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Remember the Carter Doctrine: Tamar Pileggi & Stuart Winer, Times of Israel, May 4, 2015—A better way forward in the Middle East.
Embrace, Don’t Cut off Iraq: Michael Rubin, Commentary, Apr. 15, 2015—Yesterday, Max Boot argued in a powerful post that given the extent of Iranian influence in Iraq, the United States should not be training Iraqi F-16 pilots let alone delivering the planes to Iraq.
Afghan Forces Suffer Heavy Toll in First Taliban Battles: David J Lynch, Bloomberg, May 3, 2015 —Afghan security forces are suffering record casualties in their first battles against the Taliban since the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan ended in December after more than 13 years.
A Case of Too Many Viennas: Ross Douthat, New York Times, Apr. 25, 2015 — The drone strike that accidentally killed two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier was a rare moment of media attention for a seemingly endless military campaign.
Saddam’s Last Acolyte: Andrew L. Peek, National Review, Apr. 20, 2015
Why Are We Giving F-16s to an Iranian-Infiltrated Government?: Max Boot, Commentary, Apr. 15, 2015
Islamic State Offshoot Poses New Security Threat in Afghanistan: Nathan Hodge & Qasim Nauman, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 19, 2015
REMEMBER THE CARTER DOCTRINE
Max Boot and Michael Doran
The Weekly Standard, April 20, 2015
The ouster of ISIS fighters from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, has been widely celebrated. Although this victory was brought about in no small part by American airpower, it was a triumph for Iran more than for the United States. The vast majority of fighters on the front lines belonged to Shiite militias, many of them trained, equipped, and advised by the Iranians. Their de facto commander is Gen. Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, which is charged with exporting the Iranian revolution. He has become a seemingly ubiquitous presence on the front lines, his appearances celebrated through a clever Iranian social media campaign. Iranian T-72 tanks and even Fajr-5 artillery rockets and Fateh-110 missiles are now appearing in Iraq as well.
What’s Iran up to? Most commentators emphasize the fight against ISIS, but the transfer of heavy weaponry, which is of limited use in the Tikrit campaign, implies a wider agenda. A few observers have suggested that Tehran wants to “Finlandize” Iraq. But that’s not quite right. Iran won’t be satisfied if Iraq merely adopts a neutral posture. Tehran wants to achieve something more ambitious: It seeks nothing less than to “Lebanonize” Iraq.
Although Lebanon and Iraq are very different, they have striking resemblances. Both were cobbled together out of provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and both are complex ethnic mosaics in which a large Shiite underclass was denied power for decades. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lebanon was in the throes of a civil war and Iran was undergoing a revolution. Even as they were fighting to take power in Tehran, Iranian revolutionaries exploited the chaos in Lebanon to organize Hezbollah (the Party of God), a Shiite militia subservient to Tehran. For local consumption, Hezbollah emphasizes its popular, Lebanese roots and claims that it sprung up spontaneously to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion. By presenting itself as the defender of all Arabs against the “Zionist entity,” Hezbollah seeks to overcome the traditional Sunni distrust of Shiites.
For many years, Western analysts tended to take Hezbollah’s propaganda at face value. Today, however, Hezbollah’s deep participation in the Syrian civil war (in which Israel is largely a bystander) demonstrates that it has no qualms about training its guns on fellow Muslims in order to protect Iranian interests. Its intervention in Syria was the key factor that saved the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s greatest ally, and it has also supported Iranian initiatives elsewhere in the Arab world, including in Iraq.
But of course its primary mission is to keep Lebanon in the orbit of Tehran. It does so not by ruling directly but by using extortionate methods, forcing Lebanese leaders to give it complete freedom of action in key domains, security first and foremost. Thus it deploys, with no governmental oversight, some 50,000 Iranian-supplied missiles and rockets aimed at Israel. To maintain the support of its Shiite constituents, Hezbollah runs hospitals, schools, and other social-welfare activities funded by Iran as part of a subsidy believed to total $100 million a year.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq gave Iran the opportunity to export this Hezbollah model to its Arab neighbor. Starting in 2003, Iran supplied money, weapons, and training to numerous Shiite militias in Iraq, such as the Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigades, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Khataib Hezbollah. At first, the chief goal of the militias was to drive out U.S. forces, which served as the major obstacle in their path to power. They accomplished that objective in 2011 when President Obama failed to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement. Today it is the Sunni jihadists who preoccupy the militias. But just as Hezbollah was never simply the homegrown counterweight to Israel that it pretended to be, so we should not today see the Iraqi militias as bands of local boys spontaneously organizing to protect embattled Shiites from ISIS. Iran has larger purposes. It seeks, in the near term, to consolidate its control of Iraq. After that, it will use Iraq as another springboard to further expand its power in the Arab world.
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
EMBRACE, DON’T CUT OFF IRAQ
Michael Rubin
Commentary, Apr. 15, 2015
Yesterday, Max Boot argued in a powerful post that given the extent of Iranian influence in Iraq, the United States should not be training Iraqi F-16 pilots let alone delivering the planes to Iraq. Here’s the core of Max’s argument:
Is this really a wise move? As noted above, the government of Iraq is heavily infiltrated by Iranian agents. Does it really make safe under those circumstances to deliver to Iraq three dozen high-performance fighter aircraft? I, for one, am worried that the fighters could eventually wind up in Iranian hands, buttressing an Iranian Air Force that until now has had to rely on aging F-14 fighters from the 1970s and even F-4s and F-5s from the 1960s. Granted, F-16s aren’t top of the line aircraft anymore—they are outclassed by F-22s and F-35s—but as a matter of policy and law the U.S. does not sell arms to hostile states or to states that might transfer them to hostile states.
I certainly share Max’s concern with regard to Iranian efforts to infiltrate and influence Iraq’s government, but I disagree with his conclusions, first with regard to his reading of sectarianism, and second with regard to the meaning and purpose of the bilateral U.S.-Iraq partnership.
Iraq is unfortunately sectarian, but sectarianism is neither one-way-only, nor should it be exaggerated. The roots of Sunni extremism are not any particular grievance suffered at the hands of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, though his rule was far from perfect and enlightened. Rather, it is the ethnic and sectarian chauvinism of the Baath Party and its evolution into partnership if not symbiosis with the Islamic State. The bombs which, until recently at least, terrorized Baghdad were the work of Sunni sectarian groups. That Abadi has restored a modicum of security to Baghdad, and that Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, and Christians are now restoring the (admittedly, less alcohol-centric) night life for which Baghdad was once known, is a sign that there is progress.
This past fall, I visited the Shi‘ite holy city of Karbala as a guest of the Imam Hussein shrine. Driving from the Najaf International Airport north toward Karbala, the main highway was flanked by refugees from the al-Anbar Governorate which, then as now, the Islamic State threatened. They had taken refuge in the Husainiyahs (Shi’ite meeting and prayer halls) that dot the roadside between the two cities to, in normal times, cater to pilgrims. They had opened their doors instead to Sunni refuges who were fed, clothed, and their kids educated in ordinary Iraqi schools. Many displaced Anbaris seemed to feel better treated in largely Shi’ite southern Iraq than in Iraqi Kurdistan, where ethnic discrimination Arabs face trumps the sectarian discrimination Sunnis might feel elsewhere in Iraq.
At any rate, the complex I stayed in played host not only to Sunni refugees from Fallujah, but also to Shi’ite volunteers who had answered Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s call. I would see teens and men ranging in age, by my own estimate only, from 15 to 60 years old, get off the bus, ready to begin their 30-day crash training course. Few if any I met were fighting on behalf of Iran or actually cared about the geopolitical competition; most simply wanted to defeat the scourge of the Islamic State. That is not to say that the Iranian government has not tried to co-opt some of the volunteers, but if there’s one thing that has become clear over the past decade-plus of U.S. and Iranian involvement in Iraq, it is that Washington constantly overestimated the psychological impact of occupation, whereas Tehran consistently underestimates the importance of Iraqi nationalism.
Certainly, militias like Asa’ib al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah represent important exceptions which cannot be tolerated. And, where Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani goes, death and destruction follow. Besieged Shi’ites will accept help from whomever offers it—and the Iranians offer it more consistently and with greater sustained attention than does the United States—but Iraqi Shi‘ites are also realistic enough to know that Iran is not an altruistic power. Max Boot is correct to fear Iranian ambition in Iraq.
The danger, however, is that walking away from a military partnership with Iraq because of fear of Iranian influence will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which Iran gets to consolidate control over Iraq. That smaller, weaker states in the Middle East maintain their independence by playing larger, stronger rivals off each other is Arab statecraft 101. Kuwait balances its interests against Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Iran as well. Qatar famously plays the United States and Iran off each other, as does Oman and even the United Arab Emirates. Iraqi Shi’ites are not Fifth Columnists. While the war against Iran was unjust and initiated by Saddam Hussein, when called to military service, Iraqi Shi’ites fought with honor against the Iranians.
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
AFGHAN FORCES SUFFER HEAVY TOLL IN FIRST TALIBAN BATTLES
David J Lynch
Bloomberg, May 3, 2015
Afghan security forces are suffering record casualties in their first battles against the Taliban since the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan ended in December after more than 13 years.
The number of killed and wounded so far this year is about 70 percent higher than during the same period last year, said Colonel Brian Tribus, director of public affairs for NATO’s Afghanistan mission.
Last year’s casualty rates, which marked a fifth consecutive annual increase, were labeled in November as “not sustainable” by a top U.S. general. With Afghan forces now operating without the same U.S. and NATO support that they previously enjoyed, the body count has soared.
“We are taking so many casualties, that’s the reality,” said Afghan Interior Minister Nur al-haq Ulumi. “We are fighting by ourselves.”
Some 4,950 Afghan army and police personnel were killed or wounded in the first 15 weeks of 2015, against 2,900 during the same period a year ago, said a coalition military officer not authorized to speak publicly about the losses.
U.S. officials say that so far, Afghan army and police enlistments are holding up. But the Afghan units’ performance raises questions about their ability to hold off the Taliban if President Barack Obama moves ahead with plans to further shrink the U.S. role there.
Disclosure of the increasing casualty rates comes as the Taliban steps up attacks in the country’s north, sensing an opportunity in the U.S.-led coalition’s pullback.
Obama plans to shrink the U.S. force by the end of 2016 to around 1,500 soldiers, largely focused on guarding the U.S. embassy. The U.S. has spent more than $60 billion since 2002 to train and equip the Afghan army and police.
The Afghan Local Police, a village-defense force funded by the U.S., is taking especially heavy losses, said General John Campbell, who commands U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
“They’re not using them the way they should,” Campbell told visiting reporters on Saturday. “The Taliban sees them as easy prey.”
The local police are supposed to protect Afghan settlements, especially in rural areas, from insurgent attacks. Yet, the ALP establishes checkpoints as far as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away from villages and lacks needed equipment including radios, body armor and helmets.
Campbell said he had been surprised recently to discover a Ministry of Defense warehouse bulging with “thousands and thousands” of bulletproof vests and headgear even as the local police units go without protection. The Afghan defense ministry now plans to transfer the equipment to the Ministry of Interior, which commands the local police units, he said.
Ulumi said that local police have borne the brunt of the fresh Taliban offensive, which has targeted the northern provinces of Kunduz and Badakhshan. And he acknowledged “some weaknesses in discipline” had allowed Taliban fighters to ambush government forces.
“Our national police and the Afghan Local Police are the first line of defense,” Ulumi said. “They are always fighting the insurgents. That’s why we have so many casualties.”
About 20 Afghan troops and 150 Taliban militants were killed over the seven days through May 1 as a battle raged in Kunduz province, said police spokesman Sarwar Hussaini. The security of the province is “now satisfactory” and the operations will continue until the militants are “fully defeated,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement Monday.
NATO officials say the high casualties reflect the need for their training help. Afghan forces already have shown “huge improvement” since 2009, said Brigadier General Andreas Hannemann, the German officer who commands the training effort in the north.
“It is sufficient for the Afghans to win their fight,” he said. “Because at the end, we have to train them in a way that they will win against the Taliban, not winning World War III. That’s not an option.”
The recent Taliban attacks that overran some Afghan checkpoints in Kunduz were to be expected as coalition forces withdrew, he said, adding that it was important not to overreact to temporary setbacks.
“Minor crises are always part of warfare. Sorry,” Hannemann said.
The higher casualty rate also reflects the loss of U.S. helicopters that evacuated wounded Afghans from the battlefield. The small Afghan Air Force now is responsible for that mission.
Most of the Afghan local police killed or wounded this year have been victims of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), according to Ulumi. Insurgents have shifted from employing suicide bombers to using IEDs, which for years were the defining weapon of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq.
A Taliban fighter on average is killed every 48 hours attempting to plant a bomb, according to Sediq Sediqqi, a ministry spokesman. Afghan officials are considering shifting to fewer checkpoints with larger numbers of police at each, he added.
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
A CASE OF TOO MANY VIENNAS
Ross Douthat
New York Times, Apr. 25, 2015
The drone strike that accidentally killed two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier was a rare moment of media attention for a seemingly endless military campaign. It’s six years old if you date it to President Obama’s escalation of drone warfare, 11 if you date it to the first American drone strike inside Pakistan, and 14 if you date it to when United States Special Forces first slipped into Afghanistan after 9/11. By any estimate, our AfPak intervention has lasted longer than most major wars in American history. By the third estimate, it’s lasted longer than several of the biggest ones combined.
There have been periods in this long conflict when the United States was arguably fighting with some hope of final victory. But that possibility went the way of most victories sought by foreigners in Central Asia, and now we’re in a very different mode. Our AfPak war today, with its drones and Special Forces and deliberately light footprint, is open-ended by design, a war of constant attrition that aims just to keep our friends (such as they are) in power and our enemies from gaining ground.
In essence, what we’ve chosen in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan is a kind of “frozen conflict,” in which a war is pursued without any vision of an endgame, and that’s actually the point. “Frozen conflict” is a term you’re more likely to hear applied to the borderlands of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the Kremlin has encouraged low-grade civil wars (in the Caucasus, in Moldova, now Ukraine) that are designed to just percolate and fester, keeping Moscow’s former satellites from turning fully to the West.
But while America’s motives are very different, we have this much in common with Putin: We, too, see advantages in managing conflicts, intervening just so far and no further, keeping a hand in (or a drone above) without seeking a final victory or a final peace. That’s true of the AfPak wars; it’s true for now of our interventions against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; it’s true of smaller antiterrorism forays the world over. It’s even true of our quasi-conflict with Putin himself: He wants to divide and destabilize Ukraine without actually conquering it, we want to limit his gains without provoking escalation, and the result is grinding violence without much chance of resolution.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that President Obama’s grand strategy (such as it is) is defined by a desire to lay down some of the burdens of the Pax Americana. I also wrote that it’s nearly impossible for a superpower to simply slip into a supporting role. Combine Obama’s vision with that Atlas-Can’t-Shrug reality, and frozen conflicts are the near-inevitable result: In theater after theater, this administration has us in just far enough to shape events, but without a plan to win it.
Over the next 18 months, you’re going to hear Republican politicians and — barring a Rand Paul upset — the eventual Republican nominee campaigning vigorously against this state of play, and arguing that America should be fighting more to win and less to draw. Napoleon’s maxim, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” will be repurposed as a critique of this president and all his many half-fought, un-won wars.
That critique will have some teeth. Even frozen conflicts cost lives and treasure (and invite blowback), the world has grown more dangerous and chaotic across Obama’s second term, and the sense that American policy makers are constantly playing not to lose is plainly informing the calculations made in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing.
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
On Topic
Saddam’s Last Acolyte: Andrew L. Peek, National Review, Apr. 20, 2015—The reported death of former Saddam aide and Iraqi insurgent leader Ibrahim al-Douri on Friday left me feeling a bit nostalgic. Al-Douri was one of the last old bad guys left, the King of Clubs in our card deck of most-wanted Iraqis.
Why Are We Giving F-16s to an Iranian-Infiltrated Government?: Max Boot, Commentary, Apr. 15, 2015—The summit meeting between President Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Tuesday went about as well as expected. That is to say, it was, like most high-level summits, full of affirmations of friendship and good will but few if any concrete achievements.
Islamic State Offshoot Poses New Security Threat in Afghanistan: Nathan Hodge & Qasim Nauman, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 19, 2015—Even by the grim standards of Afghanistan, the attack was shocking: A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-rigged vest in a crowd of people lined up to collect paychecks at a bank.