“What if they threw a war and nobody came?”

It is widely recognized now that the U.S. should have committed far larger military forces to Iraq than it did, in order to quickly subdue the Sunni and Al Qaeda insurgencies and provide security for more speedy reconstruction. This may be excused by the equally widely recognized failure to expect such an externally and internally well-financed and led insurgency.

What has been less focused upon, until lately, is the failure to build and commit the necessary pacification and reconstruction civilian forces necessary to success even at the lower expected insurgency level.

The senior editor of New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, (subscription registration required) asks, “What if they threw a war and nobody came?” Kaplan’s inquiry is because, as he ponders:

In a counterinsurgency whose main thrust ought to be nonmilitary, the full force and expertise of the U.S. government is nowhere to be seen in Iraq. Were the combined resources of the State Department, the Justice Department, and other government agencies actually brought to bear in this war, things in Iraq might have turned out much differently.

Instead, we’ve depended upon hard-working, well-meaning, and often but unevenly effective U.S. military officers in the field. However,

Few of the officers engaged in tribal diplomacy have the benefit of any formal training, most aren’t even civil affairs officers.

Kaplan misses some important points in his critique, which I’ll return to, but his core difficulty with the level of commitment from civilian agencies is central.

Kaplan points out the corrective:

Hence, the logic of the civilian-led PRT’s – unveiled in 2005 to, in the words of a State Department cable, “assist Iraq’s provincial government with developing a transparent and sustained capability to govern…promoting political and economic development, and providing the provincial administration necessary to meet the basic needs of the population.”…the Army now supplies most of the manpower for the PRT’s. Persuading their civilian counterparts to show up is another matter.

Six months after they were unveiled, the PRT’s had attracted all of twelve job applicants from the State Department, according to The Washington Post, and only one of those was qualified….[C]ivilian agencies have declined to revive the Vietnam-era practice of compulsory war-zone assignments.

Kaplan compares this to what occurred with a similar mandate in Vietnam, where the ambassadorial level CORDS director,

dispatched nearly 8,000 civilian and military advisors to fan out across South Vietnam’s provinces….one of every 25 State department/USAID employees was deployed to Vietnam as part of CORDS, versus roughly one out of every 300 today in the Iraqi PRT’s.

Further, tours then were 12-18 months, versus 3-6 months today.

Kaplan concludes:

Never mind the government’s well-chronicled failure to mobilize the public for war. The government can’t even mobilize itself.

Kaplan’s critique suffers from an overly facile comparison to the CORDS operations in Vietnam, clarification of which doesn’t negate his core point but makes it more potent.

CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), the pacification program, in Vietnam was a large-scale endeavor, as Kaplan stresses, under ambassador Robert Komer from May 1967 serving as a deputy to military commander General Westmoreland. Gains in population under control were slim, mostly coming from refugees moving to government areas for security or jobs. When General Abrams assumed command, after the decimation of the Viet Cong during Tet 1968, strategy shifted to a “one war” coordinative emphasis, in which counterinsurgency and pacification, clear-and-hold, were emphasized above larger-scale search-and-destroy. The more able William Colby became the pacification czar, working closely with Abrams to take advantage of the reduced enemy presence in order to eliminate enemy base areas by flooding them with military forces, eliminating the enemy’s “shadow government,” and supporting self-help, self-defense and self-government by the Vietnamese government. The program was largely successful, leaving the North Vietnamese to large-scale conventional offensives, turned back with American military support in 1972 but, then, successful in 1975 when Congress forbid the promised U.S. military supplies and support that was part of South Vietnam’s U.S. designed defense.

In short, there were three key ingredients that changed after 1968: The strategy shifted toward a greater emphasis on counterinsurgency; The leadership of pacification was more effective and effectively coordinated with the military; and, The enemy presence was far reduced.

Today, in Iraq, our strategy is shifting toward a greater emphasis on counterinsurgency and, temporarily at least, the Sadr-Shia presence is subdued and in hiding. That provides a window of opportunity to replace their influence in Baghdad with a reformist government presence. Remaining, weakened Baathist-Sunni insurgents, with little place to retreat, continue their attacks, but are being cleared from Baghdad and Anbar.

Comparable problems existed in South Vietnam as in Iraq from highly uneven quality of military and civilian leaders. But, although there were intrigues among leaders and commanders in Saigon that reduced abilities to reform local or divisional leadership, the sectarian divisions within Iraq are far more divisive and hindering, indeed are at the center of challenges.

Back to the issue of the Provisional Reconstruction Teams (PRT) in Iraq, what is also different today than in Vietnam is, as Kaplan stresses, the almost utter failure to mount a large-scale pacification and leadership building effort, or to coordinate and integrate it with the overall strategy.

The idea of PRT’s was only introduced to Iraq in October 2005. Although recognizing the earnestness of some early efforts, the October 2006 audit report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found:

Many obstacles have been overcome, but many remain, such as the ever-changing security situation, the difficulty of integrating civilian and military personnel, the lack of a finalized agreement [between State and Defense Departments] on PRT operational requirements and responsibilities, a lag in funding resources, and the difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified civilian personnel….Given the security situation, the PRT’s and the local governance satellite offices have varying degrees of ability to carry out their missions. Specifically, of the 9 PRT’s and 4 satellite offices that we reviewed [of 10 PRT’s and 8 satellite offices],4 were generally able, 4 were somewhat able, 3 were less able, and 2 were generally unable to carry out their PRT missions….[T]he lack of specific guidance led to confusion about civilian-military roles at PRT’s.

Nonetheless, the audit reported that at the local level, “in general the civilian and military organizations within the PRT’s are effectively working together.”

A PRT is targeted to have up to 100 U.S. and 30 local members. According to the audit, “To compensate for the lack of civilians, DoD stepped up and provided numerous military civil affairs personnel to fill the void for many of the vacant PRT Program positions, such as local government, economic, and agriculture advisors.” As of September 29, 2006, the audit found only 60% of the 128 civilian PRT slots filled. The audit found, also, “The PRT’s lacked funding and logistical supply resources.” Part of the lack was due to Congress requiring a detailed funding plan from State, delivered in October 2006.

The Iraq Study Group report told of civilian agencies having trouble filling positions with qualified candidates and recommended directed assignments, as during Vietnam, that greater coordination across agencies is a critical need, and that State needs to “train personnel to carry out civilian tasks associated with a complex stability operation outside of the traditional embassy setting….Other key civilian agencies, including Treasury, Justice, and Agriculture, need to create similar technical assistance capabilities.”

The day after President Bush’s speech of January 10 for a new operations strategy for Iraq that included an increase in PRT’s to 20, Secretary of State Rice announced, that a retired Foreign Service officer with experience in Vietnam was named as coordinator for Iraq reconstruction. The choice seems worthy, but it’s telling that State had to reach so deep into its bench to find qualifications.

The New York Times reported in early February 2007 that,

Senior military officers, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have told President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the new Iraq strategy could fail unless more civilian agencies step forward quickly to carry out plans for reconstruction and political development.

The State Department raised eyebrows at a Senate hearing with its request for Defense to fill more than a third of the 350 new State Department slots required for Iraq, adding to the 140 Foreign service officers in Baghdad and 50 currently with PRT’s.

Although a seasoned veteran of such posts, the institutional resistance within State to being more field active could be seen in new Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte telling the Foreign Service’s latest graduating class on February 20, of which only 4 of 75 are going to Iraq, that such “hardship” posts are good career moves.

The Congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace briefing of February 2007 on Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq brings us up to date:

Lack of established goals and information on completed projects made it difficult to determine whether PRTs were achieving "success," or whether better results would be obtained by using an alternative approach. Although it had the inter-agency lead, the State Department has not yet done an assessment to determine if PRTs are achieving their purpose.

In sum, decades after our painfully learned, then forgotten, Vietnam experience, and over three years into our latest painful learning experience in Iraq, we are just at the start of a lesser pacification effort, understaffed, underexperienced, and undermeasured.

Many commentators predict that any new public patience with our Iraq presence provided by the President’s new directions will run out by this summer. Congressional Democrats aren’t even willing to wait that long to hamstring our efforts. The grossly inadequate interagency participation or contribution to the war is an under-commented factor, and measures to correct it for Iraq or other future needs are negligent.

As Lawrence Kaplan concluded, “The government can’t even mobilize itself.”