Training Iraqi Troops No Longer Top Priority
April 20th, 2007 by Michael van der Galien
Nancy A. Youssef writes for McClatchy that “military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.”
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. “We are just adding another leg to our mission,” Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.
But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.
More:
U.S. officials don’t say that the training formula - championed by Gen. John Abizaid when he was the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and by Gen. George Casey when he was the top U.S. general in Iraq - was doomed from the start. But they said that rising sectarian violence and the inability of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to unite the country changed the conditions. They say they now must establish security while training Iraqi forces because ultimately, “they are our ticket out of Iraq,” as one senior Pentagon official put it.
Casey’s “mandate was transition. General Petraeus’ mandate is security. It is a change based on conditions. Certain conditions have to be met for the transition to be successful. Security is part of that. And General Petraeus recognizes that,” said Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in charge of supporting trained Iraqi forces…
In nearly every area where Iraqi forces were given control, the security situation rapidly deteriorated. The exceptions were areas dominated largely by one sect and policed by members of that sect.
This is a very significant change. The original ‘plan’ (and I use this word loosely) was to train Iraqis, those Iraqis, then, had to slowly take over from the U.S. so that the U.S. could withdraw more and more of its forces. This new tactic, however, means that there can be no withdrawal of U.S. troops (in the short and middle-long run). The military - and the White House - seem to agree that the Iraqi forces cannot provide security.
It will be interesting to see whether Gates will say anything about this change publicly voluntarily, or whether the media have to (just about) force him to provide some additional information. If the SecDef would still have been Rumsfeld, there would be no doubt in my mind that nothing would be admitted, nothing would be explained… Gates, however, is quite a different type of person, politician and SecDef.
An, in my opinion, far better one (which is not difficult to do considering that Rumsfeld did an absolutely horrendous job).
H/t Whiskey Fire
This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 2:44 am and is filed under Robert Gates, George W. Bush, Iraq, Military. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
