OPERATION IMPOSING LAW (Fardh Al-Qanoon)
AS has been against the plus-up, without ever really enumerating or specifying exactly why, that I remember. It was so frustrating that I actually took the time to outline all the ways in which people were suggesting that a plus-up would not work, with an emphasis that there are answers to all of that.
So far, there is tentative evidence that the threat of more troops, more troops, or the different tactical realignment of troops is negatively correlated with violence. (If it holds, this has grave implications for prior force-level assessments.)
MEASURING INCHES WITH A YARDSTICK
The harder, forward-looking truth is that counter-insurgency operations probably need to be measured in long periods of time, of 12 to 18 months, time for an entire cycle of action-reaction-counteraction to have taken place. Unless there is obvious political and economic progress over the course of a cycle, the circumstances for further chunks of time of that size seem small, given the sense of the Congress votes this week on the budget and notwithstanding the Army's own internal ticking-clock centered around just how many consecutive deployments our soldiers can handle (probably more than we think, but still).
"HOLD" THIS
Recalling that the stated reason for the surge was to do better with "hold", in clear-hold-build, today, there was a massive car-bomb in Tal Afar, which has been cleared (at least once). This suggests that insurgents and/or al-qaeda can still strike at will, wherever.
INFORMATION DEPRIVATION, YEAR FIVE OPENERS
As has been the case throughout the conflict, secrecy - the "classified war" - make real assessment impossible. One bombing doesn't necessarily imply "lost". Without systematic statistics on the violence provided by the government, almost all analysis is relegated to ad hoc.
Looking to ad-hoc reports, however, there does appear to be some indication that folks like Omar at Iraq the Model blog have some color back in their cheeks. There is some serious blowback against al-qaeda going on inside the country, from Iraqis. Of course, that is only one element of instability, but it is certainly an encouraging development in this real-time, bullet-by-bullet struggle within Islam that is worth remarking. As Omar blogs it:
The clash between the tribe and the mosque was inevitable. For centuries and since the early days of Islam the two institutions squabbled for power and dominance and while tribe sheiks are diplomats by nature and always seek to resole conflicts and find compromises between the two sides of a conflict, clerics, especially extreme ones, do not recognize the idea of compromise; to them there is halal and haram (or allowed and forbidden) with absolutely no gray area in between whatsoever.
Iraq and the western part in particular is a very tribal community and so the increased influence and interference of clerics became a serious threat to the position of sheiks. Sheiks are more businessmen than ideological leaders, like my tribe's sheik put it once "the hell with them [clerics] we want to live like normal people and all they care about is death".
companion reader link to AS
