By Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
New York Times
08 October 2004
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - Pentagon planners and military commanders have identified 20 to 30 towns and cities in Iraq that must be brought under control before nationwide elections can be held in January, and have devised detailed ways of deciding which ones should be early priorities, according to senior administration and military officials.
Recent military operations to quell the Iraqi insurgency in Tal Afar, Samarra and south of Baghdad are the first and most visible signs of the new, six-pronged strategy for Iraq, approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration, the officials said. While elements of the plan have been discussed in generalities recently, the officials described it in much more detail, calling it a comprehensive guideline to their actions in the next few months.
As American military deaths have increased in Iraq and commanders struggle to combat a tenacious insurgency and a deadly spate of bombings, even administration officials involved in creating the plan acknowledge that American forces face an extraordinarily difficult task and that success is far from guaranteed.
Both the overall strategy and the specific military component were described by senior administration, Pentagon and military officials in interviews over the last two weeks in response to requests from The New York Times for an answer to the question, "Is there a plan for Iraq?"
The three military officers who discussed the plan have seen the briefing charts for the new strategy, and the three civilian officials who discussed it were involved in deliberations that resulted in the strategy. The civilians, in particular, agreed to discuss the newest thinking in part to rebut criticism from campaign of Senator John Kerry that the administration has no plan for Iraq.
The new strategy was written this summer and laid down in a series of classified directives to the new American Embassy in Baghdad and to the United States military headquarters there. The instructions are an acknowledgment that the insurgency had seized the initiative in Sunni strongholds north and west of Baghdad and in the southern city of Najaf, considered holy by Shiites.
For each of the cities identified as guerrilla strongholds or vulnerable to falling into insurgent hands, a set of measurements was created to track whether the rebels' grip was being loosened by initiatives of the new Iraqi government, using such criteria as the numbers of Iraqi security personnel on patrol, voter registration, economic development and health care.
And for each city, a timeline was established for military action to establish Iraqi local control if purely political steps by the central government proved insufficient.
"We're working on them by population size, by importance to the election," said one senior administration official, who added that the ultimate objective was to make sure that the main Sunni Muslim cities were able to take part in free elections. "That's where the bad security situations are, and that's where we really need to make some major political and economic changes in the next several months if we're going to have a successful nationwide election," he said.
The military plan also contains options to reduce the approximately 138,000 American forces in Iraq by brigade-size increments of roughly 5,000 troops beginning next year, if the security situation improves and Iraqi forces show they can maintain order. "Depending how the security looks, the force levels could be reduced," one Pentagon official said.
Their efforts are made more difficult by the mixed performance of new Iraqi security forces, the slow pace of reconstruction projects hobbled by contract problems and guerrilla attacks and a large segment of the Iraqi population that still seems unprepared to cast its lot with the new government in Iraq.
One administration official, in assessing the plan's chances for success, stressed the difficulty of guaranteeing the safety of Iraqis who choose to support the new government by signing up for jobs in local police departments and municipal administrations. "If we can eliminate the armed threat that assassinates and intimidates and blows up local officials, there's at least a reasonable chance it can work," the official said.
The overall political, military and economic strategy is contained in a classified guidance document titled "U.S. National Strategy for Supporting Iraq." The plan, which is being coordinated by the National Security Council, sets six basic priorities, which President Bush has been briefed on, administration officials said.
The priorities are to neutralize insurgents, ensure legitimate elections, create jobs and provide essential services, establish foundations for a strong economy, develop good governance and the rule of law and increase international support for the effort.
While the broad themes are not new, senior officials now make no secret that those missions have not been carried out successfully during the first year following the end of major combat operations. Many in the administration and the military now view the past working relationship of L. Paul Bremer III, the former chief of the provisional authority in Baghdad, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who recently departed Iraq as military commander there, as ineffective.
These officials say they hope that the recent transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis from the American-led provisional authority, the arrival of a new American ambassador and the creation of a new four-star military position to command security missions in Iraq offer a second chance.
"What's new, I think, is the fact that we're putting our weight behind them in a coordinated manner," a senior administration official said. "It's not like Sanchez is going in one direction, and Bremer's going in another direction, and the Iraqis are going in a third direction. There is an integrated plan."
The new strategy is to assure that "there's no longer any divide between our military-security strategy and our economic and political strategy," the official said.
American diplomats and commanders in Iraq also stress that they are looking to the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as a full partner, expecting him to take the lead in political decisions regarding his nation and to assume security responsibilities in former insurgent strongholds once they are cleared by joint operations of American and Iraqi forces.
One senior administration official summarized its broad thrust as: "Use the economic tools and the governance tools to separate out hard-core insurgents you have to deal with by force from those people who are shooting at us because somebody's paying them $100 a week."
The military component of the effort is described in a separate, classified document, written over the summer.
This "Campaign Strategy" or "Campaign Plan" was written after Gen. George W. Casey Jr. took command of allied forces in Iraq at the beginning of July, in consultation with the military's Joint Staff, the office of the secretary of defense and the United States Central Command, which is responsible for operations across the Middle East.
The administration had already said that it would shift $1.8 billion from reconstruction projects to law enforcement and security, principally to train and equip an additional 80,000 Iraqi police officers, border guards and soldiers, and build facilities for them. A comparable amount was shifted into projects to increase employment.
"With the Iraqi forces moving into these places that have been contested by the anti-Iraqi forces, as things settle down, they bring the other Iraqi institutions of the new government in there," said Lt. Gen. Wallace C. Gregson, the commander of Marine forces in the Middle East, who visited Iraq last month. "We can start demonstrating that the course that Prime Minister Allawi's government is on, is the one that will bring peace, stability and prosperity to Iraq."
Defense Department and other administration officials say the recent offensives in Samarra and northern Babil Province, as well as airstrikes against the network of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are all part of a new strategy for American and Iraqi forces to pick the time and place of their offensives, instead of responding to insurgent uprisings, as happened in Najaf in April and August.
"What you have here is a new approach," one senior administration official said. "Najaf was not planned. We didn't plan to go in and have to do that. But we know, once we got that behind us, where do we have to work? We have to work Samarra. We have to work Ramadi. We've done our bit in Samarra. Now we're consolidating and cleaning up. We're doing kinetic strikes in Falluja."
The military campaign relies heavily on preparing Iraqi forces to hold the cities after American and Iraqi troops retake insurgent strongholds like Samarra. After the Iraqi forces' dismal showing in the uprisings in April, the training program was revamped. One of the Army's top officers, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, was brought in to oversee a training mission that in many ways was starting from scratch.
Commanders report that only now is badly needed equipment flowing to Iraqi units, and as of Wednesday the Pentagon reported that only about one-third of the required 270,000 security forces had received some training. Many of them still lack equipment.
General Petraeus and Dr. Allawi have disagreed on the pace of fielding Iraqi forces, military officials say, with the Iraqi leader wanting more troops, faster, and General Petraeus wary of pushing the Iraqis too quickly into what one American official called "a rush to failure."
The recent military operations have included a mix of American soldiers and marines, with Iraqis trained in counterterrorism, urban combat and emergency response situations.
But American commanders say it is still an open question whether the newly trained Iraqi forces can stand up over the long run to insurgent attacks, bribes and threats against their families.
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Citation: Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, "Pentagon Sets Steps to Retake Iraq Rebel Sites," New York Times, 8 October 2004.
Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/08strategy.html?ei=1&en=3dd1e89bf90fe5a1&ex=1098249362&pagewanted=print&position=
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