General Petraeus is a smart man. I’ve read and used his counterinsurgency manual thoroughly for a class I taught on comparative guerrilla conflict. His statements up to now regarding the progress of the “surge” have been measured and largely accurate. He refuses to highlight progress when there is none. He refuses to speak of lights at the end of the tunnel when he – more than anybody else – knows that the tunnel goes on for years and years. In short, he has quite a bit of credibilty, both as a strategist and a PR man.
To this point he’s cited two genuine successes in the surge so far. One is the emergence of the Anbar Salvation Front, which has cooperated – at arm’s length – with US and Iraqi government forces to drive Al Qaeda out of Anbar. As Petraeus himself has suggested many times, this is the result of engagement with the organic political leadership in the region, which opposed both US occupation and Al Qaeda’s own brutality and pan-Islamic aims. By no means is this project complete. Al Qaeda could very easily re-emerge in Anbar with a vengeance, especially if US troops pull out of Anbar and shore up Diyala. But for now, the story is somewhat encouraging. If Al Qaeda really is the greatest threat in Iraq, the failure of the organization to achieve a permanent foothold in the Iraqi West is surely a good sign. Of course, the Sunni tribesman who have joined up against AQI still do not support the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government or US army. The alliance we’ve struck is tactical and probably short-lived. But it’s given some hope nonetheless.
More importantly seemed to be the drastic drop in sectarian death squad activity as Sadr’s Mahdi Army laid low during the surge. Though Administration officials touted the drop in death squad activity as if the US had actually curtailed the activities of these groups, the reality all along has been that the militias themselves have decided to hold back and let the Americans take out the Shi’ite’s Al Qaeda foe. The strategy was supposed to be: let the Mahdi Army declare a cease fire, drive out Al Qaeda, encourage the rest of Iraq to engage the political process. The fact that these death squads were able to listen to any political leadership and show restraint was, itself, a sign of hope.
But it’s been quite obvious all along that Al Qaeda’s ability to inflict mass casualties has been utterly unaffected by the surge. And unfortunately, the result is predictable. The patience of the Shi’ites has already run out. The death squad activity that waned in the first months of the surge has now re-emerged in full force. There were 234 bodies that showed up on the streets of Baghdad during the first 11 days of May, compared with 137 during the same period in April.
If this spike in death squad activity is permanent, the relatively few gains of the surge in Baghdad will unravel. Once the death squad logic takes hold, there is little that leadership can do to stop it. And my suspicion is that these Shi’ite death squads are even less susceptible to political pressure from Sadr or Maliki or Petraeus than the death squads of before. Keep an eye on this statistic going forward. If the surge cannot stop the cycle of retaliation, it has failed.