War Is Boring

By DAVID AXE

Three months ago the city of Ramadi was dark. This city of 400,000 in western Iraq was completely severed from the country’s delicate electrical grid; those who had power got it strictly from generators that hummed all day and night.

But then came the much-heralded “Anbar awakening” – a banding-together of Sunni sheiks and their militias into a loose alliance that fought alongside U.S. and federal Iraqi forces to all but eradicate terrorist cells in Ramadi and other large western towns. As security improved in Al Anbar, U.S. “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” – some military-led, some commanded by State Department specialists – moved to restore Ramadi’s connection to the national power grid. Now 80 percent of residents have regular power, according to Colonel John Charlton, an Army commander in the province.

Expectations were that more power would mean more industry, more employment and therefore fewer disaffected residents joining, supporting or simply tolerating extremists in their communities. But it didn’t quite work out that way. The electricity somewhat benefited the area’s state-owned businesses – cement is the major product – but widespread hirings failed to materialize, according to Marine Corps Major General Walter Gaskin, senior commander in Al Anbar. “The biggest employer is still the army.”

Despite disappointing results, PRTs like those in Ramadi remain at the forefront of the U.S. and coalition strategy in Iraq. All told, there are dozens of reconstruction teams: their number has doubled since the beginning of “surge” operations in December. PRTs in safer areas include just a few people, others in more dangerous regions are manned by hundreds of soldiers with heavy weapons. The idea is to work with local employers and officials to shore up basic infrastructure and institutions and get people working, in hopes that grass roots improvements might somehow spread and trickle up to the higher levels of Iraqi government, where sectarian squabbles have resulted in gridlock.

But in such a hierarchical country, grass roots projects have proved fleeting. What Iraq’s industries and its economy in general really need, officials say, is major regional investment and better processes for distributing federal funds, both improvements consistent with Iraq’s history of top-down governance.

“Iraq is not small country, and it has no tradition of local or diffused leadership. It has been very centralized,” explains Phillip Reeker, the State Department’s Counselor for Public Affairs. As a result, local improvements tend to last only as long as coalition forces sustain them with money, expertise and manpower.

Paul Brinkley, a State Department official tasked with re-starting shuttered Iraqi factories, issues contracts to state-owned firms to provide goods to U.S. bases. This has sustained some factories in the short term. But his long-term strategy of re-introducing Iraqi companies to global markets has enjoyed less success. “Absent from the equation,” Brinkley reports, “is regional investment.”

In fact, instead of investing in Iraq, regional markets have actually exploited the struggling country. Reeker says Gulf manufacturers have begun flooding Iraq with cheaper and better goods, driving struggling Iraqi manufacturers out of business.

Greater investment by Baghdad in Iraqi industries is part of the solution, Reeker says. But even when money is available – as it increasingly is – processes are lacking for budgeting and appropriating the funds. “They have no tradition of the provinces working on their own, drawing from resources from the federal government.”

Army Brigadier General Ed Cardon, commander of a task force south of Baghdad, attributes recent battlefield victories to the surge, but says he is “frustrated” with the lack of progress on both the political and economic fronts.  “The point of surge,” he says, “was to get to point where governance could proceed. But the provinces lack the processes necessary to spend their money. Most of the provinces are spending only 40 percent of their … up to $400-million budgets.”

“Decentralization of [Iraqi] government services is one major area of emphasis for us,” Reeker says. Besides better bureaucratic processes, that requires greater political unity – another major failing of Iraq’s central government.

“We’re trying link local government to the provincial government and provincial government to the national government,” Cardon says, “but it’s advancing more slowly than we’d like.”

Cardon says U.S. talk of a withdrawal might help motivate Iraqi politicians to form a true unity government. “There’s growing awareness among Iraqi leaders of the U.S. clock ticking in last month.”

“That’s part of question – time,” Reeker says. “To take people who’ve been through what Iraqis have been through and convert them to mechanisms where they can have political reconciliation … how long that takes is the question.”

Visit an Australian PRT in Afghanistan in my C-SPAN vignette:

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Related:
PRTs to the rescue!
Anbar opens cop academies
Rebuilding Afghanistan while under fire
Re-opening Iraqi factories

(Originally published at World Politics Review)

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