As Amb. Paul Bremer reveals in his book, there was tension within the Bush administration on the issue of troop strength in Iraq while he was in Baghdad. A Washington Post piece, " Rice's Rebuilding Plan Hits Snag," yesterday indicated that the tension over troop levels remains.
On Nov. 11, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced trip into Mosul, Iraq, to grandly inaugurate a new concept for rebuilding the country that she said "will marry our economic, military, and political people in teams to help these local and provincial governments get the job done." The idea centered on establishing Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, a tactic promoted in Iraq by the new U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had built similar operations when he was ambassador to Afghanistan. He declared in November that extending a coordinated U.S. presence into the provinces was "a new addition to our strategy for success in Iraq." Three teams were rapidly established in Mosul, Kirkuk and Hilla, largely because the functional equivalent of consulates -- known in Iraq as regional embassy offices -- were simply relabeled PRTs. But the rollout of the rest of the plan appears uncertain as State and Defense Department officials haggle over a series of tough questions, including how to fund them, how to staff them, how to provide security -- and even whether they help or hinder plans to reduce the U.S. troop presence.... Other officials said, however, that the PRTs have become caught in a crossfire of different priorities. Rice and her aides have felt strongly that civilian officials need to pay greater attention to the provinces, a view that is seconded by military officials in those areas. Establishing the PRTs thus would be part of a counterinsurgency campaign, State Department officials said. At the same time, the Pentagon is eager to reduce its military footprint in Iraq, making officials wary of a project that could require the deployment of troops on yet another new mission when they are trying to reduce the visibility of U.S. forces and turn over more areas to the Iraqis....
But military historian Frederick Kagan argues in the current Weekly Standard that " the biggest danger in Iraq is drawing down too quickly."
The president has repeatedly declared that the withdrawal will not adhere to any "artificial" political timeline. How can such statements be squared with a reduction in the U.S. presence at a time many regard as the tipping point in this war? There were approximately 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in the months leading up to the October referendum and the December elections. This represented an increase from the "normal" baseline of 138,000, intended to secure those momentous votes. The extra soldiers were not just pulling guard duty, however. On the contrary, the coalition used the additional forces to conduct a series of intelligent and aggressive operations along the Upper Euphrates valley and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle to clear towns and villages of insurgents and establish Iraqi Security Forces in their wake to hold them. Coalition commanders and spokesmen have subsequently claimed that these operations played a critical role in allowing peaceful elections and in reducing the overall level of insurgent violence in the country (at least until recently). They are probably right.... Military news releases since the election have described no large-scale counterinsurgent operations at all.... The result of this shift in military operations is worrisome. From the beginning of the war, the coalition has lacked the number of forces that would be needed to clear and hold the Sunni Triangle, let alone the major population centers in Iraq. It will likely be many months before the ISF is capable of conducting such missions on a significant scale. If U.S. forces withdraw to training areas and cease operations against insurgents except for the odd joint raid or "cordon-and-knock," the insurgents may once again begin to establish safe havens in which to train and operate. The longer safe havens persist, the harder it will be to clear them out--and the longer it will be until the ISF troops are able to undertake the mission.... In short, it is better to risk having too many troops than too few. It is better to maintain active pressure on the insurgents than to wait until the Iraqis can do so. It is better to remain focused on the goal of this war. America's objective is not to withdraw from Iraq--we could do that tomorrow if we did not care about the consequences. America's objective is to establish a stable government there, which requires defeating the insurgency. Training Iraqi Security Forces is not a proxy for that goal, but one of several necessary preconditions. The temptation to subordinate our strategy to the establishment of that single precondition has always been the greatest threat to victory in Iraq.