David Brooks:
Andrew Krepinevich is a careful, scholarly man. A graduate of West Point and a retired lieutenant colonel, his book, "The Army and Vietnam," is a classic on how to fight counterinsurgency warfare.Brooks list several advantages and disadvantages to the proposed strategy. He omits what I believe is the biggest disadvantage. By concentrating forces in strategic hamlets, it permits the enemy to create sanctuaries, such as the one he had in Fallujah from which to launch attacks. It should also be noted that the strategic hamlet concept was used to pacify areas other than the large urban centers in Iraq such as Baghdad.
Over the past year or so he's been asking his friends and former colleagues in the military a few simple questions: Which of the several known strategies for fighting insurgents are you guys employing in Iraq? What metrics are you using to measure your progress?
The answers have been disturbing. There is no clear strategy. There are no clear metrics.
Krepinevich has now published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "How to Win in Iraq," in which he proposes a strategy. The article is already a phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the American Embassy in Baghdad and the office of the vice president.
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Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.
Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.
Once you've secured a town or city, you throw in all the economic and political resources you have to make that place grow. The locals see the benefits of working with you. Your own troops and the folks back home watching on TV can see concrete signs of progress in these newly regenerated neighborhoods. You mix your troops in with indigenous security forces, and through intimate contact with the locals you begin to even out the intelligence advantage that otherwise goes to the insurgents.
While US strategy may not have been articulated to people like Krepinevich, it can be deduced from actions on the ground. First the enemy is denied sanctuaries throughout Iraq. His rat lines and supplies lines remain under constant pressure. In the meantime, the force to space issue is being solved as more Iraqi units are trained and come on line. A combination of the two strategies can probably be effected when Iraqi units can take over security for the communities while US forces with some elite Iraqi units continue to deny sanctuaries and disrupt movement of the enemy. Adopting the Krepinevich strategy at this point would be seen as a welcome relief by the enemy as he is becoming more and more frantic in avoiding the pursuit of US forces. It would also be characterized as a defeat for the US forces by an enemy that is now on the ropes.
At its essence this is still a weak but persistent "insurgency" without popular support. It is being fought on behalf of a minority of a minority in Iraq. To the extent that there are Iraqis involved, they are mostly former regime elements who fear being held accountable for their terrorist acts while Saddam was still in charge. There is also the obvious stress between these guys and the al Qaeda wackos who are terrorizing everyone including their own allies.
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