The Iraq war archive, taken as a whole with its details of incidents small and large, offers a cautionary postscript for the current military strategy in Afghanistan.
That same strategy, based on an infusion of additional troops, is often credited with rescuing Iraq. The American military applied it and turned around an increasingly hopeless war, according to one narrative. And while it is true that the additional troops offered better security, the reports in the archive suggest that the approach was also successful because many Iraqis were ready for it.
A unique set of conditions had coalesced on the ground. The warring communities were exhausted from the frenzy of killing. Mixed neighborhoods and cities were largely cleansed. The militias, both Sunni and Shiite, long seen as defenders of their communities, had begun to cannibalize them, making local residents newly receptive to American overtures.
The war that emerges from the documents is a rapidly changing set of circumstances with its own logic and arc, whose fluidity was underestimated by the military, the media and Washington policy makers. The troop increase, devised and led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is now the commander in Afghanistan, came around the time that many Iraqis were so fed up with their local militias that they were ready to risk cooperating with the Americans by giving them information. Two years earlier, they were not.
That is not to say that the troop increase, commonly known as the surge, and the accompanying strategic changes, were unimportant. On the contrary, that risky gamble was central in initiating the reduction in violence. Without it, Iraqis would have been stuck.
Taken together, the archives from Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that each war has had its own alchemy. Now General Petraeus is confronting a far different society. It remains to be seen whether Pashtun society is ready to resist the Taliban, as Sunnis were in Iraq, whether tribal leaders in Afghanistan are strong enough to lead that resistance or whether the Taliban and a deeply discredited central government are ready to reconcile. Afghanistan is a poorer, far less literate and centralized country than Iraq; each valley is its own nation, a patchwork that makes it tricky to apply any policy nationwide.
In Iraq, Americans expected to be hailed as liberators, but they were resented as occupiers, and Iraqis eventually turned to the Americans largely out of exhaustion and despair. In Afghanistan, Americans were welcomed at first, but as the war dragged on, Afghans lost faith in the Americans’ ability to protect them — and it is unclear whether that faith can be restored. The lesson of Iraq is that without it, no strategy, however well conceived, can be successful.
If Afghanistan is a war of small cuts, Iraq was a gash. In the war’s bloodiest months, according to the archive’s reports, more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying, more than 10 times the current civilian casualty rate in Afghanistan, a country with a larger population.
The reports read like nightmares. In January 2005, a human head was thrown from an Opel Omega into the Mufrek traffic circle in the city of Baquba. The next month, 47 workers from a brick factory were found murdered north of Baghdad. One report noted that a discovery of six bodies at a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad was the third such episode at the same plant in recent weeks. Later during that month, there were also two more similar discoveries there. All the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head. Read the Document »
The Pentagon was slow to acknowledge what had become abundantly clear on the ground — that Iraq had sunk into sectarian war. The military began to release partial civilian casualty figures in 2005 under pressure from Congress. The word “sect” appears only 12 times in the archive in 2005, the year that systematic cleansing began. Corpses that were surfacing in garbage dumps, rivers and empty lots were blandly categorized as a “criminal event” and seem to have been given about as much importance as traffic accidents. Read the Document »
In a briefing for reporters several days after the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in 2006, the event that unleashed an all-out civil war, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the military spokesman at the time, said: “Over the last three days what we’ve seen is not widespread sectarian violence. And we believe that there has not been widespread sectarian violence because of a capable Iraqi government.”
But the Iraqi government, or at least part of it, was one of the perpetrators. The documents in the archive cite hundreds of cases of prisoner abuse by the Iraqi Army and the police. A jail in the western province of Anbar in June 2006 had “large amounts of blood on the cell floor,” an unhinged metal cell door positioned against a back wall and electrical wires with blood at the ends. (The Americans reprimanded the police.) Read the Document »
There were killings. A report from February 2006 described how Iraqis carrying official Ministry of Interior identification cards used false documents to remove 12 prisoners from a police jail in Basra. Their fate? “Prisoners are now dead,” the report stated. “All prisoners are of Sunni religion.” Read the Document »
Sectarian turf wars burned hotly until mixed neighborhoods were largely cleansed. But exactly when the tide turned remains foggy. According to the existing reports, the single worst month for civilian deaths was December 2006, two months before the buildup’s first brigade arrived. Casualties dropped slightly in January. In February, when the first new brigade arrived, the recorded casualties dropped by a quarter, though it is the shortest month.
Around that time, Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, decamped to Iran, perhaps fearing American troops.
What the documents suggest strongly is that Iraqis themselves were looking for an escape from the orgy of sectarian killing made worse by the growth of ordinary, but still violent, crime. Uses of the word “kidnap” in the reports increase sharply in 2007, as do “theft,” “loot,” and “carjacking.” Torments varied according to location. In Sunni areas, the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had brutalized and alienated people. As early as September 2006, tribes in Anbar came together to oppose Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
General Petraeus was quick to seize that opportunity, turning the tribes’ cooperation into a program that he aggressively expanded throughout the country, working with American diplomats to push a reluctant Iraqi prime minister to accept it.
His predecessor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. — who had been pursuing a policy of drawing down American troops — had seen it more as a local program.
That effort became perhaps the turning point in the war. The appearance in the documents of the initials S.O.I., a reference to the Sons of Iraq, the Sunni groups that banded together against insurgents, spiked in 2008. In Shiite areas, militias like the Mahdi Army, known as JAM (for Jaish al- Mahdi) by the military, once seen as protectors, had turned into parasites, extorting, kidnapping for ransom and demanding protection money, Mafia-style. A February 2007 report noted that the young son of a businessman was kidnapped by Mahdi Army members. The family paid $15,000 for his release, but he was killed anyway.
Iraqis of all stripes began to use the Americans as a bridge, coming forward with information about everything from Al Qaeda hide-outs to gas station extortions. Uses of the word “source” peak in 2007, with five times as many references as in 2004. “Tip” follows the same pattern. A report from May 2007 noted the arrest of a bus driver who was extorting a gas station on behalf of the Mahdi Army. The owner of the gas station provided the tip.
Meanwhile, Americans’ understanding of Iraq had become more sophisticated. If at first the sectarian war was played down or ignored, by 2007 the word sect had become part of the military’s template for daily violence reports. The often fruitless search operations that were the hallmark of the early years of the war suddenly became effective as Iraqis gave Americans information. The holdouts were many, and the Americans waged hard-fought campaigns, with heavy casualties, to eliminate them.
By 2007, the detainee population had exploded. Among the prisoners was a much feared Shiite militia leader, Abu Dura, captured by the Americans in a raid based on a local tip.
The Iraqi partners were not ideal. The documents in the archive contain references to shady politicians, like the head of security for Fadilah, a Shiite political party, who, according to one report, was believed to have received money from Iran and to “control a secret arm of the Fadilah Party that conducts kidnappings and assassination operations to influence local politics.”
Even the Sunni tribal forces that eventually helped turn the tide of the war were prone to raucous shooting episodes, including one in 2008, in which sheiks had to be airlifted to an American hospital after being wounded in a shootout over sheep food.
By 2009, civilian deaths had dropped to the lowest levels recorded in the archive. In interviews in the summer of 2008, Iraqis said they were so deeply frightened by the killings in 2006 that they would do anything to avoid being dragged into that kind of violence again.
But war is always clearest in retrospect, and it remains to be seen whether Afghanistan has reached that point.
This article, "," first appeared in The New York Times.