TIKRIT, IraqWe had walked just a few blocks into this northern Iraq city when Capt. Jason Deel of the Fourth Infantry Division paused to show me where an improvised explosive device (the military term for a homemade bomb) had blown a large hole in the sidewalk. It was late January, I was back in the country on my third visit with our soldiers, and Captain Deel had invited me on a night patrol with his remarkable platoon: a combined unit of American and Iraqi soldiers.
Despite the differences in language, culture and military training, the soldiers moved together with practiced ease, showing an outsider their city by starlight. An Iraqi lieutenant, Uday Nofan, led me down the dark streets while Captain Deel pointed out the sites of other recent bombingsa deep gouge in the curb near a kebab stand and, farther on, shattered cement next to an Internet cafe.
Last August, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began pressing for the formation of such combined units, which were a tactical success back when I patrolled in one as an infantry captain in Vietnam. By January, professionals like Captain Deel had trained some 30 local Iraqi battalions and were turning the patrolling over to eager leaders like Lieutenant Nofan. These Iraqi units, called the Civil Defense Corps, are beginning to stand on their own. By late spring they will have 40,000 soldiers.
However, at the same time, the nature of the war has changed. The insurgents rarely shoot at Americans any more, because they know that to exchange rifle fire means quick death. As we saw in yesterday's deadly attack on a police station south of Baghdad, the extremists' weapons are now car bombs and homemade explosives. While the Iraqi defense corps can provide a security umbrella, this is now a war requiring police, not soldiers, to track down bombers.
Restoring law and order will be a tough task in a society where every family seems to have a weapon, where extremists mingle in the market places, and where kidnappers and carjackers operate at will. And there is little tradition of good police work to look back on. Under Saddam Hussein, the army and the dreaded Mukhabarat security service imposed order. The police were at the bottom of the security barrel: ill led, poorly equipped and specializing in petty extortion.
This is similar to the situation after the civil bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia. There, many advisers from NATO countries came to help build a legitimate law-enforcement system. But in Iraq, the very bombings that require detective work have deterred such civilian advisers. Thus the task falls by default to the coalition military.
I recently went with Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, commander of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Airborne, to the Magreb police station in the heart of Kirkuk, a city of more than a million Kurds and Arabs. The station itself has been attacked four times by insurgents. Some months ago the colonel stationed an American infantry platoon alongside 200 Kirkuk police officers; the Americans had set an example by patrolling alongside them. But now the police chief, Abdul Tarhan, was worried because the 503rd was due to be shipped out in March.
While political strife between Shiites and Sunnis is at the heart of much of the conflict, Chief Tarhan asserted that it was "extreme Islamists" who were killing his men. He said that he was urging the 117 mullahs in Kirkuk to speak out against terrorism. "The extremists are no longer anti-American," he said of the insurgents. "They are anti anybody not obeying their kind of extreme Islamic laws."
In the long run, only Iraqis can resolve this nexus between religion and hate. For this they will need an effective army and law-enforcement system. Although most political control is to pass into Iraqi hands by July, it would be a grave mistake to remove the fledgling Iraqi military and police from the control of the American military. They are simply not ready to stand on their own.
Rather, we should convince the Iraqi Governing Council to step up Mr. Wolfowitz's initiative of establishing combined unitsboth military platoons and police units. The American divisions in Iraq are now conducting three-week police training courses. This sort of academy work is helpful, but it is vital that American soldiers also mentor the police on the job, walking the streets alongside them day to day.
This need not be an open-ended task. It took six months for our divisions to train 40,000 Iraqi civil defense troops. Likewise, it should take about six months to mentor 50,000 or so police officers. By September, American battalions could conduct tests to certify that Iraqi units are qualified for independence. If so, coalition forces would be able to pull back to regional redoubts while Iraqis take responsibility for their own law and order.
This article appeared in the New York Times on February 11, 2004.
Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.