anbar awakening

First, look into a mirror and say three times, “I will not interpret events in Afghanistan and Pakistan through strained analogy to Iraq, because doing so is sure to misinterpret organic and specific developments and the circumstances that gave rise to them.” Then note that Pashtun tribesmen near the Swat Valley are organizing a tribal [...]

The perils of basing your budget on oil revenue: the Iraqi government is practically hemorrhaging money thanks to falling oil prices, and that’s causing a drastic reduction in defense-related jobs and purchases, according to The Washington Post’s Ernesto Londono. The U.S. general in charge of mentoring Iraqi security forces observes that the shortfall will compel [...]

While you were sleeping, the Iraqi security forces and the ex-insurgent militiamen known as the Awakening Councils or the Sons of Iraq skirmished in the Baghdad neighborhood of Fadhil. The Iraqi government appears to have won the battles decisively. In Iraq, though,”decisively” means “for now, while the aggrieved party studies what went wrong, adjusts and [...]

Summer 2003 was the moment, roughly, when the insurgency in Iraq began to coalesce. (Naturally, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted no such thing was happening.) Five and a half years later, violence in Iraq has dropped down to the levels of … the beginning of the insurgency. Maj. Gen. David Perkins, a top official with [...]

The Anbar Awakening — the collection of tribes in Iraq’s Anbar Province that in 2006 broke with Al Qaeda and embraced a partnership with U.S. forces — had extremely high expectations for capturing the province’s government from the entrenched Iraqi Islamic Party in Saturday’s election. But it looks like that didn’t happen, and now the [...]