Successful and Less Successful Interventions: Stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

The US troop surge and awakening movements are the two factors most often associated with the decrease of violence in Iraq after 2006. However, these policies, including a distinction between the Anbar Awakening and later Sons of Iraq (SOI) program, did not occur simultaneously. To date, it also has not been made clear whether the surge, Anbar Awakening, and/or SOI deserve credit as the intervention responsible for improving security conditions in Iraq. Hence, we compare the relative effects of these three interventions using Poisson autoregression models for interrupted time series to assess which policy reduced civilian and Coalition troop casualties in Iraq between 2004 and 2011. We find clear evidence that the non‐Anbar SOI rather than the troop surge reduced casualty rates in Iraq, though this effect distinction has not been made salient in policy circles, where the conventional wisdom of a combined effect for the surge and awakening councils persists. Given this, the same kind of “surge and local militia allies” strategy held significant appeal for NATO strategists in Afghanistan. Yet for reasons we consider in the second portion of this article, a number of more challenging factors bedeviled counterinsurgency there.

Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey: Temporary Marriage?

“…22 Countering Kurdish insurgents centers on gaining Kurdish allies, just as Sunni Awakening Councils proved decisive to American efforts in Iraq. 23 The old strategy of arming tens of thousands of Turkish-Kurdish village guards against the PKK failed to put a stop to the insurgency. The approach after 2007 therefore moved from coercive demands on the KRG to eliminate the PKK presence in their region to more friendly requests and a common strategic vision for the future.…”

The Hearts and Minds in Conflict and Peace

“…The dependent variable is the number of attacks against the Coalition forces. The measure is by no means perfect, 3 but it is one of the most detailed and consistent measures available and widely used in other quantitative studies such as Felter (2011), Biddle, Friedman, andShapiro (2012) and Romano, Calfano, and Phelps (2015). I do not distinguish various types of attacks to allow substitution between attack modes.…”

“…In other words, the synergy effect, if there is any, is more likely to be harmful in the short run. Though this finding sounds counter-intuitive, Biddle, Friedman, and Shapiro (2012) and Lindsay and Long (2013) invariably pointed to the spike in violence shortly after the surge; so do Romano, Calfano, and Phelps (2015). All of these studies stated that troop surge in the short run causes more confrontations and backfires.…”

Primordial Identities, Bounded Territories, and Contemporary Violence?: American Geopolitical Perspectives on the Middle East's Cultural Landscapes

“…While counterinsurgency tactics were employed on an ad-hoc basis by some commanders as early as 2004, a new counterinsurgency strategy for the U.S. Army and Marines was announced in early 2007. Rather than make preparations to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq (which was the wish of opponents to the occupation), this new strategy called for the addition of approximately 30,000 more troops to give the U.S. military and its allies the ability to deploy outside of large Forward Operating Bases in order to protect the Iraqi population from insurgent violence (Romano, et al 2013). The end goal of the surge was to "buy time and space for the Iraqi government to move forward with national reconciliation and improve its delivery of public services" (Sky, 2011: 119).…”