Good finds.

The damn disturbing thing about this ties into Steven Simon's The Price of the Surge article in the May/June issue of FA, which I bought into the first time I read it.

As we step back on the military front and do more "by, with, and through", who's job is it to perform quality control in this integration process? Is it a PRT task, a Law Enforcement Professional (LEP) problem, or will this turn into another life in the emerald city problem where the blind start tring to lead the blind?

Recently retired U.S. Army counterinsurgency expert Col. John A. Nagl, who traveled with Mr. Kahl to Iraq, partly attributed the slow integration to bureaucratic problems.

"I´m sure that there is some sectarianism in these decisions, but I also am confident that some of it is just inefficient bureaucracy," said Col. Nagl, the author of several books on counterinsurgency, who helped write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual published in December 2006.

Mr. Kahl also warned against a strategy of limiting integration to Sunni leaders and placing them in low-level jobs.

"Oh, sure, we´ll let that colonel in the ... Republican Guard into the Iraqi police, but we´ll make him an enlisted beat cop," he said, describing the attitude of some Baghdad officials. "Do you know how low on the social scale that is in Iraq and how humiliating this is?"

"You don´t have to believe that 100,000 of these guys are going to turn back into insurgents," Mr. Kahl said. "If 5,000 of them do, that could be a big problem."
I worry because I am about to step back into Anbar, and wonder where these integration issues fit into the measures of effectiveness for LOO work. When I last stepped into Iraq, the 1st Mrine Division was trying to integrate Iraqi volunteers (predominantly Shiite) into small special formations to put an Iraqi face on our operations. I had a front row seat to the scheming and maneuvering from these "volunteers" to become a part of the fledgling security apparatus in order to reap greater reward down the road.

The start-up program died and got rolled into a large MOI/US effort, but the intentions of the Iraquis were clear: get in, establish what power base I can, and then run with it. Are the Sons of Iraq any different? If they want to infiltrate the security apparatus and the government is stonewalling, who is on the dime to break the impasse and move forward?

So this leads me back to my original question. If think tank guys are identifying potential friction points, who is smoothing them out...a suit and tie in Baghdad, a grunt in Rawah, or a State guy?