http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050131/wnext.html
The Way Out The Pentagon has a new plan for training Iraqis. Will it work? By DOUGLAS WALLER AND SALLY B. DONNELLY Posted Sunday, Jan 23, 2005 The U.S. military's exit strategy in Iraq rests on the shoulders of men like Marine Gunnery Sergeant Kenneth Kurre. A 19-year veteran of the corps, Kurre is beginning a seven-month tour as adviser to a platoon of Iraqi soldiers. He lives with the Iraqis at their base on the banks of the Tigris River and observes them on patrol. His job is to advise, not command, but the line often gets blurred. At a dangerous intersection in central Mosul near the Tigris, which experienced an insurgent attack nearby with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades the previous day, Kurre carefully positions his Iraqi charges at a checkpoint. Using hand signals because he doesn't have a translator, Kurre finally arranges the Iraqis, with weapons ready, to use the walls of buildings as cover as they watch over the nearby streets, alleys and rooftops. "All right," Kurre says. "Now I think we have security set." But as the day wears on he notices that one of his charges has wandered from his post to buy food from a sidewalk stand. A few minutes later he sees another Iraqi soldier standing by a street vendor with a plastic bag of goods at his feet. "I don't want to see anyone else buying s___ out here!", Kurre shouts in the direction of an Iraqi lieutenant commanding the unit. "This isn't a f___ing shopping spree." The Iraqis quickly return to their posts. Despite the unscheduled buying break, Kurre is pleased with the day's mission. "These guys are a lot better than everybody thinks they are," he says. "I wouldn't be staying with them by myself at night if I didn't feel safe." That's encouraging, since the Pentagon wants to insert more advisers like Kurre into Iraqi units that someday will lead the fight against the insurgency, part of a strategy to accelerate the handover of combat duties to Iraqi forces and pull U.S. troops back from the front lines. In briefings for TIME, Pentagon officials and military commanders outlined a two-pronged strategy aimed at easing the U.S. footprint in Iraq after Jan. 30�which the military hopes will relieve the combat burden enough for a drawing down of U.S. forces to be contemplated. In the near term, American units will continue to launch aggressive strikes against Iraqi guerrillas. According to a senior U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. forces are rounding up 1,000 suspected insurgents a week, and they will continue to stay on the hunt. "The U.S. role has been conducting offensive operations, eliminating safe havens and trying to break the cycle of intimidation," he says. But the U.S. doesn't mean to continue to play such a prominent role. The exit door in Iraq, the Bush Administration insists, hinges on the Pentagon's effort to train Iraqi security forces to take on the insurgency themselves. So far the results have been mixed. At her confirmation hearing to be Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice told Senators last week that the Iraqi security forces total about 120,000 in uniform. But that number is misleading: only about 14,000 of them are trained ground soldiers. Overall, the training of the Iraqis has been slower and less consistent than military planners had hoped. Some Iraqi National Guard soldiers, for example, have received only two weeks of training before being sent to their units. Meanwhile, many of the country's better-trained regular army soldiers still don't have the weapons and armored vehicles they need . The U.S. wants to pick up the pace. Pentagon officials say they plan to begin deploying a U.S.-trained Iraqi force salted with 10,000 or more U.S. military advisers. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dispatched General Gary Luck, U.S.A. (ret.), to Iraq to investigate, among other things, how closely U.S. advisers should work with Iraqi soldiers in the field. "We are specifically looking at whether we ought to be putting more of our own people on training and mentoring, and bringing Iraqi forces along faster, as opposed to using our own for military operations," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells TIME. The man who will soon oversee that mission is Lieut. General John R. Vines, 55, an Alabaman who cut his teeth on combat parachuting into Panama during the 1989 Operation Just Cause invasion. Vines, who will become the ground commander of U.S. forces in Iraq next month, has spent a year prepping his 18th Airborne Corps staff for the postelection mission. He has brought in Arab experts to lecture his aides on local culture and assigned them books on Islam to read before they fly to the region. Last October he staged a weeklong computer-generated war game at the corps's Joint Operations Center in Fort Bragg, N.C., to test staff members on how they would manage a typical day�filled with car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. "It's a pretty tough environment over there," an Army officer said after going through the dress rehearsal. The most urgent challenge Vines and his staff will face is preparing Iraqi forces to quell that violence. Wolfowitz flew to Fort Bragg three weeks ago to brainstorm with the general on his future mission. The two men agreed that the new Iraqi government may have to increase the ranks of its army soldiers, police and border-patrol agents beyond the 271,000 personnel the U.S. has projected the Iraqis need. But attracting Iraqis to join the security services has been easy compared with persuading them to stand and fight. Though recruits continue to join the security units for the promise of a paying job, many cut and run when the shooting starts. The new U.S. strategy aims to curb dereliction. Instead of just handing off sectors of the country to Iraqi units to police on their own�where they might be overwhelmed by insurgents�Iraqi forces will be deployed with American officers and enlisted soldiers throughout their ranks to guide them in the early months of their missions. Defense Department policymakers say the approach grew out of the U.S.'s handover of the Shi'ite city of Najaf to Iraqi forces early last year. When U.S. forces pulled out, the city was overrun by Shi'ite guerrillas. The U.S. was compelled to wage a bloody battle to reclaim Najaf last August. "We probably should have kept an American backbone in place," says a senior Pentagon official. The advisers program is still getting off the ground. Even now, some of the Americans don't have translators. Senior Pentagon officials say Iraqi soldiers don't have to be trained to U.S. standards to be able to battle the insurgents. But Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official who has been a frequent visitor to Baghdad, estimates that even in the best-case scenario, Iraqi forces won't have the training and equipment to begin significantly engaging insurgents until the end of the year. Perhaps the most daunting task facing the U.S. advisers will be persuading their charges to overlook religious, ethnic and geographical divisions. Many Iraqi soldiers are loyal not to their country but to regional leaders. In the northern part of Iraq, for instance, where ethnic Kurds have enjoyed relative autonomy for more than a decade, there is little chance that local Peshmerga militias will take orders from army units under Baghdad's control. "Not now, not ever," snapped a top official in the Kurdistan regional government. "Not even if the commander was a Kurd." The U.S. leadership notes that it has confronted similar challenges in training a new army in Afghanistan, the model for the advisers strategy the Pentagon is taking to Iraq. But to some military experts, especially veterans, plans to embed U.S. advisers more deeply into the Iraqi military and security forces also have an ugly historic parallel: Vietnam. "We had people embedded in Vietnam units at every level down to the company," says an Army veteran who is now a Pentagon official. But when those soldiers were left to fight on their own and "the North Vietnamese rolled into the South, those units melted away." If the U.S. hopes to get out of Iraq, a new generation of advisers will have to prove that this time will be different. �With reporting by Andrew Butters/Arbil and Charles Crain/Mosul ------------------------ Yahoo! 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