The Price of the Surge

Steven Simon

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

Summary:  The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director for Transnational Threats.

This strategic schism might have been papered over had the jihadists not overreacted to the opposition of other insurgent groups. In 2007, there was a wave of sensational killings of Sunni leaders by al Qaeda, including Abdul Sattar (who had met with President Bush two weeks before his death). The assassinations of Sunni leaders warranted retaliation under the prevailing tribal code, opening the door to more systematic cooperation between the tribes and U.S. forces. In the wake of Abdul Sattar's death, a Sunni leader complained that al Qaeda's assassinations had "left resistance groups with two options: either to fight al Qaeda and negotiate with the Americans or fight the Americans and join the Islamic State of Iraq, which divides Iraq. Both options are bitter." After their defeat in the battle of Baghdad -- thanks to the entrenched power of Sadr's Shiite Mahdi Army and the arrival of additional U.S. troops -- the Iraqi Sunnis went decisively with the first option, marking the start of the Sunni Awakening groups. The United States, for its part, had its own incentive to cooperate with the insurgents: June 2007, with 126 troop deaths, was the second-worst month for the U.S. military in Iraq, and General David Petraeus, the U.S. ground commander, was facing pressure to reduce casualties quickly. The most efficient way to do so was to strike deals with the newly pliable insurgents.

The deals were mediated by tribal leaders and consisted of payments of $360 per month per combatant in exchange for allegiance and cooperation. Initially referred to by the United States as "concerned local citizens," the former insurgents are now known as the Sons of Iraq. The total number across Iraq is estimated at over 90,000. Although the insurgents turned allies generally come well armed, at least one unit leader, Abu al-Abd, commander of the Islamic Army in Iraq, who controls Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, has said that he receives weapons as well as logistical support from U.S. units. His arrangement is probably typical. In November 2007, he agreed to a three-month pact, open to extension.

This strategy has combined with other developments -- especially the fact that so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred and that violence in civil wars tends to ebb and flow, as the contending sides work to consolidate gains and replenish losses -- to bring about the current drop in violence. The Sunni sheiks, meanwhile, are getting rich from the surge. The United States has budgeted $150 million to pay Sunni tribal groups this year, and the sheiks take as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent -- which means that commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief. Although Washington hopes that Baghdad will eventually integrate most former insurgents into the Iraqi state security services, there are reasons to worry that the Sunni chiefs will not willingly give up what has become an extremely lucrative arrangement.

TRIBAL REALITIES

The surge may have brought transitory successes -- although if the spate of attacks in February is any indication, the decrease in violence may already be over -- but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism. States that have failed to control these forces have ultimately become ungovernable, and this is the fate for which the surge is preparing Iraq. A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq's cohesion over the long run.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, ruling powers in the Middle East have slowly and haltingly labored to bring tribal populations into the fold, with mixed success. Where tribes and tribalism have remained powerful, the state has remained weak. The Ottomans attempted forced sedentarization of the tribes, weakening tribal authorities by disrupting settlement patterns and replacing tribal sheiks with smaller cadres of favored leaders who became conduits for patronage. The colonial powers after World War I faced a different problem: the threat of nationalist urban elites opposed to foreign rule. In an effort to counter defiant urban leaders, they empowered rural tribes on the periphery. In Iraq, the British armed the tribes so that the sheiks could maintain order in the countryside and balance the capabilities of the nominal local governments operating under League of Nations mandates. Thus, the tribal system that Ottoman rule sought to dismantle was revitalized by British imperial policy, and the power of the nominal Iraqi government was systematically vitiated. In 1933, Iraq's King Faisal lamented, "In this kingdom, there are more than 100,000 rifles, whereas the government has only 15,000."

The tribes lost some power over the subsequent decades. This was in part a result of increasing direct British involvement in activities such as law enforcement, land tenure, and water distribution and in part a result of urbanization: as Iraqis moved from the country to the city, their affiliations shifted from the tribe to urban institutions -- principally the trade union and the mosque -- even as they held on to tribal symbols. When the Baathists took power in 1968, they explicitly rejected "religious sectarianism, racism, and tribalism ... the remnants of colonialism." The tribes, in their minds, were inevitable rivals of a centralizing state. But after taking control in a coup in 1979, Saddam leaned on his own Sunni tribal networks to staff his security services, army leadership, and bureaucracy, while suppressing other tribal life. He tried to rein in tribes by dispersing Baathist apparatchiks throughout the hinterland, but he nonetheless came to rely on the tribal system as a whole to make up for the shortcomings of the state as times became harder.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam used Shiite tribes to defend regions near the Iranian border, and elsewhere tribal leaders regained some of their traditional authority as the war forced the redeployment of Baathist officials to the front. Amid the hardships created by the conflict, the flow of resources from the center shrank, leading to greater self-reliance in tribal areas and the renewed importance of tribal leaders. The Gulf War, and the grinding international sanctions that followed, accelerated these trends. In 1996, a high council of tribal chiefs was established and was granted political privilege, weapons, and land. Selected tribal leaders were allowed to enrich themselves by any means, fair or foul, and in return they were expected to defend the regime. Saddam, in effect, fostered a process of retribalization in Iraq.

Iraq's Arab neighbors, particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia, provide a counterexample. They won enduring stability by corralling the tribes through a combination of reward and punishment. In Transjordan, King Abdullah I and the British -- helped by famine and the effects of the Great Depression -- confronted recalcitrant tribes militarily and then secured their allegiance with a steady flow of resources from the emerging state. More recently, Jordan's Hashemite monarchy has preserved the tribes' loyalty by guaranteeing them prestigious positions in the government and the military and by playing them off against the Palestinians. In Saudi Arabia, the al Saud dynasty consolidated its state by subduing the tribal challenge of rebellious Ikhwan and then endowing them with status and a military role. Strategic marriages between the al Saud family and the tribes cemented these ties. Although such efforts occasionally faltered, the thrust of the policy was always clear: to subordinate the tribes to the state.