Juan Cole: Lessons of Petraeus’ Iraq for Petraeus’ Afghanistan

Lessons of Petraeus’ Iraq for Petraeus’ Afghanistan
Posted on June 24, 2010 by Juan

President Obama’s appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to succeed Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of US forces in Afghanistan signaled a continued commitment by the White House to a large-scale counter-insurgency campaign involving taking large swathes of territory, clearing it of insurgents, holding it in the medium term, and building up local government and social services.

It is frequently asserted that Gen. Petraeus “succeeded” in Iraq via a troop escalation or “surge” of 30,000 extra US troops that he dedicated to counter-insurgency purposes in al-Anbar and Baghdad Provinces.

But it would be a huge mistake to see Iraq either as a success story or as stable. It is the scene of an ongoing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that is killing roughly 300 civilians a month. It can’t form a government months after the March 7 elections, even though the outcomes are known, having a permanently hung parliament, wherein the four major parties find it difficult to agree on a prime minister. The political vacuum has proved an opening for Sunni Arab insurgents, who have mounted effective bombing campaigns and more recently are targeting the banks. And now the caretaker government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is being shaken by a wave of violent mass protests even in Shiite cities that voted for him, against his government’s failure to provide key services, especially electricity in the midst of a sweltering summer heat wave. On Saturday, a big protest rally denouncing the lack of electricity turned violent, and police shot dead two protesters. In some parts of Iraq temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and few places have electricity more than 6 or 7 hours a day. The minister of electricity has been forced to resign. On Thursday, the headline in al-Zaman, the Times of Baghdad, read “Electricity Uprisings Break out in Hilla and Diyala under the Banner of Ousting al-Maliki.” If the caretaker government falls in the face of this popular pressure before parliament can agree on a new prime minister, there would be a dreadful security vacuum and a constitutional crisis.

Going back 3 1/2 years, Gen. Petraeus did what he could to end the Sunni-Shiite Civil War of 2006-2007, which helped produce the nearly 4 million Iraqi displaced (most of whom are still homeless) and likely killed tens of thousands. He put blast walls up to separate Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods; he put in checkpoints to keep out car and truck bombs; he made some markets pedestrian-only to stop them being blown up; he established Sunni Arab pro-American militias, the “Sons of Iraq,” to fight the fundamentalist vigilantes, both Sunni and Shiite; and he systematically tracked down and had killed the leadership of the insurgent cells.

I mean to take nothing away from the significant and important efforts of the US military in 2007 when I say that they did not all by themselves end the Sunni-Shiite civil war. In some ways, they inadvertently hastened a Shiite victory. Gen. Casey had been convinced to begin his plan of disarming the Iraqis in Baghdad with the Sunni Arabs by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The US military stuck to this bargain. But it turns out that if you disarmed the Sunni Arabs, then the Shiite militias came at night to chase them away. As I argued a couple of summers ago, working in part from the intrepid journalism of Karen DeYoung at WaPo, the main reason for decrease in the virulence of the Civil War (it is not over) was that the Shiites succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. Based on US military and NGO statistics, on patterns of ambient light from West Baghdad visible by satellite, on the on-the-ground investigations of journalists like AP’s Hamza Hendawi, and on subsequent voting patterns, I don’t think Baghdad is now more than 10-15% Sunni, whereas it was probably about half and half Sunni and Shiite at the time of Bush’s invasion in 2003.

The fact is that there is still a great deal of killing and death in Iraq. We don't hear about it because it is Iraqis killing Iraqis. It is the same in Afghanistan except there are still many Americans and allies being killed. In addition, it seems inconceivable that Iraq won't explode into sectarian violence once we leave. The trillions we are spending to fight both wars is buying the illusion of change.