Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style
By Nick Turse
Posted on January 21, 2016, Printed on January 26, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176093/ ;
Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although
they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had
little in common -- at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration
followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by invading Iraq. Since then,
they've had quite a bit in common, including vast infusions of U.S. funds
and the massive levels of corruption that accompany them, as well as the way
refugees from both countries have been joining the same flow of the
desperate and dispossessed heading for Europe. These days, with the spread
of an Islamic State franchise to Afghanistan, even their insurgents are
becoming part of the same "brand." And there's one other thing they've had
in common in these years: ghosts.
In both countries, the U.S. military has built, on paper, vast local
security forces from scratch to the tune of at least $65 billion in
Afghanistan and at least $25 billion in Iraq. Their armies and police
forces have, however, both turned out to be remarkably spectral in nature.
They are filled with "ghost soldiers" and "ghost policemen" who are being
paid salaries but don't exist. In some cases, they are quite literally
already dead and wandering in the world of spirits. Their U.S.-funded
salaries are, in turn, being pocketed by commanders and other senior
military officials in an operation that couldn't be more profitable or
"successful" -- at least until their ranks, sometimes thinned to
nonexistence, are attacked by flesh-and-blood enemy forces. In Iraq, in
2014, after significant parts of that country's American-built army had
abandoned its weaponry and fled its posts in the country's northern cities
in the face of modest numbers of Islamic State fighters, the prime minister
announced that there were at least 50,000 "ghost" troops in his military.
(That figure was widely believed to be an underestimate.)
In Afghanistan more recently, as Taliban attacks have ramped up, similarly
undermanned units have found themselves hard-pressed and have retreated,
fled, or been defeated. The number of ghosts in the ranks of the Afghan
security forces (as in its police) is unknown. Recently, however, the head
of the provincial council of Helmand Province, a key area in the Taliban's
southern heartland, estimated that 40% of the Afghan soldiers there might,
in fact, be ghosts. Whatever the specific numbers, what's striking is the
Pentagon's strange skill when it comes to creating, to the tune of tens of
billions of dollars, spectral security forces of a remarkably similar kind
in two such, until recently, disparate countries. Make of that knack what
you will while reading TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse's epic saga of
how the Pentagon made special "progress" and racked up "success" after
"success" over the last 12 years building Iraq's spectral forces. Tom
The Pentagon's Progress
Will American "Successes" Lead to More Iraqi Military Failures?
By Nick Turse
There's good news coming out of Iraq... again. The efforts of a 65-nation
coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll
back gains by the Islamic State (IS).
Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of
Tikrit, while Kurdish troops ousted IS fighters from the town of Sinjar and
other parts of northern Iraq. Last month, Iraqi troops finally pushed
Islamic State militants out of most of the city of Ramadi, which the group
had held since routing Iraqi forces there last spring.
In the wake of all this, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter touted "the kind
of progress that the Iraqi forces are exhibiting in Ramadi, building on that
success to. continue the campaign with the important goal of retaking Mosul
as soon as possible." Even more recently, he said those forces were
"proving themselves not only motivated but capable." I encountered the same
upbeat tone when I asked Colonel Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in
Baghdad, about the Iraqi security forces. "The last year has been a process
of constructing, rebuilding, and refitting the Iraqi army," he explained.
"While it takes time for training and equipping efforts to take effect, the
increasing tactical confidence and competence of the ISF [Iraqi security
forces] and their recent battlefield successes indicate that we are on
track."
"Progress." "Successes." "On track." "Increasing tactical confidence and
competence." It all sounded very familiar to me.
By September 2012, after almost a decade at the task, the U.S. had allocated
and spent nearly $25 billion on "training, equipping, and sustaining" the
Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector
General for Iraq Reconstruction. Along the way, a parade of generals,
government officials, and Pentagon spokesmen had offered up an almost
unending stream of good news about the new Iraqi Army. Near constant
reports came in of "remarkable," "big," even "enormous" progress for a force
that was said to be exuding increasing "confidence," and whose performance
was always improving. In the end, the U.S. claimed to have trained roughly
950,000 members of the "steady," "solid," Iraqi security forces.
And yet just two and a half years after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, that
same force collapsed in spectacular fashion in the face of assaults by
Islamic State militants who, by CIA estimates, numbered no more than 31,000
in all. In June 2014, for example, 30,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops
abandoned their equipment and in some cases even their uniforms, fleeing as
few as 800 Islamic State fighters, allowing IS to capture Mosul, the second
largest city in the country.
Blaming the Victim
"When U.S. forces departed Iraq in 2011, it was after helping the Iraqi
government create an entirely new Iraqi Security Force following the fall of
Saddam Hussein's regime," Major Curtis Kellogg, a spokesman with U.S.
Central Command, explained to me last year. It almost sounded as if the old
regime had toppled of its own accord, a new government had arisen, and the
U.S. had generously helped build a military for it. In reality, of course,
a war of choice -- based on trumped up claims of nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction -- led to a U.S. occupation and the conscious decision to
dissolve Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's military and create a new army in
the American mold. "[T]he Iraqi security forces were a fully functioning
element of the Iraq Government," Kellogg continued, explaining how such an
Iraqi military collapse could occur in 2014. "However, the military
standards established and left in place were allowed to atrophy following
the departure of U.S. troops."
More recently, Colonel Steve Warren brought up another problem with Iraq's
forces in an email to me. "The Iraqi army that we left in 2011 was an army
that had been trained for counterinsurgency. That means route clearance,
checkpoint operations, and IED [improvised explosive device] reduction, for
example. The Iraqi army that collapsed in 2014 was... not trained and...
not ready for a conventional fight -- the conventional assault that ISIL
brought to Mosul and beyond."
Both Kellogg and Warren stopped short of saying what seems obvious to many.
Kalev Sepp, the adviser to two top American generals in Iraq and a former
deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and
counterterrorism, shows no such hesitation. "We had 12 years to train the
Iraqi Army... We failed. It's obvious. So when this lightly-armed
insurgent group, the so-called Islamic State, invaded the country, the Iraqi
army collapsed in front of it."
It's taken billions of dollars and a year and a half of air strikes,
commando raids, advice, and training to begin to reverse the Islamic State's
gains. According to Warren, the U.S. and its partners have once again
trained more than 17,500 ISF troops, with another 2,900 currently in the
pipeline. And once again we're hearing about their successes. Secretary of
Defense Carter, for example, called the fight for Ramadi "a significant step
forward in the campaign to defeat this barbaric group," while Secretary of
State John Kerry claimed the Islamic State had "suffered a major defeat"
there.
Still, the tiny terror group seems to have no difficulty recruiting new
troops, is ramping up attacks in the district of Haditha, carrying out
complex attacks in Baghdad and the town of Muqdadiya, and continues to hold
about 57,000 square miles of Syrian and Iraqi territory, including Mosul.
With questions already being raised by Pentagon insiders about just how
integral the Iraqi security forces were to the retaking of Ramadi and doubts
about their ability to clear cities like Mosul, it's worth taking a look
back at all those upbeat reports of "progress" during the previous U.S.
effort to build an Iraqi Army from scratch.
Nothing "Succeeds" Like "Success"
After the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003 as part of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration began remaking the battered
nation from the ground up. One of the first acts of L. Paul Bremer III, the
top American civilian official in the occupied country, was to dissolve
Iraq's military. His plan: to replace Saddam Hussein's 350,000-man army
with a lightly armed border protection force that would peak at around
40,000 soldiers, supplemented by police and civil defense forces. In an
instant, hundreds of thousands of well-trained soldiers were unemployed,
providing a ready source of fighters for a future insurgency.
"In less than six months we have gone from zero Iraqis providing security to
their country to close to a hundred thousand Iraqis... Indeed, the progress
has been so swift that... it will not be long before [the Iraqi security
forces] will... outnumber the U.S. forces," Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld suggested in a cheery assessment in October 2003.
Major General Paul Eaton, tasked with rebuilding the Iraqi Army, similarly
articulated his upbeat vision for the force. Schooled by Americans in
"fundamental soldier and leadership skills" and outfitted with all the
accoutrements of modern Western troops, including body armor and
night-vision equipment, the new military would be committed to "defend[ing]
Iraq and its new-found freedom," he announced at a Baghdad briefing in
January 2004. Soon, Iraqis would even take over the task of instruction.
"I would like to emphasize that this will be an Iraqi Army, trained by
Iraqis," he said. "As Iraq is reborn," he added, "we believe that her armed
forces can lead the way in unifying" the country.
"Paul Eaton and his team did an extraordinary amount for the Iraqi Security
Force mission," his successor Lieutenant General David Petraeus would say a
couple of years later. "They established a solid foundation on which we
were able to build as the effort was expanded very substantially and
resourced at a much higher level."
Retired Special Forces officer Kalev Sepp, who traveled to Iraq as an
adviser five times, had a different assessment. "General Eaton was direct in
letting me know that he wanted to be remembered as the father of the new
Iraqi Army," he told me. "I thought his approach was conceptually wrong,"
Sepp recalled, noting that Eaton "understood his mission was to create an
army to defend Iraq from foreign invasion, but he completely overlooked the
internal insurgency." (A request to interview Eaton, sent to the American
Security Project, a Washington D.C.-based think tank with which the retired
general is affiliated, went unanswered.)
General Eaton would later blame the Bush administration for initial setbacks
in the performance of the Iraqi Army, thanks to poor prewar planning and
insufficient resources for the job. "We set out to man, train, and equip an
army for a country of 25 million -- with six men," General Eaton told the
New York Times in 2006. He did, however, accept personal responsibility for
the most visible of its early failures, the mutiny of a freshly minted Iraqi
battalion en route to its first battle in April 2004.
In the years that followed, America's Iraq exploded into violence as Sunni
and Shiite militants battled each other, the U.S. occupiers, and the
U.S.-backed Baghdad government. On the fly, U.S. officials came up with new
plans to build a large, conventional, heavily armed force to secure Iraq in
the face of sectarian strife, multiple raging insurgencies, and ultimately
civil war. "The Iraqi military and police forces expanded rapidly from 2004
to 2006, adapting to the counterinsurgency mission," according to a report
by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. As chaos
spread and death tolls rose, estimates of the necessary numbers of Iraqi
troops, proposals concerning the right types of weapons systems for them,
and training stratagems for building the army were amended, adjusted, and
revised, again and again. There was, however, one constant: praise.
In September 2005, as violence was surging and more than 1,400 civilians
were being killed in attacks across the country, General George W. Casey
Jr., commander of Multinational Force-Iraq, reported that the security
forces were "progressing and continuing to take a more prominent role in
defending their country." He repeatedly emphasized that training efforts
were on track -- a sentiment seconded by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "Every
single day, the Iraqi security forces are getting bigger and better and
better trained and better equipped and more experienced," he said.
"I think we did a very effective job of training the Iraqi military recruits
that were brought to us," Casey told me last year, reflecting on U.S.
efforts during his two and a half years in command. The trouble, he said,
was with the Iraqis. "The political situation in Iraq through 2007 and even
to this day is such that the leadership of the Iraqi government and the
military never could instill the loyalty of the troops in the government."
At the time, however, American generals emphasized progress over problems.
After Petraeus finished his own stint heading the training effort, he was
effusive in his praise. "The bottom line up front that I'd like to leave
with you today is that there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi
security forces over the course of the past 16 months in the face of a
brutal insurgency," he boasted in October 2005, adding that "considerable
work" still lay ahead. "Iraqi security force readiness has continued to grow
with each passing week. You can take a percentage off every metric that's
out there, whatever you want -- training, equipping, infrastructure
reconstruction, units in the fight, schools, academies reestablished -- you
name it -- and what has been accomplished... would still be remarkable."
(Messages seeking an interview sent to Petraeus at Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts
& Co., the investment firm where he serves as chairman of the KKR Global
Institute, were not answered.)
In November 2005, President Bush voiced the same sentiments. "As the Iraqi
security forces stand up, their confidence is growing," he told midshipmen
at the Naval Academy. "And they're taking on tougher and more important
missions on their own." By the following February, General Peter Pace,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was similarly lauding that military,
claiming "the progress that they've made over this last year has been
enormous."
The next month, Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, who succeeded Petraeus as
commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I)
and later served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, chimed in with glowing
praise: "What we're seeing now is progress on a three-year investment in
Iraq's security forces. It's been a big investment, and it's yielding big
progress."
I asked retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and
international relations emeritus at Boston University's Pardee School of
Global Studies, how so many American officials could have seen so much
progress from a force that would later collapse so rapidly and
spectacularly. "I think there's a psychological need to see progress and,
of course, it's helpful to parrot the party line. I do think that,
psychologically, you need to be able to persuade yourself that your
hard-earned efforts -- this time spent away from home in lousy conditions --
actually produced something positive."
Kalev Sepp, who traveled all over Iraq talking to the commanders of more
than 30 U.S. units while conducting a seminal counterinsurgency study known
simply as the "COIN Survey," told me that when he asked about the progress
of the Iraqi units they were working with, U.S. officers invariably linked
it to their own tour of duty. "Almost every commander said exactly the same
thing. If the commander had six months left in his tour, the Iraqis would
be combat-capable in six months. If the commander had four months left,
then the Iraqis would be ready in four months. Was a commander going to say
'I won't accomplish my mission. I'm not going to be done on time'? All the
other units were saying their Iraqis were going to be fully trained. Who
was going to be the one commander who said 'I don't think my Iraqi unit is
really ready'?"
Official praise continued as insurgencies raged across the country and
monthly civilian death tolls regularly exceeded 2,000, even topping 3,000 in
2006 and 2007. "The Iraqi security force continues to develop and grow,
assisted by embedded transition teams," Lieutenant General Ray Odierno,
commander of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, announced to the press in May
2007. "Yes, there are still problems within the Iraqi security forces --
some sectarian, some manning, and some to do with equipping. But progress
is being made, and it's steady." A 2008 Pentagon review also indicated
remarkable progress with 102 out of 169 Iraqi battalions being declared
"capable of planning, executing, and sustaining counterinsurgency operations
with or without Iraqi or coalition support," up from just 24 battalions in
2005.
Years later, Odierno, still in charge of the command, then known as United
States Forces-Iraq, continued to tout improvement. "Clearly there's still
some violence, and we still need to make more progress in Iraq," he told
reporters in July 2010. "But Iraqi security forces have taken responsibility
for security throughout Iraq, and they continue to grow and improve every
day."
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, was
also upbeat, noting in 2010 that the $21.3 billion already spent to build up
the then-660,000-man security force had "begun to pay off significantly."
Don Cooke, head of the State Department's Iraq assistance office, agreed.
"We have built an Iraqi security force which is capable of maintaining
internal security in Iraq... And four or five or six years ago, there were
people who were saying it was going to take decades."
In October 2011, as U.S. forces were preparing to end eight years of
occupation, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta offered up his own
mission-accomplished assessment. "You know, the one thing... we have seen
is that Iraq has developed a very good capability to be able to defend
itself. We've taken out now about a hundred thousand [U.S.] troops [from
Iraq], and yet the level of violence has remained relatively low. And I
think that's a reflection of the fact that the Iraqis have developed a very
important capability here to be able to respond to security threats within
their own country," he said of the by then 930,000-man security forces.
Winners and Losers
As the U.S. was training recruits at bases all over Iraq -- including Camp
Bucca, where Iraqi cadets attended a U.S.-run course for prison guards --
another force was also taking shape. For years, U.S.-run prison camps were
decried by many as little more than recruiting and training sites for
would-be insurgents, with innocents -- angered by arbitrary and harsh
detentions -- housed alongside hardcore militants. But Camp Bucca proved to
be even more dangerous than that. It became the incubator not just for an
insurgency, but for a proto-state, the would-be caliphate that now lords
over significant portions of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Nine top commanders of the Islamic State did prison time at America's Camp
Bucca, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's leader who spent nearly
five years there. "Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were
violent radicals, intent on attacking America," Andrew Thompson, an Iraq War
veteran, and academic Jeremi Suri wrote in a 2014 New York Times piece.
"Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities
to broaden their following... The prisons became virtual terrorist
universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees
were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent
custodian."
So how could U.S. officials have so successfully (if inadvertently) fostered
the leadership of what would become a truly effective fighting force that
would one day best the larger, far more intensively trained, better-armed
military they had built to the tune of tens of billions of dollars? "The
people we imprisoned didn't leave with skills when they finally got out of
prison, but they did leave with will," says Andrew Bacevich. "What we were
doing was breeding resentment, anger, determination, disgust, which provided
the makings of an army that turns out to be more effective than the Iraqi
Army."
General George Casey, who went on to serve as Army Chief of Staff before
retiring in 2011, sees the failure of Iraq's Shiite government to reach out
to minority Sunnis as the main driver of the collapse of significant
portions of the country's army in 2014. "You hear all kinds of reasons why
the Sunni forces [of the Iraqi military] ran out of Mosul, but it wasn't a
surprise to any of us who had been over there. If your country doesn't
support what you're doing, there's no reason to fight for them," Casey
explained in a phone interview last year. "People probably give short
shrift to what we in the military call 'the will to fight.' When it comes
right down to it, that's what it's all about. And we can't instill the will
to fight in the heart of a soldier from another country. We just can't do
it."
"We can talk about how appalling Daesh is," adds Kalev Sepp, using the
Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, "but their fighters believe in what
they're doing and that adds a particular steel to one's backbone."
Bacevich, who has recently finished writing a military history, America's
War for the Greater Middle East, echoed this sentiment, noting the stark
difference between U.S.-trained Iraqi forces and their brutal opponents.
"Whatever else we may think of ISIS, their forces appear to be keen to fight
and willing to die in order to promote their cause. The same cannot be said
of the Iraqi Army."
And yet, in the wake of the implosion of Iraq's security forces, the United
States -- as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, its campaign against IS --
began a new advisory and training effort to assist and re-rebuild Iraq's
army. In June 2014, President Obama announced that up to 300 advisors would
be sent to Iraq. The size of the U.S. presence has increased steadily ever
since to roughly 3,500.
"As per policy we do not disclose specific numbers of troops and their
roles," Colonel Warren, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, explained to
me. He did, however, note that there are approximately 5,500 Coalition
personnel from 17 partner nations including the United States conducting
advise and assist missions and training at "Building Partner Capacity
sites."
Despite the poor results of the prior training effort, even some of its
critics are hopeful that the current mission may succeed. "American
advisors could have a positive effect," Sepp, now a senior lecturer in
defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. He explained
that a pinpoint mission of training Iraqis to take back a particular city or
defend a specific area stands a real chance of success. Casey, his former
boss, agreed but insisted that such success would not come easily or
quickly. "This is going to take a long time. This is not a short-term
thing. People want to see ISIS defeated -- whatever that means -- quickly.
But it's not going to be 'quickly' because the problems are political more
than military and that's going to take the Iraqis some time to come to grips
with."
Doomed to Repeat It?
History suggests that time is no panacea when Washington attempts to prop
up, advise, or build armies. In the early 1950s, the U.S. provided
extensive support to the French military in Indochina -- eventually footing
nearly 80% of the cost of its war there -- only to see that force defeated
by a less advanced, less well-equipped Vietnamese army. Not long after, the
U.S. began an expensive process that continued into the mid-1970s of
building, advising, equipping, and bankrolling the South Vietnamese
military. In those years, it ballooned into a million-man army, only to
disintegrate two years after the U.S. ended its own long, unsuccessful
combat effort in that country.
"The assumption that we know how to create armies in other parts of the
world is a pretty dubious proposition," Andrew Bacevich, a veteran of that
war, told me. "Yes, Vietnam was a vivid demonstration of a failed project
to build an effective army, but you don't even have to cite Vietnam. Iraq
obviously is another case. And more generally, the Pentagon exaggerates its
ability to create effective fighting forces in parts of the developing
world."
Indeed, recent U.S. training efforts around the globe have been marked by a
string of scandals, setbacks, and failures. Last year, for example, the
Obama administration scrapped a $500 million program to train anti-Islamic
State Syrian rebels. It was supposed to yield 15,000 fighters over three
years but instead produced only a few dozen. Then there's the 13-year, $65
billion effort in Afghanistan that has yielded a force whose rolls are
filled with nonexistent "ghost" troops, wracked by desertions, and hobbled
by increasing casualties. It has been unable to defeat a small, unpopular,
Taliban insurgency now growing in strength and reach. The short-term loss by
U.S.-backed Afghan forces of the city of Kunduz late last year and recent
Taliban gains in Helmand province have cast a bright light on this
slow-motion fiasco.
These efforts have hardly been anomalies. A U.S.-trained Congolese commando
battalion was, for example, implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes
and other atrocities. One effort to train Libyan militiamen ended up
stillborn; another saw militants repeatedly raid a U.S. training camp and
loot it of high-tech equipment, including hundreds of weapons; and still
another saw advisers run out of the country by a militia soon after touching
down. Then there were the U.S.-trained officers who overthrew their
governments in coups in Mali in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2014. In fact, a
December 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service noted:
"Recent events, particularly the battle between the Afghan government and
the Taliban over K[u]nduz, the inability of [Department of Defense]-led
efforts to produce more than a 'handful' of anti-Assad, anti-Islamic State
(IS) forces in Syria, and the collapse of U.S.-trained forces in Iraq in the
face of the Islamic State, have called into question -- including in the
Congress -- whether these [building partner capacity] programs can ever
achieve their desired effects."
Despite all of this, the Pentagon remains committed to creating another
Iraqi Army in the American mold with, as Colonel Warren recently explained
to me, "modern American equipment, modern conventional training, and of
course, supported by air power." The U.S. has, he notes, already spent $2.3
billion arming and equipping this new force.
Andrew Bacevich once again sees crucial flaws in the American plan. "Our
trainers, I suspect, are probably pretty good at imparting technical
skills... I'm sure that they can teach them marksmanship, how to conduct a
patrol, how to maintain their weapons, but I can't imagine that we have much
of a facility for imparting fighting spirit, sense of national unity, and
that's where Iraqi forces have been deficient. It's this will versus skill
thing. We can convey skills. I don't think we can convey will."
For his part, Secretary of Defense Carter seems singularly focused on the
skills side of the equation. "ISIL's lasting defeat still requires local
forces to fight and prevail on the ground. We can and will continue to
develop and enable such local forces," he told the House Armed Services
Committee in June 2015. "That's why [the Department of Defense] seeks to
bolster. Iraq's security forces to be capable of winning back, and then
defending and holding the ISIL-controlled portions of the Iraqi state."
Last month, Carter assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was
still "urging the Iraqi government to do more to recruit, train, arm, and
mobilize Sunni popular mobilization fighters in their communities."
This presumes, however, that there is a truly functioning Iraqi state in the
first place. Andrew Bacevich isn't so sure. "It may be time to admit that
there is no Iraq. We presume to be creating a national army that is willing
to fight for the nation of Iraq, but I don't think it's self-evident that
Iraq exists, except in the most nominal sense. If that's true, then further
efforts -- a second decade's worth of efforts to build an Iraqi army --
simply are not likely to pan out."
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S.
Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, as well as Kill Anything That Moves:
The Real American War in Vietnam. He has written for the New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing writer for the
Intercept.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176093
Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style
By Nick Turse
Posted on January 21, 2016, Printed on January 26, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176093/ ;
Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although
they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had
little in common -- at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration
followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by invading Iraq. Since then,
they've had quite a bit in common, including vast infusions of U.S. funds
and the massive levels of corruption that accompany them, as well as the way
refugees from both countries have been joining the same flow of the
desperate and dispossessed heading for Europe. These days, with the spread
of an Islamic State franchise to Afghanistan, even their insurgents are
becoming part of the same "brand." And there's one other thing they've had
in common in these years: ghosts.
In both countries, the U.S. military has built, on paper, vast local
security forces from scratch to the tune of at least $65 billion in
Afghanistan and at least $25 billion in Iraq. Their armies and police forces
have, however, both turned out to be remarkably spectral in nature. They are
filled with "ghost soldiers" and "ghost policemen" who are being paid
salaries but don't exist. In some cases, they are quite literally already
dead and wandering in the world of spirits. Their U.S.-funded salaries are,
in turn, being pocketed by commanders and other senior military officials in
an operation that couldn't be more profitable or "successful" -- at least
until their ranks, sometimes thinned to nonexistence, are attacked by
flesh-and-blood enemy forces. In Iraq, in 2014, after significant parts of
that country's American-built army had abandoned its weaponry and fled its
posts in the country's northern cities in the face of modest numbers of
Islamic State fighters, the prime minister announced that there were at
least 50,000 "ghost" troops in his military. (That figure was widely
believed to be an underestimate.)
In Afghanistan more recently, as Taliban attacks have ramped up, similarly
undermanned units have found themselves hard-pressed and have retreated,
fled, or been defeated. The number of ghosts in the ranks of the Afghan
security forces (as in its police) is unknown. Recently, however, the head
of the provincial council of Helmand Province, a key area in the Taliban's
southern heartland, estimated that 40% of the Afghan soldiers there might,
in fact, be ghosts. Whatever the specific numbers, what's striking is the
Pentagon's strange skill when it comes to creating, to the tune of tens of
billions of dollars, spectral security forces of a remarkably similar kind
in two such, until recently, disparate countries. Make of that knack what
you will while reading TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse's epic saga of
how the Pentagon made special "progress" and racked up "success" after
"success" over the last 12 years building Iraq's spectral forces. Tom
The Pentagon's Progress
Will American "Successes" Lead to More Iraqi Military Failures?
By Nick Turse
There's good news coming out of Iraq... again. The efforts of a 65-nation
coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll
back gains by the Islamic State (IS).
Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of
Tikrit, while Kurdish troops ousted IS fighters from the town of Sinjar and
other parts of northern Iraq. Last month, Iraqi troops finally pushed
Islamic State militants out of most of the city of Ramadi, which the group
had held since routing Iraqi forces there last spring.
In the wake of all this, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter touted "the kind
of progress that the Iraqi forces are exhibiting in Ramadi, building on that
success to. continue the campaign with the important goal of retaking Mosul
as soon as possible." Even more recently, he said those forces were "proving
themselves not only motivated but capable." I encountered the same upbeat
tone when I asked Colonel Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in
Baghdad, about the Iraqi security forces. "The last year has been a process
of constructing, rebuilding, and refitting the Iraqi army," he explained.
"While it takes time for training and equipping efforts to take effect, the
increasing tactical confidence and competence of the ISF [Iraqi security
forces] and their recent battlefield successes indicate that we are on
track."
"Progress." "Successes." "On track." "Increasing tactical confidence and
competence." It all sounded very familiar to me.
By September 2012, after almost a decade at the task, the U.S. had allocated
and spent nearly $25 billion on "training, equipping, and sustaining" the
Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector
General for Iraq Reconstruction. Along the way, a parade of generals,
government officials, and Pentagon spokesmen had offered up an almost
unending stream of good news about the new Iraqi Army. Near constant reports
came in of "remarkable," "big," even "enormous" progress for a force that
was said to be exuding increasing "confidence," and whose performance was
always improving. In the end, the U.S. claimed to have trained roughly
950,000 members of the "steady," "solid," Iraqi security forces.
And yet just two and a half years after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, that
same force collapsed in spectacular fashion in the face of assaults by
Islamic State militants who, by CIA estimates, numbered no more than 31,000
in all. In June 2014, for example, 30,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops
abandoned their equipment and in some cases even their uniforms, fleeing as
few as 800 Islamic State fighters, allowing IS to capture Mosul, the second
largest city in the country.
Blaming the Victim
"When U.S. forces departed Iraq in 2011, it was after helping the Iraqi
government create an entirely new Iraqi Security Force following the fall of
Saddam Hussein's regime," Major Curtis Kellogg, a spokesman with U.S.
Central Command, explained to me last year. It almost sounded as if the old
regime had toppled of its own accord, a new government had arisen, and the
U.S. had generously helped build a military for it. In reality, of course, a
war of choice -- based on trumped up claims of nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction -- led to a U.S. occupation and the conscious decision to
dissolve Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's military and create a new army in
the American mold. "[T]he Iraqi security forces were a fully functioning
element of the Iraq Government," Kellogg continued, explaining how such an
Iraqi military collapse could occur in 2014. "However, the military
standards established and left in place were allowed to atrophy following
the departure of U.S. troops."
More recently, Colonel Steve Warren brought up another problem with Iraq's
forces in an email to me. "The Iraqi army that we left in 2011 was an army
that had been trained for counterinsurgency. That means route clearance,
checkpoint operations, and IED [improvised explosive device] reduction, for
example. The Iraqi army that collapsed in 2014 was... not trained and... not
ready for a conventional fight -- the conventional assault that ISIL brought
to Mosul and beyond."
Both Kellogg and Warren stopped short of saying what seems obvious to many.
Kalev Sepp, the adviser to two top American generals in Iraq and a former
deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and
counterterrorism, shows no such hesitation. "We had 12 years to train the
Iraqi Army... We failed. It's obvious. So when this lightly-armed insurgent
group, the so-called Islamic State, invaded the country, the Iraqi army
collapsed in front of it."
It's taken billions of dollars and a year and a half of air strikes,
commando raids, advice, and training to begin to reverse the Islamic State's
gains. According to Warren, the U.S. and its partners have once again
trained more than 17,500 ISF troops, with another 2,900 currently in the
pipeline. And once again we're hearing about their successes. Secretary of
Defense Carter, for example, called the fight for Ramadi "a significant step
forward in the campaign to defeat this barbaric group," while Secretary of
State John Kerry claimed the Islamic State had "suffered a major defeat"
there.
Still, the tiny terror group seems to have no difficulty recruiting new
troops, is ramping up attacks in the district of Haditha, carrying out
complex attacks in Baghdad and the town of Muqdadiya, and continues to hold
about 57,000 square miles of Syrian and Iraqi territory, including Mosul.
With questions already being raised by Pentagon insiders about just how
integral the Iraqi security forces were to the retaking of Ramadi and doubts
about their ability to clear cities like Mosul, it's worth taking a look
back at all those upbeat reports of "progress" during the previous U.S.
effort to build an Iraqi Army from scratch.
Nothing "Succeeds" Like "Success"
After the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003 as part of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration began remaking the battered
nation from the ground up. One of the first acts of L. Paul Bremer III, the
top American civilian official in the occupied country, was to dissolve
Iraq's military. His plan: to replace Saddam Hussein's 350,000-man army with
a lightly armed border protection force that would peak at around 40,000
soldiers, supplemented by police and civil defense forces. In an instant,
hundreds of thousands of well-trained soldiers were unemployed, providing a
ready source of fighters for a future insurgency.
"In less than six months we have gone from zero Iraqis providing security to
their country to close to a hundred thousand Iraqis... Indeed, the progress
has been so swift that... it will not be long before [the Iraqi security
forces] will... outnumber the U.S. forces," Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld suggested in a cheery assessment in October 2003.
Major General Paul Eaton, tasked with rebuilding the Iraqi Army, similarly
articulated his upbeat vision for the force. Schooled by Americans in
"fundamental soldier and leadership skills" and outfitted with all the
accoutrements of modern Western troops, including body armor and
night-vision equipment, the new military would be committed to "defend[ing]
Iraq and its new-found freedom," he announced at a Baghdad briefing in
January 2004. Soon, Iraqis would even take over the task of instruction. "I
would like to emphasize that this will be an Iraqi Army, trained by Iraqis,"
he said. "As Iraq is reborn," he added, "we believe that her armed forces
can lead the way in unifying" the country.
"Paul Eaton and his team did an extraordinary amount for the Iraqi Security
Force mission," his successor Lieutenant General David Petraeus would say a
couple of years later. "They established a solid foundation on which we were
able to build as the effort was expanded very substantially and resourced at
a much higher level."
Retired Special Forces officer Kalev Sepp, who traveled to Iraq as an
adviser five times, had a different assessment. "General Eaton was direct in
letting me know that he wanted to be remembered as the father of the new
Iraqi Army," he told me. "I thought his approach was conceptually wrong,"
Sepp recalled, noting that Eaton "understood his mission was to create an
army to defend Iraq from foreign invasion, but he completely overlooked the
internal insurgency." (A request to interview Eaton, sent to the American
Security Project, a Washington D.C.-based think tank with which the retired
general is affiliated, went unanswered.)
General Eaton would later blame the Bush administration for initial setbacks
in the performance of the Iraqi Army, thanks to poor prewar planning and
insufficient resources for the job. "We set out to man, train, and equip an
army for a country of 25 million -- with six men," General Eaton told the
New York Times in 2006. He did, however, accept personal responsibility for
the most visible of its early failures, the mutiny of a freshly minted Iraqi
battalion en route to its first battle in April 2004.
In the years that followed, America's Iraq exploded into violence as Sunni
and Shiite militants battled each other, the U.S. occupiers, and the
U.S.-backed Baghdad government. On the fly, U.S. officials came up with new
plans to build a large, conventional, heavily armed force to secure Iraq in
the face of sectarian strife, multiple raging insurgencies, and ultimately
civil war. "The Iraqi military and police forces expanded rapidly from 2004
to 2006, adapting to the counterinsurgency mission," according to a report
by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. As chaos
spread and death tolls rose, estimates of the necessary numbers of Iraqi
troops, proposals concerning the right types of weapons systems for them,
and training stratagems for building the army were amended, adjusted, and
revised, again and again. There was, however, one constant: praise.
In September 2005, as violence was surging and more than 1,400 civilians
were being killed in attacks across the country, General George W. Casey
Jr., commander of Multinational Force-Iraq, reported that the security
forces were "progressing and continuing to take a more prominent role in
defending their country." He repeatedly emphasized that training efforts
were on track -- a sentiment seconded by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "Every
single day, the Iraqi security forces are getting bigger and better and
better trained and better equipped and more experienced," he said.
"I think we did a very effective job of training the Iraqi military recruits
that were brought to us," Casey told me last year, reflecting on U.S.
efforts during his two and a half years in command. The trouble, he said,
was with the Iraqis. "The political situation in Iraq through 2007 and even
to this day is such that the leadership of the Iraqi government and the
military never could instill the loyalty of the troops in the government."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20At the
time, however, American generals emphasized progress over problems. After
Petraeus finished his own stint heading the training effort, he was effusive
in his praise. "The bottom line up front that I'd like to leave with you
today is that there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security
forces over the course of the past 16 months in the face of a brutal
insurgency," he boasted in October 2005, adding that "considerable work"
still lay ahead. "Iraqi security force readiness has continued to grow with
each passing week. You can take a percentage off every metric that's out
there, whatever you want -- training, equipping, infrastructure
reconstruction, units in the fight, schools, academies reestablished -- you
name it -- and what has been accomplished... would still be remarkable."
(Messages seeking an interview sent to Petraeus at Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts
& Co., the investment firm where he serves as chairman of the KKR Global
Institute, were not answered.)
In November 2005, President Bush voiced the same sentiments. "As the Iraqi
security forces stand up, their confidence is growing," he told midshipmen
at the Naval Academy. "And they're taking on tougher and more important
missions on their own." By the following February, General Peter Pace,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was similarly lauding that military,
claiming "the progress that they've made over this last year has been
enormous."
The next month, Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, who succeeded Petraeus as
commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I)
and later served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, chimed in with glowing
praise: "What we're seeing now is progress on a three-year investment in
Iraq's security forces. It's been a big investment, and it's yielding big
progress."
I asked retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and
international relations emeritus at Boston University's Pardee School of
Global Studies, how so many American officials could have seen so much
progress from a force that would later collapse so rapidly and
spectacularly. "I think there's a psychological need to see progress and, of
course, it's helpful to parrot the party line. I do think that,
psychologically, you need to be able to persuade yourself that your
hard-earned efforts -- this time spent away from home in lousy conditions --
actually produced something positive."
Kalev Sepp, who traveled all over Iraq talking to the commanders of more
than 30 U.S. units while conducting a seminal counterinsurgency study known
simply as the "COIN Survey," told me that when he asked about the progress
of the Iraqi units they were working with, U.S. officers invariably linked
it to their own tour of duty. "Almost every commander said exactly the same
thing. If the commander had six months left in his tour, the Iraqis would be
combat-capable in six months. If the commander had four months left, then
the Iraqis would be ready in four months. Was a commander going to say 'I
won't accomplish my mission. I'm not going to be done on time'? All the
other units were saying their Iraqis were going to be fully trained. Who was
going to be the one commander who said 'I don't think my Iraqi unit is
really ready'?"
Official praise continued as insurgencies raged across the country and
monthly civilian death tolls regularly exceeded 2,000, even topping 3,000 in
2006 and 2007. "The Iraqi security force continues to develop and grow,
assisted by embedded transition teams," Lieutenant General Ray Odierno,
commander of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, announced to the press in May
2007. "Yes, there are still problems within the Iraqi security forces --
some sectarian, some manning, and some to do with equipping. But progress is
being made, and it's steady." A 2008 Pentagon review also indicated
remarkable progress with 102 out of 169 Iraqi battalions being declared
"capable of planning, executing, and sustaining counterinsurgency operations
with or without Iraqi or coalition support," up from just 24 battalions in
2005.
Years later, Odierno, still in charge of the command, then known as United
States Forces-Iraq, continued to tout improvement. "Clearly there's still
some violence, and we still need to make more progress in Iraq," he told
reporters in July 2010. "But Iraqi security forces have taken responsibility
for security throughout Iraq, and they continue to grow and improve every
day."
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, was
also upbeat, noting in 2010 that the $21.3 billion already spent to build up
the then-660,000-man security force had "begun to pay off significantly."
Don Cooke, head of the State Department's Iraq assistance office, agreed.
"We have built an Iraqi security force which is capable of maintaining
internal security in Iraq... And four or five or six years ago, there were
people who were saying it was going to take decades."
In October 2011, as U.S. forces were preparing to end eight years of
occupation, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta offered up his own
mission-accomplished assessment. "You know, the one thing... we have seen is
that Iraq has developed a very good capability to be able to defend itself.
We've taken out now about a hundred thousand [U.S.] troops [from Iraq], and
yet the level of violence has remained relatively low. And I think that's a
reflection of the fact that the Iraqis have developed a very important
capability here to be able to respond to security threats within their own
country," he said of the by then 930,000-man security forces.
Winners and Losers
As the U.S. was training recruits at bases all over Iraq -- including Camp
Bucca, where Iraqi cadets attended a U.S.-run course for prison guards --
another force was also taking shape. For years, U.S.-run prison camps were
decried by many as little more than recruiting and training sites for
would-be insurgents, with innocents -- angered by arbitrary and harsh
detentions -- housed alongside hardcore militants. But Camp Bucca proved to
be even more dangerous than that. It became the incubator not just for an
insurgency, but for a proto-state, the would-be caliphate that now lords
over significant portions of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Nine top commanders of the Islamic State did prison time at America's Camp
Bucca, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's leader who spent nearly
five years there. "Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were
violent radicals, intent on attacking America," Andrew Thompson, an Iraq War
veteran, and academic Jeremi Suri wrote in a 2014 New York Times piece.
"Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities
to broaden their following... The prisons became virtual terrorist
universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees
were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent
custodian."
So how could U.S. officials have so successfully (if inadvertently) fostered
the leadership of what would become a truly effective fighting force that
would one day best the larger, far more intensively trained, better-armed
military they had built to the tune of tens of billions of dollars? "The
people we imprisoned didn't leave with skills when they finally got out of
prison, but they did leave with will," says Andrew Bacevich. "What we were
doing was breeding resentment, anger, determination, disgust, which provided
the makings of an army that turns out to be more effective than the Iraqi
Army."
General George Casey, who went on to serve as Army Chief of Staff before
retiring in 2011, sees the failure of Iraq's Shiite government to reach out
to minority Sunnis as the main driver of the collapse of significant
portions of the country's army in 2014. "You hear all kinds of reasons why
the Sunni forces [of the Iraqi military] ran out of Mosul, but it wasn't a
surprise to any of us who had been over there. If your country doesn't
support what you're doing, there's no reason to fight for them," Casey
explained in a phone interview last year. "People probably give short shrift
to what we in the military call 'the will to fight.' When it comes right
down to it, that's what it's all about. And we can't instill the will to
fight in the heart of a soldier from another country. We just can't do it."
"We can talk about how appalling Daesh is," adds Kalev Sepp, using the
Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, "but their fighters believe in what
they're doing and that adds a particular steel to one's backbone." Bacevich,
who has recently finished writing a military history, America's War for the
Greater Middle East, echoed this sentiment, noting the stark difference
between U.S.-trained Iraqi forces and their brutal opponents. "Whatever else
we may think of ISIS, their forces appear to be keen to fight and willing to
die in order to promote their cause. The same cannot be said of the Iraqi
Army."
And yet, in the wake of the implosion of Iraq's security forces, the United
States -- as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, its campaign against IS --
began a new advisory and training effort to assist and re-rebuild Iraq's
army. In June 2014, President Obama announced that up to 300 advisors would
be sent to Iraq. The size of the U.S. presence has increased steadily ever
since to roughly 3,500.
"As per policy we do not disclose specific numbers of troops and their
roles," Colonel Warren, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, explained to
me. He did, however, note that there are approximately 5,500 Coalition
personnel from 17 partner nations including the United States conducting
advise and assist missions and training at "Building Partner Capacity
sites."
Despite the poor results of the prior training effort, even some of its
critics are hopeful that the current mission may succeed. "American advisors
could have a positive effect," Sepp, now a senior lecturer in defense
analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. He explained that a
pinpoint mission of training Iraqis to take back a particular city or defend
a specific area stands a real chance of success. Casey, his former boss,
agreed but insisted that such success would not come easily or quickly.
"This is going to take a long time. This is not a short-term thing. People
want to see ISIS defeated -- whatever that means -- quickly. But it's not
going to be 'quickly' because the problems are political more than military
and that's going to take the Iraqis some time to come to grips with."
Doomed to Repeat It?
History suggests that time is no panacea when Washington attempts to prop
up, advise, or build armies. In the early 1950s, the U.S. provided extensive
support to the French military in Indochina -- eventually footing nearly 80%
of the cost of its war there -- only to see that force defeated by a less
advanced, less well-equipped Vietnamese army. Not long after, the U.S. began
an expensive process that continued into the mid-1970s of building,
advising, equipping, and bankrolling the South Vietnamese military. In those
years, it ballooned into a million-man army, only to disintegrate two years
after the U.S. ended its own long, unsuccessful combat effort in that
country.
"The assumption that we know how to create armies in other parts of the
world is a pretty dubious proposition," Andrew Bacevich, a veteran of that
war, told me. "Yes, Vietnam was a vivid demonstration of a failed project to
build an effective army, but you don't even have to cite Vietnam. Iraq
obviously is another case. And more generally, the Pentagon exaggerates its
ability to create effective fighting forces in parts of the developing
world."
Indeed, recent U.S. training efforts around the globe have been marked by a
string of scandals, setbacks, and failures. Last year, for example, the
Obama administration scrapped a $500 million program to train anti-Islamic
State Syrian rebels. It was supposed to yield 15,000 fighters over three
years but instead produced only a few dozen. Then there's the 13-year, $65
billion effort in Afghanistan that has yielded a force whose rolls are
filled with nonexistent "ghost" troops, wracked by desertions, and hobbled
by increasing casualties. It has been unable to defeat a small, unpopular,
Taliban insurgency now growing in strength and reach. The short-term loss by
U.S.-backed Afghan forces of the city of Kunduz late last year and recent
Taliban gains in Helmand province have cast a bright light on this
slow-motion fiasco.
These efforts have hardly been anomalies. A U.S.-trained Congolese commando
battalion was, for example, implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes
and other atrocities. One effort to train Libyan militiamen ended up
stillborn; another saw militants repeatedly raid a U.S. training camp and
loot it of high-tech equipment, including hundreds of weapons; and still
another saw advisers run out of the country by a militia soon after touching
down. Then there were the U.S.-trained officers who overthrew their
governments in coups in Mali in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2014. In fact, a
December 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service noted:
"Recent events, particularly the battle between the Afghan government and
the Taliban over K[u]nduz, the inability of [Department of Defense]-led
efforts to produce more than a 'handful' of anti-Assad, anti-Islamic State
(IS) forces in Syria, and the collapse of U.S.-trained forces in Iraq in the
face of the Islamic State, have called into question -- including in the
Congress -- whether these [building partner capacity] programs can ever
achieve their desired effects."
Despite all of this, the Pentagon remains committed to creating another
Iraqi Army in the American mold with, as Colonel Warren recently explained
to me, "modern American equipment, modern conventional training, and of
course, supported by air power." The U.S. has, he notes, already spent $2.3
billion arming and equipping this new force.
Andrew Bacevich once again sees crucial flaws in the American plan. "Our
trainers, I suspect, are probably pretty good at imparting technical
skills... I'm sure that they can teach them marksmanship, how to conduct a
patrol, how to maintain their weapons, but I can't imagine that we have much
of a facility for imparting fighting spirit, sense of national unity, and
that's where Iraqi forces have been deficient. It's this will versus skill
thing. We can convey skills. I don't think we can convey will."
For his part, Secretary of Defense Carter seems singularly focused on the
skills side of the equation. "ISIL's lasting defeat still requires local
forces to fight and prevail on the ground. We can and will continue to
develop and enable such local forces," he told the House Armed Services
Committee in June 2015. "That's why [the Department of Defense] seeks to
bolster. Iraq's security forces to be capable of winning back, and then
defending and holding the ISIL-controlled portions of the Iraqi state." Last
month, Carter assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was still
"urging the Iraqi government to do more to recruit, train, arm, and mobilize
Sunni popular mobilization fighters in their communities."
This presumes, however, that there is a truly functioning Iraqi state in the
first place. Andrew Bacevich isn't so sure. "It may be time to admit that
there is no Iraq. We presume to be creating a national army that is willing
to fight for the nation of Iraq, but I don't think it's self-evident that
Iraq exists, except in the most nominal sense. If that's true, then further
efforts -- a second decade's worth of efforts to build an Iraqi army --
simply are not likely to pan out."
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S.
Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, as well as Kill Anything That Moves:
The Real American War in Vietnam. He has written for the New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing writer for the
Intercept.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176093
