Iraq Report: Too Soon to Judge the Surge

The surge is failing, according to the New York Times. The U.S. has fallen short of securing Baghdad by July, and the Iraq security forces have been hopelessly infiltrated by Shiia militias.

The Times's conclusion is based on a one-page memo. The memo, actually a status update on the situation in Baghdad, was never intended to serve as a full report on the progress of the Baghdad Security Plan. But that didn't stop the New York Times from characterizing the memo as such.

Staff Sgt. Kevin Nettnin conducts a dismounted
patrol to assess the progress of security measures in the
Al Dora market area of Baghdad, May 25.

The article's entire premise seems to be the statement of a single, unnamed senior American military officer, who claims the architects of the Baghdad Security Plan "assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July... so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed." As Fredrick Kagan has noted in THE DAILY STANDARD, this rosy assessment was made by General Casey, the outgoing commander of Multinational Forces Iraq. But the current military leadership in Baghdad has never made this claim.

I contacted General David Petraeus yesterday and asked him if July was a realistic target date to secure Baghdad. "I've never assumed we'd have Baghdad under control by July," he stated. He also reiterated something he has been saying since January: that it would be late summer before he and his commanders had a sense of how the surge was progressing.

The Times goes on to report, "The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to 'protect the population' and ‘maintain physical influence over' only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods." But it is unclear exactly what the Times means by "neighborhoods," since Baghdad only has 89 neighborhoods that are referred to as such. Still the overall percentages are not in dispute. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver confirmed earlier today that less than a third of Baghdad can be considered "secure."

However, the context for this data in the Times article is misleading.

"In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face 'resistance,'" the Times notes. Of the 311 remaining "neighborhoods," the Times does not tell us which have a U.S. or Iraqi presence, how many have been the focus of clearing operations, the number in which security is marginal, the number in which security forces are altogether absent, or the intensity of the "resistance" where it is found.

In the proper context, that news that "less than one-third of Baghdad is secured" hardly suggests the surge is so far an abject failure. According to the military, a secure area is one where security is considered tight and where reconstruction is moving forward. This is a high-threshold definition. And saying that two-thirds of the city are less than "secure" doesn't tell the rest of the story.

The first three months of the surge involved moving five additional combat brigades into the city and the outlying belts, from which al Qaeda is launching its attacks into the city. The final brigade is still moving into position, and the other four are just now adapting to the situation on the ground.

The Times article then mentions problems in western Baghdad, particularly the Rashid district. Western Baghdad is one of the most hotly contested areas of the city. It is an area where Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army has battled al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgent groups for control. U.S. and Iraqi forces have just begun clearing operations in that region. In one western neighborhood, Amiriyah, local residents, backed by Sunni insurgent groups, a team from the Anbar Salvation Council, and U.S. forces, began their own clearing operation to eject al Qaeda from the area.