Letting Iraqis step in

As second anniversary of the War in Iraq arrives, the U.S. struggles to determine the most effective exit strategy from the war-torn country

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS | WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

March 21, 2005

WASHINGTON - Rear Adm. William Sullivan, a top military planner, struggled last week at a House subcommittee hearing to explain how the Pentagon's estimates of Iraqi security forces keep dropping.

A chart showed a steady rise in Iraqi forces from 90,000, in October 2003, to 206,000 in April 2004. Suddenly there was a precipitous drop to 132,000.

The reason, Sullivan said, was that the U.S. had been counting police and soldiers who were on the payroll, as opposed to those actually reporting for duty.

With a new training program in place, the number climbed back up to 160,000 in August. But in September it dropped again to 90,000. This time, Sullivan said, officials decided not to count forces that had not yet been equipped, and to stop including night watchmen.

Now, Sullivan said, the number is back up to 142,472. But that figure, too, is misleading, Sullivan admitted, because tens of thousands are absent without leave at any given time.

The information was too much for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).

"This is like fantasyland," he said. "This is as fictive as the weapons of mass destruction are."

The number in the security forces is key to the Bush administration's exit strategy, which is largely based on standing up enough Iraqis in uniform to fight the powerful -- and by every account highly intelligent -- Iraqi insurgency. The number of insurgents is estimated at 18,000 fighters, with as many as 200,000 active or passive supporters.

A top Army general estimated last week that U.S. troops could begin withdrawing from Iraq early next year, as Iraqis start taking over the Americans' functions. Gen. Richard Cody, Army vice chief of staff, told reporters that the success of the recent Iraqi elections, U.S. military victories against the insurgents and "the rapid growth of the Iraqi national guard and the Iraqi Army" would make that possible.

The subcommittee heard testimony that Iraqi officers themselves are optimistic about their ability to take over from the United States in the near term.

But the effort to reach the goal of 273,000 Iraqis with combat capability has been bumbling from the start, and military experts say it is still unclear whether or when large numbers of capable fighters might be in the field.

The administration took heart from the effective performance of hundreds of Iraqi fighters in Fallujah last fall. But experts on the Iraqi military say the units involved were mostly from the experienced and politically problematic Kurdish militia, not from newly trained Iraqi Army soldiers.

At the same time in the same battle, U.S. Marines and soldiers were fighting an equal number of Iraqi National Guard troops who had turned against them, according to Kalev Sepp, a counter-insurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

"They were fighting Iraqis who were trained and equipped by Americans to fight the Americans," Sepp said in an interview.

Sepp said the U.S. military had concluded that 70 percent of the police in Anbar province, which includes Fallujah and other trouble spots, are insurgents or sympathizers.

"One infiltrator with access to intelligence [can give the enemy] forewarning," Sepp said. "How does that degrade a unit's effectiveness? This has to be accounted for."

The United States began training Iraqi forces in the summer of 2003, after Saddam Hussein's army was defeated and disbanded. It hired Vinnell Corp. in Virginia to oversee the training at a cost of $48 million.

But more than half the first battalion of 900 troops deserted or quit. U.S. military officers soon decided that civilian training was ineffective. Within months they had discharged Vinnell and taken over the training themselves, put newly trained Iraqis to work as trainers or sent recruits to Jordan.

But the United States concluded that this second stage was not effective either. The training was decentralized and therefore highly variable and the Iraqis were ineffective because they did not have enough experience, according to testimony at the hearing last week. Most problematic of all, the Iraqi Army was trained to fight an external threat from a conventional army, not insurgents.

Finally, last year the Pentagon named Gen. David Petraeus, who had been highly successful in the initial invasion, to take over the training, increased funding for it, and assigned hundreds of experienced officers to Iraqi units.

Some experts believe the new effort is finally bringing results, at least within the small core of the new Iraqi Army, a force of just 14,000 which is being merged with the much less reliable Iraqi National Guard of 37,000. While army recruits were carefully vetted and better trained, National Guard units received little vetting and haphazard training, according to many experts on the Iraqi military.

Within the army are several thousand Special Forces troops and a counter-terrorism force that have already proved effective, experts say.

The nation's police force of 55,000 -- also counted by the Pentagon as "Iraqi security forces" -- has received training of as little as three weeks and is ill-equipped to fight insurgents, experts agree.

The police are under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, as opposed to the army, which is part of the Ministry of Defense. (The Iraqi "air force" has just 186 men, and the Navy 517.) But also reporting to Interior are 27,000 other forces of various types, some of which are elite units starting to conduct effective raids against insurgents. These include a small SWAT team, paramilitary police forces and commandos.

According to Peter Khalil, a former civilian in the Coalition Authority in Baghdad, the U.S. intends to have 25,000 such special forces -- a combination of army and internal security troops -- trained to fight insurgents in the police and army by the end of next year.

One danger, Khalil said, is that the Special Forces may become too powerful, giving whoever controls the Ministry of Interior the ability to intimidate other political or ethnic groups.

Another looming danger mentioned by subcommittee chairman Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) is that the Shia and the Kurds, the two dominant groups in the new Iraqi government, intend to conduct a new purge of Shia or Sunnis who were members of Hussein's Baath Party.

While experts say that proper vetting of the security services to root out insurgents is of prime importance, they add that a political purge, particularly in the officer corps, will be highly disruptive.

Perhaps the most optimistic witness at last week's hearing of the Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on national security was Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and expert on Iraq, who has been among the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration's handling of the war's aftermath.

In an informal survey of Iraqi officers, Cordesman found that while they acknowledged all these problems in the past, "most believe that Iraqi forces are growing steadily better with time, will acquire the experience and quality to deal with much of the insurgency during 2005, and should be able to secure much of the country by 2006," with support from U.S. forces.