Surge — doing what it should

Are you surprised to learn that the New York Times got a lot of facts wrong, and misinterpreted others, when it confidently stated to the world that the surge had failed? I’m not. Of course, I didn’t know what they’d gotten wrong, since I’m not an expert on the subject — far from it. I simply didn’t trust the source. Frederick Kagan, however, is an expert and he carefully dissects the article and its errors:

YESTERDAY the New York Times published yet another article in an ongoing series that might be called “The Surge Has Failed.” This one was titled “Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal.” The article reports on a one-page summary of a document the Times characterized only as an “internal military assessment.” According to that document and interviews with some commanders, the paper argues that the Baghdad Security Plan is not meeting its goals in securing the population of Baghdad, largely because of sectarian bias within the Iraqi police.

The article contains some important distortions. The authors state, “American commanders have also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped south of the capital.” In fact, Generals Raymond Odierno and David Petraeus decided from the outset to deploy additional U.S. forces to the “belts” around Baghdad, both south and north, in order to interdict the lines of communication used by both Sunni and Shiia terrorists to send weapons and fighters into Baghdad. Violence had been rising in Diyala since mid-2006, and the U.S. command decided to address it early this year because instability there contributes directly to violence in Baghdad. The southern belts house car-bomb factories and terrorist safe-havens, which is why MNF-I decided to clear them before attempting to secure Baghdad. The decisions to flow additional forces into these areas slowed the pace of clear-and-hold operations in Baghdad, but these operations will go a long way toward ensuring that peace established in the capital will be stable and durable. The decision to flow forces into the belts was a sensible adaptation to the reality on the ground at the start of the new plan.

The problematic New York Times article elides two very different military plans into one. General George Casey began developing a new plan to stem the rising tide of violence at the end of 2006. Casey’s plan was based on the same presuppositions that had guided the U.S. war effort in Iraq since late 2003. President Bush announced a new strategy on January 10, 2007, and he changed the command team in order to implement it. In mid-February General David Petraeus replaced General Casey as the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Since the change of command, Generals Petraeus and Odierno have made clear that they did not accept the rosy scenarios of security by summer that General Casey had been pushing.

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New York Times has paid no heed, and is now trying to compare the progress of the actual, much more realistic, plan being conducted by American and Iraqi forces to the goals of the unrealistic plans developed by the now-departed commander. The paper’s comparison is meaningless. Generals Petraeus and Odierno have made it clear that it is not possible to make even a preliminary assessment of whether their plans are working before September 2007, and they have indicated that operations and U.S. forces will need to be sustained at a high level into 2008. They are right.

The discussion in the New York Times article about the involvement of Iraqi Police in sectarian killings and attacks against U.S. soldiers is portrayed as a major setback in the context of these elided plans. It is not. It is the same situation U.S. forces have been dealing with since early 2006, when sectarian violence began to rise in the first place. This is precisely why Congressional recommendations to accelerate the handover to Iraqi forces are mistaken. The current coalition plan–and the New York Times does not even note that General Petraeus has just completed a thorough review of the situation and developed a new campaign plan to guide coalition efforts henceforth–takes this situation into account much more thoroughly than the discredited and discarded approaches of 2004-2006. The appropriate adjustment of military strategy to reality on the ground has led to a more realistic appraisal of the time required for success, as well as an approach far more likely to lead to success.

These are just bits and pieces. You can read the whole Kagan analysis here.

When you think about it, it’s rather shocking how far afield the Times gone from the facts on the ground. To appreciate the magnitude of their factual and thinking errors, try to think of a person who has read Oliver Sach’s wonderful The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales, who then pronounces himself fit to do brain surgery. That person has a very badly distorted sense of his own abilities.