Earlier today I sent my most recent blog post to my good friend Andrew Exum with the subject line, "Peace in our Time?" (you see in the past we haven't seen exactly eye-to-eye on everything, but when it comes to bombing Iran we do). Well like Neville Chamberlain's fateful words . . . that didn't last too long.
You see, Andrew has a new blog post up where he basically argues that all the surge-haters need to get over it and admit that the surge in Iraq worked. But not so fast. First of all, we still don't know if the surge was successful. It's important to remember that the initial increase in troops was predicated on the notion that it would improve security, thus creating breathing space for Iraqi politicians to move forward with reconciliation. In the words of then-President Bush:
When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders, and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq's Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace. And reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible.
to be sure we've seen important progress on the security and reconciliation fronts, but it is still not
clear that reconciliation will take hold (although I think there is reason for optimism). But that part is less important than
the other one, which Andrew glosses over:
Well those "other factors" are actually quite important - in fact, they are likely the dominant reasons why violence decreased in Iraq during 2007 and 2008 (and Andrew leaves out a critical one; the sectarian cleansing and subsequent ethnic enclaving that took place in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, which contributed mightily to the fall in civilian casualties). In other words there were very specific factors that allowed the surge to "succeed" in decreasing sectarian violence in Iraq.
argue about how many other factors aside from U.S. diplomatic and military
operations led to the stunning drop in violence in 2007. There was a civil war
in 2005 and 2006, tribes from al-Anbar "flipped" in 2006, and Muqtada
al-Sadr decided to keep his troops out of the fight for reasons that are still
not entirely clear. Those are just three factors which might not have had
anything to do with U.S. operations. But there can be no denying that a space
has indeed been created for a more or less peaceful political process to take
But the point here is not to get into a rather tiresome debate on whether the surge failed or succeeded (I could argue that it both failed AND succeeded); it's to examine the question of whether the surge and counter-insurgency tactics adopted by the United States in 2007 and 2008 decreased violence in Iraq - and here's the rub - can be replicated elsewhere?
After all the the "success" of the surge has been used as a rationale for escalation in Afghanistan and the adoption of COIN tactics there. And when political and military leaders start believing that the "surge worked" in Iraq while downplaying the importance of other indigenous factors - like Iraqi agency - they risk drawing the wrong conclusions about the efficacy of COIN. Indeed, I would argue that to a large extent this is precisely what is happening in Afghanistan where the mantra that "the surge worked" has underpinned the adoption of COIN tactics by General McChrystal.
So while I think it's fair to argue that the surge in US troops in Iraq contributed to the decline of sectarian violence in Iraq (which it almost certainly did) it's exceedingly dubious and dangerous to argue that thus COIN will work in Afghanistan or anywhere else for that matter (and in fairness Andrew is not making this argument).
As Andrew well knows, the debate over whether the surge did or didn't work has massive national security implications and the conclusions that one draws on this issue will go a long way toward determining the future direction of national security policy. As I have noted many, many times here and elsewhere drawing lessons from the surge is the wrong way to think about the war in Iraq; the right lesson is how did the US find itself in a place where it had to surge in Iraq and now Afghanistan.