Atlanta Journal Constitution July 30, 2006
Building Iraqis' trust a difficult mission
Progress in Iraqi town fades since Georgia Guard unit headed home
By Moni Basu, Ron Martz
Soon after Doraville's police chief, Lt. Col. John King, arrived with his soldiers in Iraq's treacherous Triangle of Death last summer, they set about the civilian task of nation-building.
Within months, the Georgia Army National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team began earning trust from the residents in Mahmudiyah, a small, rural town 45 minutes south of Baghdad that had become notorious for insurgent attacks and criminal activity.
The citizen soldiers knew that the key to their success would be their ability to nurture relationships with the Iraqi people.
"They were telling us where the bad guys were, where the IEDs [improvised explosive devices, or makeshift bombs] were put in so that we could destroy them instead of hitting them," said Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, commander of the 48th Brigade.
But, after just five months on the job, the Army replaced the Georgians in Mahmudiyah and southwest Baghdad.
Brigade officers found themselves handing over control to the 101st Airborne Division, the storied regular Army unit out of Fort Campbell, Ky., that has a well-respected history dating back to the beaches of Normandy.
What happened after the 101st Airborne units moved in, however, has raised questions among military analysts about what type of combat unit is best suited for Iraq.
The 48th Brigade's 1st Battalion of the 108th Armor Regiment, a unit that had roughly 800 soldiers, suffered six deaths in the Mahmudiyah area — three of them from non-combat vehicle accidents. By comparison, the two 101st battalions of about 1,400 soldiers patrolling the same area have been hit hard, losing 35 soldiers in eight months.
Additionally, U.S. military officials have opened investigations into two incidents involving 101st Airborne soldiers and the deaths of Iraqi civilians, one of them in the Mahmudiyah area.
It would be impossible to pinpoint exactly why violence has escalated in Mahmudiyah since the 48th's departure. Both the U.S. military and the insurgents are known to commonly change tactics in Iraq's war of one-upmanship. And in recent months, spiraling sectarian violence has contributed to the chaos.
But as the United States tries to shift more of the burden for Iraq's defense onto the Iraqi army and police, some have questioned whether reservists — part-time soldiers who are generally older and bring more life experience to their military jobs — are more appropriate than their regular military counterparts for a counterinsurgency mission.
"I think by the nature of the beast, most National Guard forces are better in what actually needs to be done," said Piers Wood, a retired lieutenant colonel whose 28 years in the Army included duty in the Vietnam War.
"The last person who should be running a town and having meetings with the mayor is a West Point colonel. Not because he's not bright but because nowhere along the line have they developed the requisite skills for running a municipality or understanding what goes on in an economy," said Wood, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-area military watchdog organization.
King said the skill sets his soldiers brought to the combat zone were essential.
"The fact that my guys are older has a lot of resonance in the Arab community because they respect age and maturity," he said. "All the experience the Georgia Guard has gotten on dealing with national disasters and dealing with chiefs of police and local mayors — my brothers in active duty don't get those opportunities."
War not all about fighting
Military officials won't say why the 48th Brigade was replaced less than halfway into its deployment. But there was concern within the National Guard and Congress that citizen soldiers were bearing too much of the load in Iraq.
At one point last year, U.S. troops in Iraq drew 40 percent of their numbers from the National Guard and Army Reserve. The Department of Defense estimates that now has dropped to 20 percent.
Wood said the decreasing dependence on reservists is counterintuitive. They believe aggressive operations by combat-centric soldiers have escalated a primarily political battle that requires a vast amount of noncombat skills.
"In a counterinsurgency, aggression just gets you deeper in trouble," Wood said. "You are going to create more enemies than you are able to kill."
U.S. military officials are developing a new counterinsurgency manual, the first in more than 20 years, designed to aid troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A draft copy of the manual was posted recently on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that researches issues of global security and nuclear arms control. It appears to make the case that Iraq and Afghanistan require more nation-building skills to support the local government than combat skills.
Co-written by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne on the initial invasion of Iraq and later led the training of Iraqi security forces, the manual indicates the U.S. military has forgotten the counterinsurgency techniques it learned in Vietnam.
In one section titled The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is, the co-authors write, "The more force applied, the greater the chance of collateral damage and mistakes. It also increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda to portray lethal military activities as brutal. The precise and discriminate use of force also strengthens the rule of law that needs to be established."
Officials with the 101st in Iraq declined to answer questions about the division's tactics and procedures. Maj. Frank Garcia, spokesman for the 101st in Baghdad, said in an e-mail response to questions that he could not comment on such issues "due to the sensitivities of the ongoing investigations in our area."
Military officials are looking into an incident involving 101st soldiers — four soldiers still with the division and one former GI. They are accused of rape and murder in the death of a teenage girl in the Yusufiyah area, near Mahmudiyah, in March, and of then burning her body and killing three members of her family to conceal the crime. If convicted, all could face the death penalty. A fifth soldier has been charged with dereliction of duty for alleged failure to report what happened.
The Army has charged three 101st soldiers in connection with the killing of three Iraqi men in custody near Samarra.
The investigations and casualties have taken their toll on the 101st, whose soldiers were among the first to parachute behind enemy lines on D-Day — heroics recounted in historian Stephen Ambrose's book "Band of Brothers."
Cal Posner, a Marietta man who served in Vietnam with the 101st and is now the secretary of the Georgia chapter of the 101st Airborne Division Association, called the recent drumbeat of bad news "discouraging."
He said the young soldiers are trained to fight, not to be ambassadors or policemen.
"I'm surprised things haven't started happening on a larger scale," he said. "That speaks well of the leadership that it hasn't."
Still, given the pervasive bloodshed in Iraq, some military analysts interviewed for this article argued that well-honed combat skills override all else.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey praised the efforts of the 48th Brigade as a "capable force for peacekeeping missions" but said the 101st Airborne was sent into the Mahmudiyah area with the objective of quelling the violence.
"There was a widespread belief that we had to break up insurgency havens, including south of Baghdad, to make sure we did not end up with open rebellions," said McCaffrey, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and now a consultant and West Point professor who has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. "So the 101st had a different mission than the 48th."
But that did not exempt the 101st soldiers from picking up the noncombat missions the 48th Brigade left behind. They, like other Army units, were required to deal with local leaders and their problems.
Overall violence up
Officers of the 48th said their replacements have not been able to continue the nation-building gains the brigade made.
"It was calming down when we left," Rodeheaver, the 48th commander, said of the Mahmudiyah area. "It seems to have intensified in the last few months."
Overall violence soared in Iraq after the February bombing of a major mosque in Samarra fueled anger between Sunnis and Shiites. But Rodeheaver also said the 101st has suffered because it is a light infantry unit that does not have the heavy tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that the 48th Brigade used. And, said Rodeheaver, the Iraqi people may not have taken to the 101st soldiers.
He said the biggest challenge for the 101st was that they had to start from scratch in building trust with the local Iraqis.
"I think the Iraqi people don't have a relationship with the American Army — they have a relationship with the people they meet," Rodeheaver said.
He added that the 101st soldiers might have been targeted specifically because of their participation in the 2003 invasion and its aftermath.
Iraqis, said journalist and Middle East expert Sandra Mackey, live in the most tribal of Arab societies and have long memories. The sheiks and town leaders Rodeheaver dealt with remembered the Eagle patch worn on the left arm by 101st soldiers when the unit was forced to take much more aggressive battlefield action in the first months of the war.
"Revenge is a very, very powerful motivation in Arab society," said Mackey, who spent time in Iraq researching her book "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein."
Rodeheaver said it was not easy to earn the trust of Iraqis in the Mahmudiyah area. He and his officers attended local council meetings and spent hours chatting with sheiks.
Within a few months of the brigade's departure, insurgents started to pick off key Iraqi leaders whom the 48th soldiers had worked with in Mahmudiyah. The city's mayor and a popular Iraqi Army battalion commander were assassinated, and a police official was killed by a roadside bomb, King said.
Recently, gunmen killed at least 50 people, mostly Shiites, in a brutal attack on the market in Mahmudiyah.
Based on the increased insurgent attacks in that area, King said he suspects "there was not a lot of progress" diplomatically between the 101st and Sunni tribes after the Georgians left.
"There were a lot of attacks out there and air assaults and things like that," King said of the U.S. military's efforts to wipe out the insurgency. "But I don't know if we really went down there and put the economic and political might of the American Army behind changing attitudes."
Staff writer Jeremy Redmon and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
© Copyright 2006, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
