Iraq and Afghanistan

American intelligence is developing what purports to be an improved picture of the enemy they are fighting. Intelligence officers believe they are facing 8000 to 12,000 insurgents backed up by another 20,000 active sympathizers (this figure seems low). They are divided into an estimated 50 cells. They believe that only a 1000 of the total are foreign fighters, although these are some of the most dedicated. The insurgents are supported by almost unlimited supplies of money brought in from Syria, but originating in many cases in Saudi Arabia (notice the absence of Iran in this account). The rest of the money is evidently parceled out by relatives of Saddam from a hoard that the family had managed to place under their control in Syria. It was noted that Iraqis are often fees decided on in advance for setting bombs or attacking Americans. The data reported in the article suggests that 80% of the attacks are criminal rather than insurgency in the accepted sense. This applies especially to kidnappings for ransom and hijackings. Four-fifths of the remaining 20% are carried out by domestic insurgents rather than outsiders. Major insurgent leaders in the Falluja area are more like gang leaders than guerrilla fighters. (The numbers may be wrong, but other accounts suggest that a large percentage of the incidents reported are not actually political. This includes large numbers of revenge killings within the Iraqi community.) The new intelligence suggests a lack of unified command. There are five leaders in the Falluja area alone. The new intelligence is based on an increase in intelligence due to increasing involvement of Iraqis in the anti-insurgent effort. Unfortunately, this gain is balanced in part by the fact that as more Iraqis become a part of the anti-insurgency, the insurgents are able to also improve their intelligence by placing some of their members in the new anti-insurgent units.

These figures should be considered in the context of theories of guerrilla war. The old “rule of thumb” going back at least to the war of the British to suppress the communist insurgency in Malaysia was that to defeat guerrillas the government (or analogous body) needs ten times as many soldiers as there are active guerrillas. This suggests that we are not in such a bad situation in Iraq. We have more than the 120,000 soldiers that this would imply are needed. Unfortunately, the 135,000 or so Americans are scattered over a large area while the guerrillas we are speaking of here are concentrated in a much smaller area. In this area, we do not have ten times their number. Bringing a few thousand British up from the South should help. But perhaps we could turn a much larger percentage of the country over to Iraqi security control, concentrating our forces only in the most difficult areas. We already have very few troops in the Kurdish area. We could also reduce our forces greatly in most of the South.