More on Understanding the Surge

I recently wrote a post about the Surge of Troops in Iraq and here is a follow up post with an excellent explanation of why the Surge was so effective that should also leave no doubt that it cannot be simply transferred to Afghanistan as is (though I have no doubt military commanders are fully aware of this). The core point is again that the additional troops helped implement a series of policies but that they were in not the central reason why the surge was successful. Here's how the Washington Post article put it (article via Tom Barnett):

How did Gen. David H. Petraeus do it? My answer? Bottom line, for the first time since the war began, a U.S. leader decided to address the political motivations of the Iraqi combatants. Petraeus convened a study group that shrewdly analyzed the raging sectarian conflict, then came up with what he called "the Anaconda strategy" to address the underlying dynamic.

I think this is crucial to understand - more than playing politics, General Petraeus took time to understand the different forces at play and why they were fighting and then developed a strategy to counteract this.

On how the insurgency was created (in addition to not having enough troops to secure the situation on the ground and control weapons stashes and the border):

[...] disbanding Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the old regime's security services -- had helped create the Sunni insurgency. They produced a critical mass of angry men worried that the Sunnis who had run the old Iraq would wind up on the bottom in the new one.

Larry Diamond talks a lot about the problem of the overly deep debaathification where most of Iraq's soldiers, civil servants, teachers, etc. were fired in his podcast on Stanford on iTunes U. While removing top level members of the Baath party from the public sphere was clearly necessary, many others were solely party members to be able to keep their jobs under Saddam's regime.

The importance of winning over the alienated Sunnis:

On June 2, 2007, Petraeus gathered his commanders and told them to engage with influential Sunnis and insurgents and persuade them to stop fighting. "Tribal engagement and local reconciliation work!" he said. "Encourage it!"
[...]
As the Sunni insurgents switched sides, they passed vital intelligence to their U.S. partners and paymasters, which enabled Petraeus's forces to target Sunni holdouts, including diehards affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. soldiers also employed new techniques to control the Iraqi population and provide for its safety and to identify fighters hidden among the civilians.

How this was achieved:

Why were so many Sunnis -- insurgents and civilians alike -- ready to respond to the U.S. overture? Because they were getting desperate and saw Petraeus's outstretched hand as their best chance of surviving a campaign of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing led by the Shiites and fueled by neighboring Iran. The secular Sunnis' alliance with the jihadist insurgents had always been an uneasy marriage of convenience, and it broke up when Petraeus made a better offer.

On how Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were brought under control:

That move has been widely misinterpreted as a spontaneous, unilateral gesture; in fact, it came after months of military and political pressure. Iraqi special operations forces, backed by elite U.S. combat advisers, conducted near-nightly raids against the most extreme elements of the Mahdi Army.
[...]
That said, the intra-Shiite competition for power will persist for years; the trick is to channel it into politics, not violence -- and to continue to make use of the competition between Maliki and Sadr.

An excellent read.