U.S.'s Cultural Ignorance Fuels Iraq Insurgency
28 April National Public Radio - U.S.'s Cultural Ignorance Fuels Iraq Insurgency.
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The U.S. military's lack of understanding about Iraqi culture helped create the conditions for the insurgency that U.S. forces face there, according to a military adviser who has written a new book about the insurgency.
Between November 2003 and September 2005, professor Ahmed Hashim worked with U.S. troops in Iraq. His job was to try to understand the insurgents and what motivates them His new book is called Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq.
Hashim lists about 20 groups of insurgents, including nationalists, former Baathists, tribal-based insurgents and religious extremists. The groups say they want the United States out of Iraq, and they reject the U.S.-backed government, but they don't agree on what they do want.
"If we were out of the picture, some of the insurgent groups could engage in bloodshed against one another because they have such different and disparate political views of the future of Iraq," Hashim says.
Hashim, who teaches at the Naval War College, says he was surprised by how little the U.S. military understands about the culture, or "human terrain," of Iraq. That includes "societal networks, relations between tribes and within tribes, kinship ties... what is it people are fighting for?"...
Origins of the Iraqi Insurgency
28 April The American Spectator - Origins of the Iraqi Insurgency.
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... Until early 2005, U.S. authorities understood that the Iraqi insurgency consisted primarily of FRE's or Former Regime Elements. As then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Atlantic Monthly, "[T]hey're allied with people who want to help them win, by which I mean the jihadis on the one side and the Syrian Baathists on the other."
In the spring of 2005, however, the U.S. understanding of the insurgency shifted. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to be seen as the most dangerous part of the violence, and he was understood to act independently of the Baathists. Yet the Baathists and Islamic radicals have been working together for a number of years -- at least since 1998, according to the documents cited here. Why should that cooperation have stopped in 2005?
Iraqi officials understand the insurgency quite differently from U.S. officials. In late 2005, the Iraqi Defense Minister instructed the embassy in Washington to tell the Americans that the Baathists were the enemy. His warning, which followed a mortar attack targeting General George Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, evidently fell on deaf ears.
Similarly, another senior Iraqi politician told a small group of Americans last fall that Zarqawi was "nothing." Zarqawi's operation is essentially run by the Syrian mukhabarrat, this Iraqi figure explained. Jihadis are recruited through the mosques to Syria, where they are trained by individuals from Afghanistan. They then cross into Iraq, all the time under the watchful eyes of Syrian authorities, without realizing that they are, in fact, part of a major Syrian intelligence operation.
Most recently, Jawad al-Maliki, Iraq's new Prime Minister -- in his first television interview after assuming that post -- warned neighboring states that Iraq would not tolerate "security interference" or involvement with "certain movements inside Iraq."
"[I]f you don't see who the enemy is and why they're fighting, you can't win," Wolfowitz told the Atlantic Monthly. Indeed, "know the enemy" is ancient and axiomatic. A critical link is missing in the current U.S. understanding of the violence in the Middle East, namely how the intelligence agencies of terrorist states interact with the jihadi networks. We consistently see the jihadis, indeed, they are front and center, but we are blind to the intelligence agencies that use them, support them, and hide behind them...
Jihadis and State Intel Agencies
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"[i]f you don't see who the enemy is and why they're fighting, you can't win," Wolfowitz told the Atlantic Monthly. Indeed, "know the enemy" is ancient and axiomatic. A critical link is missing in the current U.S. understanding of the violence in the Middle East, namely how the intelligence agencies of terrorist states interact with the jihadi networks. We consistently see the jihadis, indeed, they are front and center, but we are blind to the intelligence agencies that use them, support them, and hide behind them...
Hardly. This has been a critical tracking issue for years even decades. As US Observers in UNTSo in the late 80s we operated with a bounty of $500K on our heads courtesy of Hizballah as funded by Iran. I can only assume that Iranian intel paid out that bounty when LTC Rich Higgins was abducted in early 1988. See LTC Robin Higgins, Patriot Dreams: The Murder of Colonel Rich Higgins with foreward by GEN A.M. Gray USMC (ret).
And it is an open source discussion focus. For example, Tactics of the Crescent Moon by Poole concentrates heavily--perhaps too heavily--on Hizballah as an instrument of Iranian intelligence and paramilitary agencies like the Pasdaran. See also Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.
Tom
