A recent opinion survey among ordinary Iraqi people has produced significantly mixed results. The optimism of a majority of respondents about the countrys progress is combined with support for the religious authorities, little confidence in the appointed Iraqi political leadership, and a highly negative attitude to the United States-led occupying forces.
The degree of longer-term confidence revealed by the survey is welcome, but in almost every other respect, the imminent anniversary of the start of the 2003 war has been fraught with difficulties for the United States and its closest allies. The past week has been a particularly dangerous time in Iraq itself, the conflict on the Afghanistan / Pakistan border is escalating daily, and the full realisation of the significance of the Madrid bombings is calling into question George W. Bush's whole approach to the war on terror.
Iraq: the challenge of numbers
After a period of relatively few attacks on US troops and coalition civilians, the past few days have seen a sudden and unwelcome upsurge. On 14-15 March, six US soldiers were killed (and others injured) in attacks in Baghdad and Tikrit; this brought the total of American soldiers killed and seriously injured since the start of the war a year ago to 564 and 3,000 respectively.
These attacks came during a time of mourning by 1,000 people attending the funeral of a bombing victim, Haidar al-Qazwini, the brother-in-law of a leading Shi'a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Al-Qazwinis murder was seen, like the recent Ashura massacres, as an attempt to increase Sunni /Shi'a tensions. In Mosul on 16 March, a further attack on Iraqi police officers killed two police and wounded two more; this in turn followed the killing of six foreign aid workers - four Americans, a German and a Dutch national within a single 24-hour span. On 17 March, a large bomb attack on a hotel in Baghdads relatively prosperous Karrada district killed around 27 people and injured 40.
United States military sources also highlight an increased sophistication among the insurgents, especially in relation to the roadside bombs that have caused a high proportion of US military casualties. These bombs are now substantially smaller, more easily hidden, and more effective. They are often deployed in clusters to affect a group of US military vehicles. Perhaps more significant is the belief that they are being planned, constructed and deployed by a fairly intricate network that the US is finding difficult to counter.
Against such an insurgency, the US military requires a range of skills that are in short supply, especially language and computer competencies. The situation has become sufficiently serious for the Pentagon to plan for the possible reintroduction of a selective draft or conscription of US civilians into the armed forces.
A number of unconfirmed reports in recent months have hinted at the existence of plans for a new draft. Most have been dismissed as scaremongering. A general reintroduction of the draft (for the first time since 1973) is regarded as unlikely at present; but the Selective Service System (SSS), an independent federal agency that keeps a register of numerous types of medical specialist for drafting in time of crisis, gives a pointer to future US policy in this area.
This agency is now preparing to develop the procedures and decisions to enable it to undertake a targeted draft of language and computer professionals. To implement such a draft would require congressional approval, and this is now thought sufficiently probable for the initial planning to have started.
Afghanistan-Pakistan: fighting shadows
While most attention in the past week has inevitably focused on the tragedy in Madrid, there has been a marked acceleration in military developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of the Afghan operations are being undertaken by US troops and local Afghan forces, but other states are involved, notably a force of several hundred French troops. In what has been termed a "hammer and anvil" approach, these forces are working in concert with Pakistani army units across the border (see the columns of 5 February, 26 February and 11 March in this series. Earlier reports had suggested a total of 11,000 coalition troops operating in eastern Afghanistan, the great majority American, but the true scale of these operations has only just become clear. It now appears that the US alone has built up its forces to 13,500 (see Pamela Constable, U.S. Launches New Operation in Afghanistan, Washington Post, 14 March 2004), alongside 1,500 other coalition troops. This is in addition to activity by US forces in Pakistan, where Pakistans own army has deployed as many as 70,000 of its own troops in support of the US operations.
In January-February 2004, US troops were engaged in an Afghan operation termed Mountain Blizzard, involving over 1,700 patrols and 143 raids on suspected targets. According to the US army, 22 guerrillas were killed during this period and substantial quantities of arms seized. With the onset of spring, the larger Mountain Storm operation has started. The operations in Pakistan, apparently running in close parallel, have now become substantial; the most recent was in South Waziristan, close to the Afghan border, where Pakistani troops lost eight soldiers but claimed themselves to have killed twenty-four people described as suspects.
These operations, aimed at disrupting the recent Taliban resurgence and killing or capturing members of the al-Qaida leadership (especially Osama bin Laden), are expected to continue and expand on both sides of the border. Inside Pakistan, supporters of Pervez Musharrafs government see his closer relationship with the United States as a necessary expedient, but its risks were demonstrated by the 15 March attempt to destroy the US consulate in Karachi.
In this incident, police defused a 200-gallon liquid explosive bomb in a minibus. If it had detonated, this would have massively damaged the consulate and impacted on other buildings in the citys diplomatic district. The aborted attack occurred the day before a meeting between Musharraf and the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, during his visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In spite of the risks, Washington appears to believe that current operations, including its cooperation with Pakistan, are essential in order to disrupt al-Qaida and its associates, with the "prize" of capturing bin Laden an added political enticement during a closely-fought presidential election year. But there is emerging evidence that the impact of any disruption caused to al-Qaida and its associates by American operations in the region would be limited; in any case, the problem the US and its allies faces in Afghanistan and Pakistan is only one part of a wider and more complex picture.
A widening arc
President Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002, two months after the Taliban regime was destroyed, articulated a confident vision that envisaged the extension of the "war on terror" to a wider "axis of evil". This led eventually to the operation to terminate the Saddam Hussein regime fourteen months later.
In this light, United States operations in Afghanistan are essentially an admission that the war in Iraq has been an immense diversion from the original US motive of disrupting and defeating al-Qaida.
Meanwhile, al-Qaida and its associates have been developing in quite different directions, involving many interrelated movements across many countries and with varying degrees of connection. The rigorous pursuit of these groups, combined with the impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has almost certainly had the opposite effect to that intended actually increasing anti-American sentiment across much of the world and aiding recruitment to the al-Qaida cluster.
The bare statistics, albeit with the qualification that precise figures are difficult to obtain, tell a bleak story. It is likely that 3,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan as well as several thousand Taliban and al-Qaida militia. Iraq saw at least 8,000 civilians killed and probably many more Iraqi soldiers. Tens of thousands of people have been injured, many of them maimed for life. Across the world, well over 10,000 people are detained without trial. Their detention frequently involves physical and psychological intimidation and violence, as is becoming clear from former Guantanamo detainees.
None of this will cause surprise to those familiar with war and counter-terrorism operations - whether conducted by the United States, Russia, Israel or Middle Eastern and Asian autocracies - but what is significant is that these facts are as ignored or unrecognised among majority populations and media in the United States and Europe as they are widely known across the Middle East and Asia, as well as in Islamic communities in the US and Europe. A dangerous dynamic may be in operation where aggressive prosecution of the war on terror and knowledge about its effects - acts as an aid to recruitment to and sympathy for al-Qaida and its associates.
One impact of the Madrid bombings could be to reinforce this dynamic. If the US and other states redouble their efforts to isolate Islamic paramilitary groups, this could involve military action combined with increased surveillance, greater legal restrictions and more detentions. An increasing focus on Islamic communities could also entail a rise in anti-Islamic movements of the extreme right, especially in western Europe. All this could provoke a reaction that benefits al-Qaida and its affiliates.
The United States continues to pursue al-Qaida in its originally focused area in Afghanistan and Pakistan, long after the organisation has evolved into a much more dispersed series of groups, at least one of which is clearly capable of mounting complex and devastating operations in western Europe. If Osama bin Laden is killed or captured, it will be hailed by the Bush administration as a great victory. In reality it will be little more than a minor diversion in an action-reaction process that now has its own, growing, momentum.
At some time in the next few years, western states will begin to rethink their entire approach to paramilitary violence. There is virtually no sign of that at present. The tragedy is that there may be many thousands more people killed and injured in the Middle East and in Central Asia and in cities across the world before the futility of current strategies and policies is recognised.
