Negotiating with Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists by Mitchell B. Reiss

Author:Mitchell B. Reiss [Reiss, Mitchell B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The Anbar Awakening was the first move in what became a province-wide movement against AQI. By the end of 2008, the Anbar tribes had joined with the United States against al Qaeda in Iraq.

What accounts for this?

Sorting out the jumble of reasons behind the Awakening and assigning to each its proper weight is challenging. Some stories remain vague or obscure. (For example, the role the CIA played is hidden, and it may never be publicly revealed.) Too, American attempts to recapture the history of the Awakening always underplay the Iraqi side, because of language barriers and the difficulty of interviewing the key players, some of whom have died.

Other stories are biased. There is the natural human temptation to inflate one’s own role while diminishing or even dismissing the work of others. Personal jealousies and institutional rivalries, between the Army and Marines, for example, color both American and Iraqi narratives.

And then there is the normal fog of war. Many of the American participants in Ramadi and Anbar during 2006 and 2007, even general officers, still do not fully understand all the reasons the Awakening was successful. Junior officers were expert in their areas of responsibility but less certain of events that occurred outside these areas. Senior officers could see the larger picture but often did not have the granularity of detail that affected men and decisions on the ground.

But some reasons are clear.

For engagement to work, the United States had to make a number of dangerous, demanding, and intellectually difficult changes, ranging from Tony Deane’s initial willingness to invest time night after night in the home of Abdul Sattar to Generals Odierno and Petraeus developing a fresh operating concept for the war and then expertly orchestrating its implementation. A new focus on stabilization and victory, not transitioning to the Iraqis or to a hasty U.S. exit from the country, signaled to the Sunni resistance that the United States was “in it to win it.” Colonel Sean MacFarland refused to stay hunkered down on his FOB and conduct “drive-by COIN” in and out of Ramadi. In the summer of 2006, he insisted instead that the Ready First live among the people, which was the first large-scale demonstration that U.S. forces could “clear, hold, and build” in conjunction with local Iraqis. It meant putting steel on targets, and slugging it out with AQI and the insurgents through the fall and winter of 2006 and then through the spring and summer of 2007. As Petraeus matter-of-factly recalled when we met in his CENTCOM office in Tampa in April 2010, “Sectarian violence didn’t burn itself out. We defeated it.”127 It meant operating “inside the tribes,” which would provide U.S. forces with the local knowledge needed to understand the human terrain. And it meant having the additional surge forces to accomplish all these tasks.

If there was one constant, it was the willingness from day one of many outstanding American officers, from the platoon to division level, to engage, negotiate, cajole, threaten, befriend, and empower local leaders and reconcile with the tribes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.