. And it is doubly hard to avoid giving offense when you are a foreign force fundamentally ignorant of the culture in which you have to operate.

Some of America's unpopular actions in this war have been, arguably, unavoidable: Any combat inside a city will kill innocents. Some U.S. actions, however, have been debatable. The use of heavy weapons fired from long range, however "precise" they are, safeguards U.S. troops but endangers Iraqi civilians. And Americans have made some clearly unforced errors, such as the humiliating abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But every day, even seemingly minor incidents can sow the seeds of deadly enmity.

Consider the most basic exercise in hunting urban guerrillas: searching a house. Few things are more unnerving for anyone, from any culture, than having heavily armed strangers barge into your home. It is obviously worse if they don't speak your language. And some U.S. units did not even have Arabic-language pamphlets explaining their benign intentions to hand out, until their "psychological operations" specialists finally printed up Arabic booklets in June, more than a year after the invasion. Reportedly, some Americans assumed that a household that had photos of Saddam still supported the dictator, because the soldiers could not read the Arabic captions denouncing him.

And even American sources tell of U.S. troops kicking down doors in the dark, rushing in with weapons ready, throwing menfolk to the floor (sometimes stepping on their heads to keep them down), hustling women off to be searched, and putting bag-like blindfolds over the heads of anyone arrested--all eminently sensible precautions against potential ambush--only to discover, ultimately, no signs of insurgents in the house. No one appreciates such treatment: "Don't step on someone's head because that's disrespectful in Muslim culture?" asked Sullivan, the marine who served in Falluja. "Hell, it's very disrespectful in New York."

But the values held by the typical Iraqi male makes his humiliation even deeper, and his anger even greater. "The worst thing you can do is dishonor the females of his family," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, who spent much of his career in the Middle East. "The second-worst thing is to dishonor him in front of the females of his family." SWAT-style searches manage to do both. And, Davis added, "if you have been dishonored, you must regain your honor--by revenge, or by coming to some sort of settlement."

Some cash, and an apology, can defuse potential vengeance. Most U.S. units do try to compensate families they have mistakenly raided, but floods of often-fraudulent claims brought to U.S. units can overwhelm a foreigner's ability to sort true from false. In Falluja, that process briefly broke down earlier this year--and led to an upsurge in revenge attacks. "Every time a legitimate claim is not recognized," Davis warned, "you can almost guarantee that every male member of that family went over to the insurgency. They are compelled to regain their honor."

So soldiers with poor "cultural intelligence" can bungle an operation as simple as a house search in three ways: picking the wrong house to start with, using needlessly offensive tactics during the search, and failing to make amends afterward. Repeat this pattern a few thousand times amid a proud and well-armed people, and you have yourself a war.

Meet the Sopranos

The proud, clannish, vengeful Arab is, of course, a stereotype. But tribalism is a logical last line of self-defense when formal institutions fail to protect you--as they failed both under Saddam's thugocracy and after the dictatorship's fall, when U.S. forces could not stop the looting and terror. A former CPA official who interviewed some 60 Iraqis said, "Every one of them had a family member--a brother, second cousin, somebody--who had an ax to grind with somebody in the coalition who had hooded Grandpa and drug 'im out in front of the women" for interrogation. And nowhere is family loyalty more important, nor family honor more sensitive, than in the deeply traditional small towns northwest of Baghdad whose fierce resistance to the occupation has made them infamous as the "Sunni Triangle."

"The equivalent of redneck jokes in Iraq are jokes about Fallujans," Sullivan said. Situated astride key crossroads, and famous for their independence, "many of the tribes in the area pride themselves on their history of smuggling and banditry," he said, and added: "Tony Soprano is alive and well, and there with all his cronies." Saddam Hussein, himself a small-town Sunni from Tikrit, recruited many clansmen from the triangle as enforcers and business partners in the Baath Party mafia that ran Iraq for 30 years.

The U.S. invasion and plans for reform directly threatened these Sunni Triangle Sopranos. And into this explosive situation walked the elite U.S. 82nd Airborne Division--straight from brutal city fighting on the road up to Baghdad and poorly prepared for anything short of all-out combat by an Army that has been reluctant since Vietnam to even study "nation building" or "police actions," let alone train for them. Still today, at America's premier training ground for "low-intensity" warfare, the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., Army units primarily practice combat, not the peacekeeping skills that might prevent combat, said Stephen Henthorne, an expert in civil-military operations who recently left the JRTC. "We are failing to secure peace and stability overseas, because we are not training properly for it here in the United States," Henthorne said. "That lack of training here means people are dying in Iraq."

So in Falluja, the 82nd Airborne could not switch mental gears fast enough from being warriors to being peacekeepers. In April 2003, stone-throwing protesters provoked the soldiers into opening fire and killing at least 17 Fallujans; in September of that year, troops killed eight Iraqi police, mistaking the gun-wielding men in unmarked cars for guerrillas. The Army then largely pulled back from the town, except for in-and-out patrols that kept soldiers on the move and in their vehicles.

Then the 1st Marine Division took over the area in spring 2004. Drawing on the Corps's long tradition of policing in Caribbean "small wars" (see "Counterinsurgency 101," this issue, p. 3524), the Marines sent out foot patrols and offers of aid, seeking to balance firmness and friendliness under the motto "No better friend, no worse enemy." But insurgents fired mortars at Marine commanders visiting local leaders on their first day in town, and killed four American security contractors--and then burned and mutilated their bodies. The marines were ordered to attack. But in keeping with their small-wars strategy, they had left most of their tanks and heavy artillery back in the United States. They still managed to seize much of the city before, amid rising concern over civilian casualties, orders came to pull out. So Falluja festered for months, testifying to the American struggle to balance making war and keeping peace.

But U.S. military leaders have made some improvements--led, even some Army officers acknowledge, by the marines. "I conducted, personally, over 300 'hard knocks' and 'soft knocks,' " said Capt. Adam Strickland, recently returned from Falluja to work on "lessons learned" at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va., "and I never saw an Iraqi male emasculated in front of his family." In a "soft knock," troops incorporate house searches into routine neighborhood patrols, passing out soccer balls and candy to the kids while politely telling the head of a household that they must check to see whether his home has running water, electricity, and (by the by) only those weapons allowed for self-defense. Even in a "hard knock," where firm intelligence of a threat prompts a nighttime raid, civil-affairs specialists follow up afterward to offer any necessary compensation and apologies.

The Army is increasingly adopting these techniques as well: "The soldiers are becoming more and more culturally aware," said retired Army Gen. William Nash, who led troops into Bosnia. "The guys that went over this time [in the latest rotation] are better trained than the guys that went over a year ago."

Nevertheless, an American will never understand Iraq as well as an Iraqi does. "There's never been an instance in history when a foreign occupation force has put down an insurgency" permanently, said Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel who advised on the creation of the Iraqi national guard. "That's something only the Iraqis can do."

The Role of Iraqis

Both Americans and Iraqis want the U.S. out of Iraq. But assuming that anarchy is not a welcome option, the foreigners have to hand control off to competent locals before they can leave. After several false starts, training those locals has been the responsibility, since May, of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, "the most brilliant officer in uniform," according to retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey: "If we give him two to five years, he'll probably pull it off. In the interim, we've got to be there with substantial U.S. forces."

Disbanding the old Iraqi army, experts now widely acknowledge, cost precious time in the effort to train replacement forces. But the training program was also plagued by shortfalls in resources, reliance on private contractors instead of U.S. military advisers as trainers, and inconsistency among U.S. commanders in how seriously they took the mission of training Iraqis. Until a unified training command was created under Petraeus, Cordesman writes, "the U.S. wasted a year (at least May 2003-April 2004) in trying to create effective Iraqi military and security forces."

Plenty of Iraqis are ex-soldiers, but the quality of the forces is distinctly mixed. Veterans of Saddam's army understand military discipline but rarely got the chance to train (as their performance in two wars against the U.S. testifies); veterans of anti-Saddam militias, like the Kurdish pesh merga, have practical experience of guerrilla warfare but struggle with conventional military maneuvers.

U.S. officers interviewed by National Journal agree that most of the new Iraqi security forces--about 4,000 soldiers in the Iraqi army and 41,000 in the Iraqi national guard, according to a November 3 State Department report--are competent defensive units, able to patrol, garrison, and man checkpoints in territory taken by coalition forces. A much smaller elite force--estimates range from 3,500 to 12,000 troops--assigned to commando battalions and to the "Iraqi Intervention Force" is capable of conducting offensive operations of its own, albeit with U.S. support. The Iraqis' numbers and capabilities are increasing, but not fast enough to take the lead in clearing the no-go zones before the January elections.

Yet Iraqis can make a crucial contribution, just by not being Americans: They can seize sensitive sites, such as mosques, where any U.S. presence would be inflammatory, or garrison neighborhoods where a prolonged U.S. presence would stoke resentment. "Initially, we employed them in joint patrols along with coalition forces," said Lessel, "but once they gained experience, they were able to successfully patrol on their own. The multinational forces were then able to pull back and reduce the friction that can occur when dealing with those Iraqis who still believe we are an occupying force."

The Iraqi soldiers are not only a lubricant to avoid friction, but also a sponge to soak up information that foreigners could never get, Lessel said. "The Iraqi people trust the Iraqi security forces more, language is not a barrier, and consequently, we're getting more and better intelligence as a result."

So while the military might of the new Iraqi forces is small compared with the U.S. juggernaut, it is not in the military arena that they are most needed, but in the cultural and political sphere. "This struggle is primarily political, not military," CSIS's Cordesman said. "You're not going to solve this problem with violence alone."

More Than Military

Since the first coalition troops went into Iraq--and arguably, since the first American troops went into Vietnam 40 years ago--the U.S. has been unstoppable in battle and yet inept at winning hearts, minds, and empty bellies. "We've done a much better job of defeating enemy insurgents than we have afterward of rushing in economic aid and providing security," Cordesman said. "It's hard to win when you don't follow up."

But the military has made some progress. U.S. commanders boasted that, before U.S. forces even entered Samarra last month, they had an Iraqi police chief and other local leaders standing by, while engineers and civil-affairs specialists followed right behind the combat troops to jump-start reconstruction projects, restore basic services, and provide jobs. Engineers are already at work in Falluja. "We integrate all the different elements of power," Lessel said, "to include diplomatic, information, military, and economic." And many of these "elements" are not American, but Iraqi.

For weeks before the Falluja assault, for example, interim Prime Minister Allawi alternated furiously between threats and negotiations. Neither caused insurgents to yield the city peacefully (which few expected), but the hot-and-cold treatment may have helped crack open fissures among the rebels: between foreign fanatics willing to take Iraqi civilians with them in their quest for martyrdom, and native Fallujans unwilling to sacrifice their city; between Iraqi patriots who simply want the Americans out, and Sunni Triangle Sopranos who profit from chaos. Allawi's tactics at least yielded some intelligence and at best persuaded some factions not to fight. And now the U.S. has given him Falluja as a smoldering object lesson to invoke in talks with other intransigent cities. "The real question is whether or not Falluja encourages the Sunni Arab notables"--clerics, tribal elders, and other local leaders--"to side with Allawi's government," said Col. Lang. "We won't know that for a few weeks."

Even with Iraqi insight to guide U.S. firepower, the securing of Falluja and the other no-go zones will be bloody work. Nor will the killing end with January's elections. "If your goal is the cessation of violence, the situation is hopeless," said George Friedman, chairman of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "But that's not a reasonable goal for a country like Iraq." What can be achieved, Friedman argued, is containing the violence and enabling a functioning, legitimate government to emerge, as has taken place in such terrorist-plagued places as Spain's Basque country or Northern Ireland. Like--ironically--the Israelis, Iraqis may not see an end to car bombs and suicide bombs in this generation. But the coming months may buy them peace enough to breathe, and to vote.

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