Progress Report: Iraq

As this story from the Mideast Stars and Stripes makes clear, the "readiness" of Iraqi troops to take responsibility for security is difficult to define:

MOSUL, Iraq — The sun had barely risen above the concrete blast walls of police headquarters Thursday and Col. Abedul al-Kareem Mohammed Khalaf was already logging the day’s first terrorist arrest and chastising three young lieutenants for letting another evil-doer escape.

The lieutenants and a group of patrolmen had shot it out with an insurgent the day before, during a massive, ongoing sweep of Mosul by Iraqi forces. Yet after firing off all of their ammunition, the lawmen had no dead or captured insurgents.

Instead, they had a bunch of angry business owners whose buildings were damaged in the gunbattle. And the officers told one patrolman’s family that he had been killed in the shootout, when in fact he was only wounded in the leg.

“I want to fire you,” an angry Khalaf told the men.

But that snapshot isn't the full story:

As the Iraqi police chief of operations for Nineveh province, Khalaf helped direct more than 1,500 Iraqi police and army units during the massive cordon-and -search operation under way in Mosul.

The operation, dubbed Operation Lion’s Hunt and planned and executed entirely by Iraqi security forces, marks a turnaround from 18 months ago, when Iraqi police collapsed before an insurgent onslaught. Lion’s Hunt, U.S. advisers say, is proof that local police are now poised to take full responsibility for the city’s security.

“The million dollar question is — how much longer do they need our support to function here,” said Master Sgt. John Ladik, 38, of the Hanau, Germany-based 709th Military Police Battalion, one of the U.S. Army units advising the Iraqi police.
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Each day before dawn, Iraqi army and Iraqi police units cordon off major bridges and roadways leading to specific neighborhoods. Police officers conduct informal searches in several different neighborhoods each day, hitting both quiet and troubled quarters. To date, they have detained more than three dozen suspected insurgents.

In most cases, the suspected insurgents are from out of town — many from the northwest city of Tal Afar — and have tested positive for having explosives residue on their hands. A large shuttle bus follows police commanders through the streets, ferrying prisoners to local lockups.

The operation was the idea of Iraqi police Maj. Gen. Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Khadir al-Hamdani, the provincial police chief and a former commander in Saddam’s army.

“As a commander in the former Iraqi army, I know that the best defense is to make an attack,” the provincial chief said. “I want to prove to the people of Mosul that the police are stronger than these insurgents.”

As Iraqi army units secure intersections and bridges within the city, Iraqi police conduct searches on most residences, but not all. U.S. advisers call the searches “passive searches” and say they’ve hit roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of the homes in a given neighborhood.

“The chief didn’t want them kicking down doors, he wanted them knocking on doors,” Ladik said.

“Already, civilians are stepping forward with information,” said Staff Sgt. Jeremy Lucas, 27, of the 549th Military Police Company. “Things are quiet and the locals like it that way.”

On Friday, a crowd of dozens of civilians captured and bound a suspected criminal and brought him to the front gate of a local police station in western Mosul as Lucas visited the station.

Brigade's Iraq Mission Put Off To Assess Need

The military is debating whether to cancel the deployment outright, drawing down forces.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will delay the deployment of a combat brigade that had been scheduled to go to Iraq, a potential precursor to further troop reductions, Defense officials said Friday.

The delay will give the military more time to assess whether the unit — the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, based in Germany — is needed in Iraq.

The brigade was due to begin shipping equipment to Iraq next week from Schweinfurt, Germany. Once its equipment was loaded on trains for shipment, holding the brigade back from Iraq would have been harder.

Military officials have been debating whether to cancel the deployment or just send part of the brigade, which numbers about 3,500 soldiers. Unable to decide, military officials opted to delay deployment. A Pentagon official said the announcement of the delay could come as soon as this weekend from Germany.

"It was a decision not to decide," said one Defense official who requested anonymity because the decision had not been formally announced. "But it means there is not a pending, immediate need" for additional forces.

In late December, the Defense Department announced it was canceling the 1st Brigade's deployment and sending the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division to Kuwait as a quick reaction force. Those announcements cut the number of troops now in Iraq from 138,000 to 133,000.

If officials also cancel the deployment of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, the number of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq will fall from 15 to 14 and the number of troops will decline to 130,000.

The last U.S. troop reduction came after the Iraqi national elections in December. At the time, Pentagon officials expressed hope that they could reduce troop strength to 100,000 or below by the end of 2006. Commanders say they still intend to reduce troops, and Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top commander in Iraq, said last month that his "general timeline" was still on track.

This may be the biggest story of the year, but it's also a complex one that will play out over a long, slow period. (A "long, hot summer", if you prefer.) Much like attempting to follow the plot of a movie by examining a few still frames, it will be difficult to grasp in full from the occasional reports received from a media that tends to be "miserly" in reporting progress, and reluctant to convey "good news" at all. The unglamorous hard work will be ignored, while the violent punctuations will grab headlines.

Violence will continue in Iraq, but Iraqi troops will increasingly respond and bear the brunt of combat. As they do, we can expect a significant upswing in pronouncements of American "failure" - and a surge in increasingly ironic claims that the US doesn't have enough "boots on the ground". Too many parties have invested themselves - politically, emotionally, and spiritually - in terrorist victory in Iraq.