Local Knowledge In Iraq, One
Officer Uses Cultural Skills To Fight Insurgents
While
Talking Like a Bedouin He Sees Smuggling Routes; Spotting a Phony
Kurd
Army
Has Recalled His Unit
By
GREG JAFFE Staff
Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL November 15, 2005; Page A1
MOSUL, Iraq -- Last summer, two dozen U.S. Army Rangers
headed for the Iraq-Syria border to figure out how foreign fighters were
slipping through western Iraq's barren deserts.
As they had done in the past, the Rangers took positions
around each village and Bedouin encampment. At one village, an officer
named David, accompanied by a small security team, strode into the center
looking for someone who would talk. Unlike the clean-shaven,
camouflage-clad Rangers, David wore a thick goatee and civilian clothes.
The Rangers carried long, black M-4 carbine rifles. David walked with a
small 9mm pistol strapped to his leg. The Rangers spoke English. He spoke
Arabic tinged with a Yemeni accent.
As he recounts the day, David met a woman with facial
tattoos that marked her as her husband's property. As they chatted, the
pale-skinned, sandy-haired North Carolina native imitated her dry, throaty
way of speaking. "You are Bedu, too," she exclaimed with delight, he
recalls.
From her and the other Bedouins, the 37-year-old officer
learned that most of the cross-border smuggling was carried out by Shamar
tribesmen who peddle cigarettes, sheep and gasoline. Radical Islamists
were using the same routes to move people, guns and money. Many of the
paths were marked with small piles of bleached rocks that were identical
to those David had seen a year earlier while serving in Yemen.
Col. H.R. McMaster, who oversees troops in northwestern
Iraq, says David's reports allowed his regiment to "focus our
reconnaissance assets upon arrival" in Iraq's vast western desert last
summer and immediately begin to intercept
smugglers.
David is part of a small cadre of cultural experts in the
Army known as foreign-area officers. The military would only allow him to
be interviewed on the grounds that his last name and rank be withheld.
U.S. officials say he'll be spending the rest of his career in the Middle
East, often operating alone in potentially hostile territory. Naming him,
they say, would make him more vulnerable to attack.
His colleagues in Iraq say his presence has been
invaluable. "We ought to have one of these guys assigned to every
[regional] commander in Iraq," says Col. John Bayer, chief of staff for
Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, the commander of U.S. forces in the northern
third of the country. "I'd love to say 'assign me 100 of these
guys.' "
That's not happening. Instead, the military is pulling
David out of Iraq later this month along with seven other officers who
make up his unit. Before the end of the year, David will resume his
previous post in Yemen.
The decision to disband the Iraq unit is part of a
continuing debate within the Pentagon about how best to fight
unconventional wars that don't lend themselves to the Army's traditional
reliance on firepower and technology. The issue: How should the Army use
officers who specialize in accumulating historical, political and cultural
knowledge.
Earlier this fall, the U.S. embassy and the military's main
headquarters in Baghdad concluded that the work of David and his
colleagues was duplicating the efforts of other personnel. David's team is
part of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. It was sent to Iraq to
advise U.S. military and State Department officials.
"While it's regrettable to lose experienced people, overall
there are many more Arabic speakers working for us [in Iraq] than you
might think," says one U.S. embassy official in Mosul.
To some in the Defense Department, the foreign-area teams
offer a model for how all types of future officers should be trained. A
report approved by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in
January, specifically ordered the military to beef up its linguistic and
cultural capabilities.
"Language skill and regional expertise have not been
regarded as warfighting skills and are not sufficiently incorporated" into
war plans, the report concluded.
In Iraq, cultural misunderstandings have contributed to
mistakes. The decision to disband the Iraqi Army, which the U.S. saw as a
tool of Saddam Hussein and a symbol of oppressions, created ill-will among
Iraqi soldiers, who saw it as a source of national pride and pensions. As
they battled an insurgency, U.S. commanders also struggled to understand
Iraq's deep tribal and sectarian divisions. American officers working with
Iraq's fledgling security forces frequently complain that police officers
and soldiers sometimes put tribal allegiances ahead of their duty as
officers.
'A Cold War Mindset'
Col. John D'Agostino, who oversees David and his colleagues
and has also been recalled, says he disagrees with the decision to close
the Iraq foreign-area officer unit. He says these officers are often
overlooked, for which he blames "a Cold War mindset in which we are still
fighting the hordes in Eastern Europe." When David leaves, the U.S.
embassy's regional office in Mosul won't have a single Arabic speaker or
Middle East expert on its staff.
In total, there are currently about 1,000 foreign-area
officers in the Army. Currently, 145 of them specialize in the Middle
East, the fourth-largest number devoted to a single region. The biggest
concentration is in Europe. Typically, they spend big chunks of their
careers working as the military's eyes and ears in remote and dangerous
outposts. They coordinate military exercises and gather intelligence about
the forces in their region. "They operate at the ends of the earth," says
retired Col. Jack Dees, a longtime foreign area officer. "Often they are
the one military guy out there representing their nation."
David decided he wanted to be a foreign-area officer even
before he graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point
because he wanted to live overseas. He grew up in rural North Carolina,
shuttling between an orphanage and several foster homes after he was taken
away from his parents by the state. He chose West Point because it was
free. "I was also looking for a sense of family and belonging...you know,
all that psycho-babble stuff," David says today.
After commissioning as an officer, he flew Apache attack
helicopters for a decade, in Iraq and along the border between North and
South Korea. He then spent six months in Bosnia as the American liaison
officer on a French division staff. In 1999, as soon as he was eligible,
David applied to become a foreign-area officer.
The military dispatched him to Morocco where he spent part
of his time coordinating U.S.-Moroccan military exercises. His main job
was to travel the region and learn about its culture and people.
On returning to the U.S. in 2001, David spent 18 months
learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. He
then earned a master's degree in Arabic studies from Georgetown
University, focusing on the co-existence of Yemen's tribal culture with
its fledgling democratic institutions.
In preparation for a position at the U.S. embassy in Yemen,
he learned all he could about qat, a narcotic leaf that's chewed in the
region. He says he's never actually chewed it -- an act that would get him
bounced from the Army -- but he quickly developed an ability to talk about
it.
"The three books you have to read are: 'The Flowers of
Paradise: The Institutional Uses of Qat in North Yemen'; 'Qat in Yemen:
Consumption and Social Change'; and 'Eating the Flower of Paradise: One
Man's Journey Through Ethiopia and Yemen,' " he says.
This knowledge allowed him to initiate conversations when
nothing else worked. By the end of his two-year tour in the country, he
could talk fervently about qat's cultivation, its aphrodisiac qualities
and its price fluctuations.
David's mission was to keep senior U.S. military officials
abreast of what was going on in Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral home,
specifically within its military. He traveled extensively, building a
network of contacts with tribal leaders who would ensure safe passage
through their areas. He became legendary for hosting elite receptions at
his home in the capital Sana where he gathered gossip and information.
Yemenis worth talking to won't set foot in the U.S. embassy for fear of
being labeled imperialist lackeys. David's house had a lower profile.
When Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the
Middle East, visited Yemen in January 2004, David set up a dinner with its
political elites as well as military attachés from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and
Jordan. They discussed elections in Iraq and smoked cigars on David's back
porch. Gen. Abizaid's staff confirms the event took place.
David's biggest coup was convincing Sana's most-important
sheik to attend one of his receptions. "He brought his wife and daughter,
which was huge because they never take their women anywhere," David says.
The sheik, Abdullah Mohammed Abdullah Al-Thor, says in an interview he
attended several events at David's house and that the officer is a "very,
very good friend."
Posted to Iraq
In May, after two years in Yemen, David was dispatched to
Mosul. His role was to help senior commanders build relationships with
Iraqis the U.S. would be able to trust in advance of any reduction in the
U.S. military presence. "If things are going bad, it is my responsibility
to know who we should call," he says.
In Iraq, he prepped Gen. Rodriguez, the chief of staff for
northern Iraq, for meetings with senior Iraqi leaders. He also gave State
Department employees extensive tutorials. The current State Department
staffers in the Mosul office, who cover most of northern Iraq, are South
America and Asia experts. A key lesson involved the proper etiquette of
arguing with Arabs. David goaded the diplomats to be less diplomatic. When
Arabs yelled, David told them to yell back.
One recent day, David sat down with a Foreign Service
civilian who had arrived from Santiago, Chile. He started by explaining
how one became a sheik and that not all sheiks are equal. He briefed him
on the major ethnic groups and political parties in the region.
After two hours the State Department official seemed lost.
"How do you keep all this stuff straight in your head?" he asked.
David discovered that many of the U.S. interpreters,
including that of Gen. Rodriguez, spoke poor Arabic because the people
doing the hiring didn't speak the language. "When Gen. Rodriguez spoke he
was articulate. His interpreter made him sound like an eighth grader,"
David says.
The general's interpreter was re-assigned and David began
screening new hires. A few weeks later, he figured out that one
interpreter -- who had access to intelligence about U.S. operations -- had
lied about his background. The tip-off: The interpreter said he was from
Suleimaniya in northern Iraq. Based on the Kurdish dialect he spoke, David
could tell he was from a village outside Mosul. "We don't know his agenda;
we just know he was deceitful," says an intelligence officer who works
with David. The interpreter was fired.
David made his biggest impact supporting the 8,000 U.S. and
Iraqi troops who assaulted Tal Afar, a city in northwestern Iraq that had
become a major insurgent haven. In 2004, the U.S. tried to drive
insurgents from the city. The operation was a disaster. Two days into the
assault, Turkey, which has historic ties to the Sunnis in the city,
complained publicly to U.S. authorities in Ankara and Washington that the
attack was too heavy-handed. Turkey threatened to close a border crossing
with Iraq through which more than 30% of Iraq's gasoline moves. The U.S.
abruptly halted the attack after two days.
Before a renewed attack this September, David, working with
officials at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, hatched a plan to placate the
Turks. Each night, after traveling through the area, he emailed photos
with a time, date and GPS stamp to the U.S. embassy in Ankara. He also
sent along the U.S. military's major-incident reports. That allowed the
embassy to give Turkish military officials meticulous daily briefings.
Turkey's foreign minister complained about the attack in a
meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but didn't ask the U.S.
to call it off, says a U.S. official in Ankara.
David's biggest contribution in Tal Afar drew on virtually
all of the skills he had amassed in five years as a foreign-area officer
and a close friendship he'd forged with the city's mayor.
Three months before the attack on Tal Afar, U.S. and Iraq
officials had installed Najem Abdullah, a senior official from nearby
Mosul, to run the city. During his brief tenure, the Sunni mayor earned
the grudging support of Tal Afar's warring Sunnis and Shiites. Without
him, U.S. commanders feared Tal Afar would slip into all-out war.
Helping the Mayor
David and Mayor Najem had become close in the weeks leading
up to the invasion. David teased him about his purple-tinted,
rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses. He stood with him in tougher times as
well. When Shiite sheiks, through their allies in the police, physically
blocked key Sunni sheiks from attending a meeting, David stormed out,
earning the mayor's respect.
"I consider David like an Iraqi in the city," Mayor Najem
says today. "When he discusses things with the tribal leaders he does it
like an Iraqi. He raises his voice. He is passionate just like the
Iraqis."
In early September, as U.S. and Iraqi forces readied their
second assault on Tal Afar, the mayor began to doubt whether he could
continue in the job. The pressure of running the divided city had become
unbearable. Death threats from Sunni extremists forced the mayor's family
to flee their home. The Sunni mayor worried that Tal Afar's Shiite-led
police would use the invasion to settle scores with Sunnis.
Midway through rancorous meetings in the mayor's office,
the two men stepped out into a dimly lit side room. "Why should I stay
here? What is the point?" Mayor Najem recalls asking David.
In this moment of doubt, David and the 49-year-old Iraqi
held hands -- a common sign of affection among Arab men. David promised to
move the mayor's wife and children to a new city. (They're currently in
hiding.) He also pledged to make sure that U.S. commanders acted on the
mayor's concerns about the city's Shiite security forces.
"David talked to me as a friend and a brother and convinced
me to stay," the mayor says. "He is like Lawrence of Arabia."
Write to Greg Jaffe at [EMAIL PROTECTED]1
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