Anbar safer but critics query the cost

Financial Times
By Roula Khalaf in London
Published: September 7 2007 21:10


Sunni Arab tribes’ decision to co-operate with the US against al-Qaeda has allowed George W. Bush to point to some progress in next week’s assessment of his military ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq.
It was in Anbar, the western Sunni heartland, that the president dramatically staged his war council on Monday as his officials hailed the province’s transformation from a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold to what Mr Bush called ‘one of the safest places in Iraq’.
But analysts warn that the arming and financing of local tribes – a pattern the US hopes to export to other parts of the country – could have more damaging long-term consequences, contributing to the fragmentation of Iraq and an even more brutal civil conflict.
‘The Americans have dampened Anbar but they are accepting that the Iraqi government cannot do it – and the US military is now essentially circumventing the Iraqi government,’ says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary College in London. ‘The policy is successful in the short term but it will directly damage state-building in the long term.’
Once part of the nationalist Sunni insurgency against the American occupation, some of the Sunni Arab tribes dominant in Anbar have grown increasingly frustrated with the extremism of al-Qaeda and have turned instead to the US for support.
Analysts say it was about a year ago – long before the injection of extra US troops in the ‘surge’ – that signs of a change in attitude emerged, encouraging the US to help organise them as a more robust paramilitary force that can fight al-Qaeda.
Advisers to the US-led coalition say the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad was suspicious of the tribes and reluctant to help them. The US military, however, was receptive to the “bottom up” approach of fighting the insurgency by backing locals, even more so today because the central government has been paralysed.
In the short-term the US strategy has at least created a nascent local authority in a region that has been most chaotic since the 2003 invasion. US military officials acknowledge the long-term political concerns but say the Anbar fighters will be integrated into the national security forces. They say this is already happening, though not at a pace that they would call a success.
But although Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, was summoned by Mr Bush to Anbar to show support for the policy, Shia politicians have been alarmed by the US promotion of tribal paramilitary groups.
‘It’s one of the biggest mistakes the US has made in Iraq – it subjugates Iraqi domestic problems to American domestic policies,’ charges a Shia politician who asks to remain anonymous. ‘The US wants quick fixes now and it needs to show some progress. But the tribes are a militia and they could be used as such in the future.’
Joost Hiltermann, Iraq analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, says the co-operation with Sunni tribes was advocated by his organisation in 2004, but adopting the strategy today is ‘way too late’.
Three years ago, he argues, al-Qaeda was still dominated by foreign fighters and Shia militias had not yet launched their campaign against Sunni groups. Now, al-Qaeda has expanded and has been ‘Iraqified’ and while it has been pushed out of Anbar, it has not been ‘defeated’.
The Sunni tribes, he says, are not a movement that could deliver the Sunni community in any meaningful reconciliation deal. Their loyalties also could easily shift again. ‘When the Americans leave, these people have to face Shia militias so they will turn back to al-Qaeda,’ says Mr Hiltermann.
With the Kurds in the north reliant on their own security forces – the peshmergas – and Shia political groups running their own militias, the emergence of armed Sunni tribal groups has raised fears that the US is accelerating the sort of ‘soft partition’ been advocated by some US politicians.
More alarming, say analysts, is that the US could end up backing militias that are fighting rivals within their own communities. Shia militias are already vying for control of southern provinces in Iraq, sometimes with bloody consequences.
‘Because of the failure of the central government and the US embassy in Baghdad, you have the military running with political strategy, and basing it on security,’ says an adviser to the US-led coalition. ‘The Americans are taking sides in an internecine conflict. This speeds up the fragmentation of Iraq.’
Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington