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Like Chicken and Ham, Peachy

What did Peachy Carnahan tell Daniel Dravot, the Man Who Would Be King?

“For Gord’s sake, leave the women alone!  … Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o’ women.”   

Australian LTC David Kilcullen, having just ended his tour as counterinsurgency advisor to Gen. Petraeus, reports that women have been the undoing of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt:  

Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ’s standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so “embedding” the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me “we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa’ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it’s hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.”) Well, indeed.

But this time, the tactic seems to have backfired.

It isn’t just the women. Turns out AQ failed to grasp other key aspects of Iraqi society, as did another major foreign player in Iraq. Kilcullen states that the marginalization of AQI also could have the effect of marginalizing the Shiite militias … a revolt of the center against both extremes, as he puts it, no longer reliant on extremists for protection from extremists. 

Having said all that, it is clear that the tribal revolt could still go either way.

The strategic logic, from our point of view, is relatively straightforward. Our dilemma in Iraq is, and always has been, finding a way to create a sustainable security architecture that does not require the “coalition-in-the-loop”, thereby allowing Iraq to stabilize and the coalition to disengage in favorable strategic circumstances. But taking the coalition out of the loop and into “overwatch” requires balancing competing armed interest groups, at the national and local level. These are currently not in balance, due in part to the sectarian bias of certain players and institutions of the new Iraqi state, which promotes a belief by Sunnis that they will be permanent victims in the new Iraq.

…

The implications of the tribal revolt have been somewhat overlooked by the news media and in the public debate in Coalition capitals. In fact, the uprising represents very significant political progress toward reconciliation at the grass-roots level, and major security progress in marginalizing extremists and reducing civilian deaths. It also does much to redress the lack of coalition forces that has hampered previous counterinsurgency approaches, by throwing tens of thousands of local allies into the balance, on our side. For these reasons, the tribal revolt is arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment for several years. But because it occurred in ways that were neither expected nor accounted for in our “benchmarks” (which were formulated before the uprising began to really develop, and which tend to focus on national legislative developments at the central government and political party level rather than grass-roots changes in the quality of life of ordinary Iraqis) the significance of this development has been overlooked to some extent.

Read the whole thing here.  

Topics: Iraq, al qaeda

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:53 am on Sunday, September 2, 2007

One Response to “Like Chicken and Ham, Peachy”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   September 2nd, 2007 at 1:20 pm

   Nobody ever said working your way out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first was going to be fast and easy.

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