An Army Lieutenant Colonel Explains Why The Iraq "Surge" Wasn't The Strategic Triumph It's Remembered As Being

Dereliction of Duty II

In Iraq, radical jihadists have captured key cities and infrastructure and the country appears to be spiraling into full-on sectarian war. So it's worth remembering that the U.S.'s apparently-successful effort to stabilize the country - the troop "surge" that began in 2007 - might not have been the triumph it's widely remembered as being.

In April of 2012, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis authored a blistering report on the deteriorating mission in Afghanistan and the lies told to the American public by some of its highest military officials.

The 84-page report is full of cogent arguments and vivid anecdotes that describe "the truth in regards to the genuine conditions on the ground in Afghanistan."

One section is dedicated to explaining how sending 30,000 surge troops to Afghanistan in early 2010 until late 2011 "was flawed before one boot hit Afghan dirt." In Davis's view, the 2007 Iraq surge only succeeded because the brutality of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) caused its allies to turn on them and not because of the "grossly inaccurate" claims that celebrated U.S. military leaders have propagated.

In early 2009, it was expected that the primary architects of the Iraq surge could duplicate their success in Afghanistan. This group included military leaders like General David Petraeus (then-commander of CENTCOM), new ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal and his principle deputy General David Rodriguez.

Lt. Col. Davis - who completed four combat deployments (Desert Storm, Afghanistan in 2005-06, Iraq in 2008-09, and Afghanistan again in 2010-11) - posits that the Afghan mission has been a immense failure because some of the most lauded military figures of the post-9/11 era "fundamentally failed to account for the main causal factor in explaining the success of the Iraq surge."

The widely-accepted story is that in 2006 - amid a fledgling war effort in which the Iraqis didn't trust U.S. soldiers, a civil war that U.S. policymakers didn't know how to stop, and a strategy to turn over control of the country to the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) as quickly as possible - Gen. Petraeus decided to implement a "protect the population" policy in which U.S. soldiers moved into Iraqi neighborhoods "24/7." This strategic shift supposedly earned the population's trust, convincing various Sunni insurgent groups to reconcile from their new position of weakness and "awaken" to join the cause of defeating al-Queda in Iraq (AQI).

According to this narrative, this "awakening" was just the development Iraq needed to break out of a mire of terrorism and violence and stabilize the country in preparation for the eventual exit of U.S. troops.

However, Davis cites "information that only a handful of English-speaking people have" - including the views of Iraqi Arabs who fought the U.S. with the insurgency or AQI and later became part of the Awakening programs - that provides considerable evidence that Petraeus's 2007 strategy in Iraq played no more than a supporting role.

Dereliction of Duty IILt. Col. Davis posing with members of the Iraqi Security Force in 2008.

From the report:

The version of events that depicted the lion's share of the causality going to superior US generalship and the adoption of the "protect the population" strategy was created and sustained by a number of key senior US generals. When the full facts are examined, however, it becomes very clear that the surge of troops in 2007 was instrumental at best and according to one senior ground commander who led much of our fight in the Anbar province, "75% to 80% of the credit" for the surge's success lies elsewhere. What really happened is that the "guerrilla war for liberation from the occupying Americans" supported across much of Iraq's Sunni population was put on hold after the Second Battle of Fallujah, which lasted from November 7 - December 23, 2004. After that confrontation, AQI raised the level of brutality against Sunnis, Shiites and Americans to an unimaginable level.

By mid-2006 AQI had alienated the locals so much that, despite their hatred for "the invading Americans," the Sunni population "would have worked with the devil to get rid of [AQI]," according to Former Iraqi General Najim al-Jibouri.

From the report:

The Bottom Iraqi Line: ... it was only the nearly two years of overt brutality and mindless slaughter inflicted on the Sunni community by its ostensible Sunni ally AQI that the Iraqi Sunnis were willing to revolt and instead partner with the US.

Two U.S. officers who fought during the surge told Davis that had this sectarian split not happened, there would have been no Anbar Awakening.

In fact, the two U.S. commanders who were most instrumental in getting Iraq's Sunnis to switch sides - Col. Sean MacFarland, who led of the Anbar Awakening, and Lt. Col. Dale Kuel with the Baghdad-centric Sons of Iraq program - confirmed to Davis that the U.S.'s change in tactics played only a supporting role in the American military campaign's seemingly successful outcome.

Nevertheless, some of the most influential U.S. combat commanders who led the surge efforts - including Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal - championed the idea that superior American strategy led to the Anbar Awakening.

The failure to acknowledge the main cause of the Iraq surge's success led to a similar strategy in Afghanistan that "never had a chance to succeed" but was applied because the plan was "so powerfully advocated by the military heavyweights any President would have been hard pressed to oppose." The Afghanistan surge took place despite the fact that it was to be implemented in "a dramatically different environment and culture and against a very different enemy" than the one in Iraq.

It turned out that despite the U.S.'s 94,000 to 100,000 military personnel on the ground in Afghanistan from May 2010 through December 2011, violence continued to rise at almost the same rate as between 2005 and the summer of 2011.

Dereliction of Duty IICommander of the Afghan Border Police detachment in Kunar Province.

From the report: [As] a result, our country has squandered almost a full decade in which it might have made noteworthy advancements in its force structure, has continued pursuing a military strategy that has proven to be an abysmal failure during a time when effective outcomes might have been found, and worst of all, has cost the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of American Service Members - and reportedly deprived hundreds of thousands more of their psychological and emotional well-being. Davis asserts that the U.S. military leaders advocated a flawed strategy in Afghanistan. And they should have known better, because of the experience of the surge in Iraq. From the report: The inaccurate assigning of the reason for the 2007 Iraq surge's success has profound implications for our current war in Afghanistan and doubly so for the surge forces ordered by the President ... Had the President known the truth of what really happened in 2007 Iraq it is a virtual certainty he would not have made the decision he did in November/December 2009.

Now check out Davis describing the true conditions on the ground in Afghanistan >