[lit-ideas] How to Win in Iraq

Here's the article Marlena was referring to -- Andrew Krepinevich on the 
oil-spot strategy written in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. David Brooks 
discusses it here in a recent op-ed piece before the Times asked us to pay $50 
to read him.

This is in answer to Andy's question: isn't there any other way to win in Iraq? 
Andrew Krepinevich answers his question here.

Stan Spiegel



August 28, 2005
Winning in Iraq
By DAVID BROOKS
Andrew Krepinevich is a careful, scholarly man. A graduate of West Point and a 
retired lieutenant colonel, his book, "The Army and Vietnam," is a classic on 
how to fight counterinsurgency warfare. 

Over the past year or so he's been asking his friends and former colleagues in 
the military a few simple questions: Which of the several known strategies for 
fighting insurgents are you guys employing in Iraq? What metrics are you using 
to measure your progress? 

The answers have been disturbing. There is no clear strategy. There are no 
clear metrics. 

Krepinevich has now published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, 
"How to Win in Iraq," in which he proposes a strategy. The article is already a 
phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the 
Pentagon, the C.I.A., the American Embassy in Baghdad and the office of the 
vice president. 

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic 
counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by 
the British in the 1950's. The same approach was pushed by Tom Donnelly and 
Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth 
Pollack in Senate testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and 
Marine Corps officers in Iraq. 

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that 
you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions 
trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You 
end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents 
just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate 
civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids. 

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important 
to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good 
security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, 
you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size 
of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

Once you've secured a town or city, you throw in all the economic and political 
resources you have to make that place grow. The locals see the benefits of 
working with you. Your own troops and the folks back home watching on TV can 
see concrete signs of progress in these newly regenerated neighborhoods. You 
mix your troops in with indigenous security forces, and through intimate 
contact with the locals you begin to even out the intelligence advantage that 
otherwise goes to the insurgents.

If you ask U.S. officials why they haven't adopted this strategy, they say they 
have. But if that were true the road to the airport in Baghdad wouldn't be a 
death trap. It would be within the primary oil spot.

The fact is, the U.S. didn't adopt this blindingly obvious strategy because it 
violates some of the key Rumsfeldian notions about how the U.S. military should 
operate in the 21st century.

First, it requires a heavy troop presence, not a light, lean force. Second, it 
doesn't play to our strengths, which are technological superiority, mobility 
and firepower. It acknowledges that while we go with our strengths, the 
insurgents exploit our weakness: the lack of usable intelligence.

Third, it means we have to think in the long term. For fear of straining the 
armed forces, the military brass have conducted this campaign with one eye 
looking longingly at the exits. A lot of the military planning has extended 
only as far as the next supposed tipping point: the transfer of sovereignty, 
the election, and so on. We've been rotating successful commanders back to 
Washington after short stints, which is like pulling Grant back home before the 
battle of Vicksburg. The oil-spot strategy would force us to acknowledge that 
this will be a long, gradual war.

But the strategy has one virtue. It might work. 

Today, public opinion is turning against the war not because people have given 
up on the goal of advancing freedom, but because they are not sure this war is 
winnable. Why should we sacrifice more American lives to a lost cause?

If President Bush is going to rebuild support for the war, he's going to have 
to explain specifically how it can be won, and for that he needs a strategy.

It's not hard to find. It's right there in Andy Krepinevich's essay, and in the 
annals of history. 

E-mail: dabrooks@xxxxxxxxxxx

Nicholas D. Kristof is on vacation.

Other related posts: