American Enterprise Institute
March 28, 2007
[Edited transcript from audio tapes]
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Larry Crandall, Contractor, U.S. Department of State |
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Michael Eisenstadt, Washington Institute for Near East Policy |
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Ali Latif, Baghdad Institute for Public Policy Research |
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Larry Sampler, Institute for Defense Analyses |
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Proceedings:
Michael Rubin: Please, what we are going to do today is I’m going to introduce our panelists. Each one is going to speak for about eight minutes on this topic, which is basically decommissioning/disbanding the Iraqi militias, which I think is one of the most important subjects that does not necessarily get enough attention. After every panelist’s remarks - and people know that I can be a strict moderator - I’ll open the floor to questions because Q&A can really be the meat of a discussion like this. And without further ado, I’m Michael Rubin. I’m a resident scholar in Foreign Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m very pleased to have with me today Ali Latif who splits his time between Baghdad and London. He is a fellow with the Baghdad Institute for Public Policy Research and maybe just at the beginning of your remarks I’ll ask you to just say a word or two about the Baghdad Institute. He is also the Chairman of the Iraqi Prospect Organization, which has been doing some excellent work. I would recommend to everyone to look at their reports and their analysis.
Also on the panel today, Larry Crandall who has spent a good deal of time studying DDR: Demilitarization, Demobilization and Reintegration. He has admirable service in Iraq with USAID. He has spent a lot of time at the US State Department as well; and as you can see from his biography, he has service all over the world.
Larry Sampler is a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Virginia. I know that at AEI, not only myself but many others come to rely on his expertise on subjects relating to military subjects, decommissioning of the militias, and so forth. And as you can also see from his biography, he has had a great deal of military experience and also policy experience.
And last but not least, my former colleague Michael Eisenstadt who is a senior fellow and director of Military and Security Studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is a well-respected military analyst who has done a good deal of analysis and time at US Central Command, and his writing has appeared in pretty much every policy journal of military note.
And without further ado, I would like to turn the floor over to Ali, and actually with further ado, I just want to say that the report which Ali is going to be discussing, there are copies of that available at the front desk as you leave. Thank you. All right, Ali, can you press the button so that we can record.
Ali Latif: That is good. That is better, I think. May I just thank the American Enterprise Institute for hosting this event and may I just say that we appreciate all the work that AEI does do on this topic and on the region as a whole. Just a bit of a background about the Baghdad Institute, it has been recently formed. The debates and discussions occurring in Baghdad and Iraq are there. The Baghdad Institute tries to distill some of that debate and try and make it available to an Iraqi and Western audience so we have tried to bring together some scholars and experts and tried to distill some of the discussion that might not be available, so readily available over here and try and get it to a wider audience.
This is our first major report and we started this in December and it was the culmination of conferences, round table discussions, private and public meetings with politicians and various representatives of the militia groups in Iraq. We managed to pool together quite a diverse group of people which you will see when you read the report, the list of names that contributed to this report. I have only got a few minutes to discuss the report, so I would like to get started.
There is a lot to talk about, and hopefully through the question and answers, we can get most of the points across. Before we talk about this dealing with the militias, it is important to understand where they come from, their backgrounds. Most of the militias we see today in Baghdad and the rest of the country arose out of armed wings of political parties in response to the repression of Saddam’s regime. So you had the Peshmerga of the Kurdish parties. You had the Badr Brigade of the SCIRI, and to be honest, even the relatively new Mahdi Army, you could see their origins well before the invasion. They arose from the underground network of young men in Sadr City and other parts of the country. They were there and the Mahdi Army grew out of that network that was established by the Sadr family.
So when talking about the militias, it is important to understand that they were there before the war and they just did not arise out of nowhere. They did not arise out of a vacuum. Now following the invasion, they naturally filled the security vacuum that was left from the collapse of the regime, and they deployed themselves around the country and initially, they were quite peaceful, especially in the Kurdish and Shia areas in the south, so the government and coalition forces largely ignored their presence. They did not feel that they were an important issue to tackle initially.
But following the relentless attacks, the suicide bombing campaigns that were waged and the failure of the Iraqi government and the coalition forces to stem that tide, there was increasing desire for reprisals and revenge attacks. This was held largely in check by the Shia leadership, most notably the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Husaini Sistani but it definitely reached a tipping point around the bombing of the shrine in Samara, and there we see the escalation in the sectarian violence in the capital and just as the militias escalated this violence, this cycle of violence, so the cycle of violence justified their presence. Local communities looked to them to protect them because they lost faith in the government. It is an important point to make, that the militias provided local communities or claim to provide local communities with the protection they needed from the ethnic cleansing that was going on under the nose of the Kurdish and the government from the suicide bombing attacks and the various assassinations. Another service the militias did provide and are still providing is monetary assistance to the victims of the terror campaigns in Iraq. Now, the government has failed to really look after these people, and again, these people turned to the militias for their help.
Local policing is another matter. Militias are more able to deal with the crime in their own way than the local police can do, especially in areas such as Sadr City. So, it is important to bear in mind that the militias provide other, let’s say, services to the community that may not be apparent. So in dealing with the militias, we have to understand what they do and how successfully to deal with them. We need to actually deal with what they provide to the local communities.
So this report divides dealing with the militias into two bits, the short term plan and long term plan. The short term plan is divided up into three phases. The first phase is the security phase. Now, I’m not going to go into very much detail, but let me just say it goes along similar lines as the Baghdad security plan at the moment, which we found is quite useful. One point though to bear in mind is the sequence of the security plan which we find sometimes concerning at the moment. The greatest justification for the presence of militias is to protect them from these suicide bombings. Now if the coalition and Iraqi forces occupy these areas and the militias stand down yet the suicide bombing campaign continues or is not seen to be dealt with, a lot of it is about perception. A lot of the people in Iraq at the moment say, “Yes, you are concentrating on militias but how about the insurgency or terrorism? You do not seem to be talking about that anymore.” And maybe that is not the case in reality, but it is the perception of the people. So if this suicide bombing campaign continues and people do not seem to be dealing with it properly, then people will actually get angry and you will see people being against this confrontation with the militias that the security plan is trying to achieve. So the sequence of a security plan is just as important as the security plan itself.
Moving on, let’s just say that the Baghdad security plan works and at the moment the indicators seem to suggest is pointing in the right direction with respect to sectarian violence. The next phase is just as important. It is providing the people with the services that they require. Now, this report identifies four basic services. They are really basic, easy to achieve but have immediate impact. These are things like providing electricity, actually reliable electricity. At the moment, in Baghdad especially, the grid is not sufficient for the demand and at the moment most people rely on private generators. Now, the electricity grid is not going to be fixed overnight, but a plan that actually allows for the private generators to be incorporated in this plan -- for example, a lot of these private individuals charge a lot of money for the use of electricity and they actually undersupply the electricity that they sell. So the government can actually maybe force a deal whereby they secure the safety of these private individuals and the private generators in return for a more reliable and reasonable supply. For other services such as sewage, unblocking the sewage system, cleaning their streets, paving the roads, they are really easy to do but the thing is, they are not being done at the moment and these taskforces come into play in Phase II to also enhance the reputation of the government in the eyes of the people. Again, it is here to build up confidence in the government. These services are not hard to achieve, but once people see there is activity there, there is a government providing the services that the militias claim to be providing, then we can actually remove another justification for their presence.
The third phase is the political deal. Once we have created the environment where the justification of the militias is removed, you can begin to put forward a deal with their political masters. Now, the important points in the political deal are firstly to make the political masters responsible for the militiamen. They try to integrate, whether it is in the security services, into the civil administration or into civilian life, rehabilitation. A way to do this that the focus groups came up with was for the political leaders to register their own militiamen in a series of lists and that will be given to a central authority. Now, these militiamen will then go on to be integrated at the security services, into various training programs if they have got high school diplomas and any other rehabilitation program. This puts the onus on the militia leaders to make sure the militiamen have been integrated. They will be responsible for making sure to keep them in check.
Now, another key factor in this as well is creating competition amongst the militia groups, because once one militia group sees another militia group integrating all its militiamen in the security services, naturally they will want to register their own people but they are only going to register the people that they can trust to behave because there will be financial and political consequences to political parties that are not in control of the militiamen that they have registered. And, of course, once these people have been registered, all other people have no political cover to continue their activities. The political cover that they have enjoyed in the past will be removed. It is either they disband or they will be dealt with by the Iraqi and coalition forces.
So that is essentially the short-term plan. Hopefully, if all these phases are successful, then the long term plan can come into effect and then it will give the government the breathing space to tackle terrorism, create an economic environment whereby we can make use of all these unemployed young men who joined the militias for an income. They also joined the militias for a sense of worth. It is really important in Iraq. Unemployed people join militias not because maybe they believe in their political objectives. It is because they feel they are doing something, and it is important to address that.
Other measures, for example, witness protection laws. There are no witness protection programs for people to really - if they see any sort of criminal activity or illegal activity in their area, there is no mechanism to get them to really have confidence in providing the information to the government so that they deal with it in the right way. So there are quite a few other long-term measures. I do not really want to go into all of them; you can read them in the report. But essentially, this plan, the major thrust of this plan is to increase the confidence of the people in the Iraqi government and throughout these steps, step by step plan first of all to regain the monopoly on security, regain the monopoly of the services and it is through these means that the militias can be successfully dealt with.
Militias are not tolerated in Iraq by the majority of the people and belatedly, the political parties have come to a realization that militias are causing a far bigger problem than they thought beforehand and they are really starting to take it seriously. The people who took part in the focus groups were militia leaders, politicians who have now come to this realization. So based on this, we need to really push forward these steps to try and really deal with the militias and hopefully dismantle them and carry the critical process on forward. I’ll stop there, thank you.
Michael Rubin: Thank you, Ali. I would like to move directly onto Larry Sampler from the Institute for Defense Analyses.
Larry Sampler: Thank you. I would have to start by qualifying my comments, saying nothing I say should reflect on the time I spent with the embassy or the government or the IDA. These are my own observations I’m going to bring to the table and I intend to be provocative. I’m looking forward to the question and answer part. When I do these panels, I like taking the position that we are expressing my position in a way that is a little bit off-center, so I hope you will find something I say provocative.
Let me begin by giving you sort of a bottom line upfront of what my different approach will be. I’m going to argue that you cannot directly attack and disband militias. The international community and the local government of Iraq has to act in such a way that we can tame the militias and limit the damage they can do. But did they die of benign neglect? Did the population lose interest in supporting them, the people give up and lose interest in providing the funds and the personnel and the militia, the accoutrements of militia that support them?
I have to start with a joke. I came from a conference in Munich on Afghanistan and I have written my remarks specifically so that I do not forget them and fall asleep, but Afghanistan has been on my mind along with Iraq for quite a while and an American leaving Afghanistan at the end of his tour of duty was having kind of a last meeting with some of the leaders of the Afghan community. And they were bragging about how ordered and proper their lives were in their homes in Afghanistan and one Afghan said, “When I go to bed at night each night, I tell my wife that the first thing I want to see when I wake up in the morning is a wonderful hot breakfast on the side table when I get up, and when I get up in the morning, that is the first thing I see.” Then the other Afghan said, “Well, when I go to bed at night I tell my wife that I want my shalwar kameez to be freshly pressed and hanging on the door and a glass of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice right there on the bedside table.” And the American was feeling a little bit inferior and left out, so when he got home from his six months in Afghanistan, he said, “Wife, things are going to be different around the house. When I get up in the morning, not only do I want a fresh hot breakfast but I want my suit hung by the side of the bed, and I want a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice by the side of the bed.” The next morning when he got up, he could not see anything. But by lunch time the swelling had gone down and he was able to find his way to the kitchen and make his own breakfast.
The point here is that good ideas are not always cross-cultural. What works in one place might not work in another place. DDR is one of those things, and by DDR that is Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration of the militias. It gets a lot of play in the press. It is really fun to talk about in policy circles. I do not think -- and when you hear about DDR in Liberia, you hear one thing from the public pundits who talk about it; you hear something else if you talk to people who have been on the ground. I do not think it ever succeeds as well as we think it does and I’m going to argue that right now or for the foreseeable future in Iraq, this may be not such a great idea.
The idea of DDR in Iraq is certainly something I thought a lot about. In August of last year, Ambassador Khalilzad asked me to come out and be part of the country team and head up a joint office that would do demilitarization and demobilization in Iraq. And the answer then is the same as the answer now: This is not something that we can take on. We do not have the resources and the time is not right to do it. One of the things that I have done over the course of my military career is I focused on the operational parts of policy questions. It was great to make a policy statement like we want to do DDR, but then who is going to answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions, and most important perhaps, with whose money? If we get around to discussing financing, that is another tough one in this particular case.
There was an assertion made in the literature for this meeting that said few problems have destabilized Iraq more than militias. If you did not get it from my opening comment, I’ll say it explicitly now. Militias are a consequence of instability in Iraq more than they are the cause of it. Now that has changed and certainly the militias are contributing to the instability, but if we address militias as the cause and not a consequence, I think we are going to get our solution perhaps backwards. The “who” question here is not trivial. Working with the country team in Baghdad, the CPA-91 militias, that is militias that are identified under CPA article 91, range from the Kurdish Peshmerga, which is as well-organized in some cases as a lot of National Guard units I have worked with, no offense intended. It is a very large militia. It is quasi-state official. We would suffer enormous consequences if we tried to separate the Peshmerga from the Kurds.
At the other end of the spectrum are what I call the neighborhood watch militias, typically you might consider Baghdad which is a patchwork of ethnic enclaves and neighborhoods. These are small militias that have stood up to protect a particular neighborhood. They are different than our neighborhood watches. They are much better armed, although coming from Georgia that might not actually be true but they are at least focused on defending their home and they are not something that I would consider a high priority for disarmament. And then everything in between is included in the CPA 91 definition of militias, so if we say that we want to disband militias in Iraq, who are we going to disarm? Who are we going to demobilize and who are we going to start with? There is a question of what? What does disbanding mean?
I have to draw attention and give credit now to the office of national unity within MNCI, the Multi-National Coalition in Iraq. This office of national unity is a bunch of Navy guys who are doing some incredible work on planning for the eventual demilitarization of these militias down to the level of how many classroom seats will we need to create and local technology institutes to teach these guys other skills? How many of them do we think we want to train to be welders because they do not have a high school diploma yet or construction workers? How many of them can we put into technical training so they become computer technicians and how many need to do other things, perhaps join the active military?
So they have done a lot of the detailed analysis and planning that A, civilian agencies are not really equipped to do; and B, this analysis and planning is something we can do now without actually committing ourselves to an active disbanding of the militias. They actually have a several-hundred-page plan that they have drafted which is wide open and of course it will continue to be modified as the situation changes. But aside from who and what, the when question comes up.
One of the things that Ali and I may have to have a discussion about during the question and answer part is one of my concerns is that weakening militias at the wrong time increases the instability in a local area. There are cases where these militias are the only security forces operating in a particular area and if we eliminate or destabilize or weaken those militias and we do not do it in a balanced and deliberate way, we are going to create an imbalance of power which is going to encourage some local powerbroker to take advantage and take exception. So I think there has to be some really careful thought given by Iraqis, not by ill-informed Americans like me, but about how and when and in what balanced way we make sure that we are decommissioning these militias in a responsible manner.
I have already kind of alluded to the why question. The why question is more, “Why are the militias there? Why do we choose to take them on? Why have they come into being?” And then I will skip actually the rest of my notes and go straight to the end of -- addressing militias is a question of increasing governance capacity and that is why I’m thrilled to hear what Ali said about that. If the government can convince the local populations that the government can do what needs to be done, then they will have no reason to turn to these militias because, make no mistake, these militias exact a very high price in terms of terrorists, in terms of fear, in terms of restricted freedoms that people expect to have. On the part of some of the Shia militias, the repression - that is the wrong word - the restrictions on home life and public life are fairly draconian. So the militias do not enjoy public support in general because people like the way the militias govern; they enjoy public support because there is not a legitimate government alternative that they can turn to for essential goods and services, with security being the first among those.
Let me close with a paradigm that I think is going to gain traction among the non-military and perhaps even OSD policy people and that is one of illicit power structures. Illicit power structures include militias, but are not limited to militias. It includes also criminal gangs. It includes cross-state interference. It includes a lot of things and illicit power structures have to be addressed either by attacking their illicitness and persuading them to join the popular public and legitimate political process. You can attack their power by eliminating the funding they receive, by disarming them, eliminating their ability to project power into the neighborhood or by addressing their structures, and that would be disbanding militias and attacking them at their structural level. That is a paradigm that USAID and the State Department have begun to use and is one that I find fairly attractive. Thank you.
Michael Rubin: Thank you, Larry. Larry Crandall?
Larry Crandall: I have been involved with this subject for Iraq since actually the war began, so I get a little bit too steep in detail sometimes. I apologize for that in advance. First, congratulations to the authors of this because to my knowledge, this is the first time that Iraqis have put pen to paper to look at this issue in a very serious way. All of the documents I have seen over the last four-plus years with respect to Iraq have all been done by foreigners and many of those were not quite sure how to find Iraq on the map.
Be that as it may, there are some issues here that I think Ali and his colleagues need to think a little bit more about. One would be with respect to experience in other parts of the world with semi-successful DDR programs. There are very few that are fully successful but those that have had some success have almost always had some kind of political process or peace process underway where the warring parties or the parties in conflict were in discussions with each other and maybe those discussions have not borne a three-fold fruit, but at least they were underway and they were serious. And there are no – repeat - no examples of semi-successful DDR programs where that process was not underway. And since that process is not underway in Iraq, it is clearly premature based on experience elsewhere in the world to try to seriously undertake a DDR-like process now.
Secondly, the serious looks at the DDR-type issues with respect to militias in Iraq have included all the insurgent groups as well. Now, in my involvement over the last four years, we have certainly looked at the insurgent groups and the militias, not necessarily through the same optic but as part of the same overall political problem that the government of Iraq needs to address. So I think, Ali, that you and your colleagues would need to take a good look at them as well.
In my last visit out there, I had a lot of opportunity to sit down with senior Iraqi officials to discuss this very subject, and I came away with a feeling then which has only been reinforced since and which I still hold today that the al-Maliki government is not serious about this subject. At the time I was there for the month of August, last August, I could find little meaningful evidence that they were giving anything more than lip service to this subject and that includes both the militias and the insurgent groups.
Now, there have been some rhetorical flourishes and a few meetings here and there and even the Ministry of Finance had subsequently set aside some money for this. But until such time as the government of Iraq undertakes some sort of meaningful political process and also puts an operational plan against the needs of DDR, nothing is going to happen anytime soon. I would add that your paper does not deal with the issue of how internally driven and how internally conflicted the government of Iraq is. You only have to pick up the paper on any given morning and you will almost always find a story above the fold about how messed up this ministry or that ministry is or the government in general is, and obviously many of those stories, at least the ones I read, are focused on the Ministry of Interior, which is responsible for one of the biggest issues that we have to deal with, with respect to militias having infested, shall we say, the national police force.
There are some real serious issues there and I would also add something that is kind of obscured to most people’s experience out there, but there is a very large organization called the FPS, the Facilities Protection Service, which is something set up by the US government that allows each ministry to protect the infrastructure under its rubric, if you will, as well as its own buildings, and some of these FPS units have turned into a little more than murder incorporated goon squads, et cetera, et cetera. And others of them are clearly just operatives of this or that militia including JAM or the Mahdi Army as it is popularly known. I would add that your paper does not really deal with the issues already experienced where militia members have been informally to be sure but nonetheless integrated into the civil service and the police force or the army or whatever, and much of the experience there where that has already happened without official approval, shall we say, has not been necessarily positive. I will not go into all the details but it is a pretty mixed bag. So while the paper suggests that that needs to be done under the rubric of political party supervision, I would suggest that that may be putting the fox in the henhouse in certain cases.
I’ll just stop with the notion that you cannot have a DDR program anywhere on the face of the earth without serious attention not only to some of the issues I have mentioned here, but also you need an operations plan. The level at which this particular paper has been written, with all due respect, that has been done by Iraqis and I thank God for that. It is the first time to my knowledge that has happened. You cannot go operational until you have an operational plan and you cannot see where your real issues are apart from your academic recommendations until you get to that level of detail, and that of course has not yet been done. I’ll stop there.
Michael Rubin: I should note the plan is the first step in a much longer debate but I’ll give Ali time to respond during the Q&A session. And with that, I’ll turn the mic over to Mike.
Michael Eisenstadt: Thank you, Mike. I just also want to say, Ali, I very much enjoyed reading the paper that was written by your colleagues and I urge everybody else here to do that too. It is very useful but I what I thought I would do is--actually my comments are very much in line with those made by the first Larry here with regard to -- [indiscernible] comments made by the second Larry, as long as there is not a political reconciliation process in train, I think the main focus of our efforts right now have to be on containment and mitigation and I have a few thoughts on that in a moment.
Just a few opening, kind of preparatory comments about the role of militias in the violence in Iraq. First, I think it is important to say that initially, a lot of the principal driver of the violence in Iraq was the insurgency and as Ali said, although there were militias that had a pre-state presence, a lot of the militias gained a lot of their support as a result of the insurgent violence and as well as a result of the economic activity, and I’ll touch on that in a moment. And what has happened is that initially, I think we have had a situation where the insurgency was the main driver of a lot of the growing sectarian violence in the country. Eventually, I think we have seen the situation where you have had actually mutually reinforcing effect between sectarian violence carried out by militiamen and insurgents and insurgent violence, and it is very difficult to disaggregate the two now.
We also hear a lot of talk about the point in which maybe sectarian violence become self-sustaining. I’m not sure analytically that that characterization is accurate and I’m not quite sure we actually fully have people on the ground who actually fully understand all the dynamics simply because I suspect it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, village to village and the like, and you have to have a local lens when looking at this. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the militias are part of a very complex mix now.
An additional element of that complexity is the fact that whereas initially you had again, it was mainly the insurgency, Sunni-Arab insurgents involved in the violence in Iraq, you now have the situation wherein the Sunni areas where you previously had only a problem with insurgent violence, you now have the emergence of militias, mainly I think as far as I could tell of the home guard or neighborhood watch variety being stood up. And I think many of these, it is likely - and there is anecdotal information to this effect - have relations or some kind of ties to insurgent groups. Likewise, in parts of the country where you previously only had a militia problem mainly in the south and the center, you now also have an insurgency problem in that many of the militias or at least some of the militias are involved in anti-coalition attacks. So you have now militias involved in insurgency and insurgents involved in creating a kind of overt militias, and that again adds an additional layer of complexity to the problem which shall also make more complicated efforts of DDR down the road.
The second point I wanted to make had to do with again the motivations or the drivers for the creation of these militias. A lot of times, the militia problem is kind of set in the context of what I generally refer to in the field as the security dilemma. But because of a lack of security, people feel compelled to join militias or support militias because they are the only providers of security. But I think Ali, to his credit, and the authors of the study, to their credit, also recognized that there is a political and economic component to this, which makes, again, DDR or dealing with the militia problem much more complicated simply because it is not simply a matter of solving the security situation. But you have very often in societies that are driven by war; you have the emergence of conflict economies where there are economic activities which are undertaken in order to support the war effort and to support the manning of militias. In Afghanistan, you have had the opium harvest. In Lebanon, you had drugs as well. In Africa, you have conflict diamonds and there is timber in other parts of the world.
In Iraq, it is a combination of I think kidnapping, rackets, protection rackets and I think most importantly, oil smuggling. So what happens is that people have a vested economic interest after a while in the perpetuation of the conflict because they are making money off of the conflict, but this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs. We know in many countries where this happens, people who make money illicitly often then invest in property and in legal businesses and, over time, gain an interest in more stability. So very often the economic motives can change and that has an effect on the dynamics of the conflict.
And then, finally, there is also political motivation. We have seen in Iraq as we have seen elsewhere in the region, very often political power is seen as coming through the barrel of a gun and the parties who establish militias see their armed wings as an essential component of their political power and, therefore, they are loath to give it up because this was the source of their power or their means of achieving popularity among their constituency. You saw this earlier with Hezbollah, with Hamas, and I think there is an element of this in play in Iraq as well.
So what are the implications of this assessment with regard to efforts to at least mitigate or contain the militia problem which I think is probably the best we could hope for now? The first implication is and we have already been doing this I think for about a year now, the coalition forces, in cooperation with Iraqi security forces, basically whenever possible, roll up the death squads. You get the bad actors who are involved in sectarian violence and killing people.
Secondly, do what we can, and again, everything in Iraq is just so very difficult, but do what we can to deal with the conflict economy. And here, I do not know how good a job we are doing simply because I think the dimension of the problem is so large. Deal with kidnapping rackets, protection rackets and oil smuggling. And again, in order to do this effectively, you really need an effective Iraqi law enforcement system, an effective police force, courts and jail system and right now we are not there. And so that makes it difficult to deal with the problem of the conflict economy. Prevent the militias from enhancing their military capabilities. We know there is smuggling of arms across several of Iraq’s borders. The borders are very hard to seal off and I’m not sure how much success we have had in this area.
And then finally, the role of internally displaced persons needs to be mentioned because we know from conflicts elsewhere - and I think we have seen this in Iraq - that very often, displaced persons when they move, when they are forced from their homes, have to move to a different neighborhood or town. They do not have their old jobs anymore because they cannot work in their old neighborhood. So, they are unemployed and there is a temptation for a lot of these people to join militias and as a result, because they have suffered more so perhaps than anybody else, because their own life has been disrupted, they, in many cases, act as a source of fuel for the conflict and they provide much of the emotional energy which drives a lot of these militias. So you have to deal with the IDP problem, but again, it is such a massive problem. Where do you start in Iraq?
Just my final comments looking to the future; I guess my final comments really just kind of reinforce the comments made by some of the other speakers. Basically, you cannot conduct DDR without security sector reform because if you deal with militias and you do not deal with militia and infiltration of the police, all the militiamen will migrate to the police so you have to have a parallel process, and actually, we are working on security sector reform right now. While we are building the security sector, we are also simultaneously reforming it, so that is going on, government capacity-building, absolutely essential because right now the militias are fulfilling a lot of the functions that should be filled by the government. And if you want to limit the role of the militias, you have to create government capacity.
And then finally, we have to keep in mind that DDR is likely to be affected by the structure and nature of militias. Each militia is different. In fact, it might be even possible that various local branches of militias -- people join for different reasons in different places and, therefore, you have to structure a DDR program that is tailor-made for each militia because some might be ideological militias that have a great degree of discipline, where if you get the buy-in of the leader, everybody will follow. In other militias, people might be joining for economic reasons and, therefore, there has to be a strong economic motive in dealing with these people. And it might be, you are of a kind of fragmented militia, like, people often talk about the Jaysh al-Mahdi in those terms. So again, there is no tailor-made approach not only from one country to another but even within Iraq you might have to have multiple approaches to deal with the different types of militias there. Anyhow, we will leave it at that. Thank you.
Michael Rubin: We have four experts on militias and/or DDR. I'm not one of them, so I’m going to keep my remarks very, very brief. I just want to highlight, before we turn to Q&A, that the devil is always in the details. The solution to this problem, and I think all our panelists agree that it is a major problem, has to be rooted in the situation on the ground in Baghdad, which is why it is important to combine both the Iraqi voices as well as the past experience of American policy makers and so forth. But, again, the debate and a solution to this problem has to be rooted in the situation in Iraq rather than only in a rather detached debate in Washington that may not be rooted in Iraqi contingencies but may be more rooted in American political contingencies. With that, I want to turn the floor over to questions.
There are four ground rules when I moderate. The first is wait for the microphone. The second is state your name and affiliation and I do not know anyone in Washington that does not have one affiliation, or when pressed for, five affiliations. Third, put your statement - Jeopardy rules - put your statement in the form of a question and keep your question short so that we can maximize some of the discussion. And fourth, you can ask absolutely as many questions as you want but I'm only going to instruct the panelists to answer the first one. So, please do not say I have three, say, questions. We will go around to multiple rounds, but this way as many people in the audience can ask as possible. And with that, I will turn the floor over to questions. Yes, in the corner, please wait for the microphone.
Norman Olsen [phonetic]: Norman Olsen in Achievable Solutions and if I may add, excellent presentation. I think you have overstated or a little more optimistic about the --
Michael Rubin: Will you just check whether the microphone is on? Okay.
Norman Olsen: Filling the potholes technically is an easy job. Operationally and organizationally, it gets a lot more difficult, and I would imagine in Baghdad that is accelerated. My question is, could you not turn the militias around in the sense, use American capitalism and say, okay you got a 12-square-block area and your job is to provide security on that. And if you happen to be able to do that without incidents for three months, we will give you a bonus; and if you do it for six months, we will give you a little bigger bonus; and actually if you go a year, we might be even talking serious money.
Michael Rubin: Ali?
Ali Latif: Well, the idea seems quite reasonable, to be honest. The plan in the report was to use taskforces that use the local populations, which would probably be the militiamen. But, yes, certainly, I can see there might be a role in that. Maybe just the fear that maybe paying militiamen as militiamen, they might use it for other means is certainly a concern. But the actual details of how it is going to happen is something for the government to really -– and hopefully for us, a subsequent report just to deal with the details. Let me just say, this is the first step. It is not a comprehensive look at dealing with the militias. This is the first time, as some of my panelists said, that Iraqis have sat down and thought about what they should do in the Iraqi context. So, it is important to bear that in mind.
Also, I just want to make this point, that there is a difference between willingness and capability. The Iraqi government lacks capacity at this moment in time. The whole civil administration was started almost from scratch. These politicians have no previous experience. They were militiamen at some point in their past. While I take the majority of the points and I agree, as I said, this is a start. It is not definitely -– we are nowhere near actually getting to the details and actually addressing the problems to the degree that we would like.
I know here in Washington, you run on clocks. In Iraq, it takes a bit longer than that. I mean I live in London and I know how it works there and I go to Baghdad, and it is a totally different time scale. So patience is all I'm asking for. As I said, the willingness is there, the capacity needs to be built, and that is very important. And I agree with the majority of the panelists; it is not there at the moment.
Michael Rubin: Larry Sampler.
Larry Sampler: I think that is a sensible idea and I think General Patraeus is not in a position where he can discard any ideas. But let me just off-the-cuff red team, or propose some of the challenges that might make that harder to implement or not as useful as it could be perceived to be. The first thing is that there is going to be a whole host of agencies or organizations that deride us for rewarding bad behavior. We are taking people who are in some cases war criminals or certainly have done illicit and illegal things, and we are rewarding them.
Second point along those lines is I think we would probably create flattery by imitation. When one group of unemployed Iraqi males see that all you have to do to be on the American payroll is create a militia and you will be given this status and you will be given money, I think it would be -- it would be hard to define the roles of the militias in terms of the name rosters. We found in doing DDR in Afghanistan that a militia that we knew had 30 people, when the DDR team showed up had 300 because all of a sudden there was money involved and their brothers and cousins all turned out. Then there would be issues of, if my paycheck is based on preventing incidents, I may be fairly draconian in how I prevent those incidents. And there is some sympathy with notions of culturally-appropriate measures, but I think we might be encouraging people to be more draconian than we would like in how they prevent those incidents.
So, I think some notions of capitalism and its incentivizing good behavior is probably appropriate. I am not sure that I would recommend it to General Patraeus thinking about that much capitalization or capitalism of the notion, but good first start of an idea.
Michael Rubin: Mike.
Michael Eisenstadt: Yes, I have looked into kind of similar schemes that have been kind of put forward with regard to oil pipeline security, which is kind of similar, kind of notion that we paid off, we tried to initially create the tribal militias. And what happens is very often that you pay one group and another group that is not getting the cut or maybe the money is not flowing down within the tribe in an equitable manner, then there is other people within that tribe who have an interest in subverting those who are getting paid, so they launch attacks on the pipeline. The part of the problem is that we do not -- it is an opaque social situation and we do not exactly always know what is going on. There are attacks in the pipeline maybe because an adjacent tribe feels that we have assigned another tribe to secure part of the pipeline that goes through their traditional tribal domain so they are unhappy about that. Or like I said before, the money is not being distributed equitably within the tribe, so a member of the tribal subsection that is not so close to the tribal chief attacks the pipeline as a way of, kind of an out¬-of-protest.
There are so many ways these kinds of things that sound -- that makes sense in Washington -- get subverted in the field. I'm just saying this from 7,000 miles away, but I have talked to a lot of people on the ground. It is just amazingly complex and we do not always understand why things are happening and who is doing what so even the simplest things are difficult.
Michael Rubin: Yes, question in the back and then I move forward into the center aisle.
Sonny Efron: Sonny Efron with the Los Angeles Times. I am curious about your views of amnesty for militiamen and how you would go about your criteria for who should get amnesty and who should not get amnesty, and then how do you proceed with your DDR schemes accordingly? Thank you.
Michael Rubin: We will start with Larry, go ahead and then Ali.
Larry Sampler: The amnesty was one of the toughest parts, and this plan has been written by Iraqis and by the Office of the National Unity with NMCI. The amnesty part is the hardest part to write. It has to satisfy so many audiences. The two primary audiences are the militiamen to whom we hope the amnesty will appeal. They have to feel that this has a sense of permanence about it. There is going to be a suspicion that this is a bait to draw them into the coalition arms where they will be arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo or some horrific fate. They have to have faith that the amnesty is real and has roots. But the second audience is the victims in the local communities.
We are very conscious of the fact that we could ostracize ourselves and the government and we could cause more problems and hurt than help if the amnesty is seen as just a blanket recusal for criminal behavior in the past. That is a really difficult thing to unpack. The nickel summary of how it has been developed so -- of how the concept has developed is that amnesty would be done by the local panels at the provincial or sub-provincial level. And again, this is just notional. I do not want anyone to take this as any kind of gospel, but that these panels will be multi-ethnic. Even if it is a province that it is ethnically homogeneous, the panels would represent minority populations, perhaps not represented strongly in that province, and that there would be an international oversight of the amnesty panels that would be appealing and satisfying to Amnesty International and the United Nations and other international bodies.
Having said that, there is a notional plan, but implementing it would be incredibly difficult. I think for the amnesty program to satisfy our harshest critics, it would have to be so strenuous and so carefully applied that it would not satisfy the target audiences of the militias. On the other hand, an amnesty panel, a program that satisfy the militias would be found to be a sham or not necessarily effective to other audiences. So there is not a good answer to your question.
Michael Rubin: Larry Crandall.
Larry Crandall: Last year, the intelligence community, the US intelligence community, took a look at all of the semi-successful amnesty programs around the world. A document has been declassified since they first did it, maybe some of you, including you, have seen it; I do not know. But that was prepared sort of initially for internal use and then eventually it was shared with the government of Iraq. In fact, I think I was the first person to give it to them and I had a discussion with the Minister of National Reconciliation last year.
What that shows you is that if you want to have a shot at a successful amnesty program, you have to think very seriously about no conditions; it is sort of unconditional amnesty. Unconditional amnesty gives you the best shot at this sort of peacemaking tool, if you will, for making a useful contribution. When you start cluttering up your amnesty program with lots of conditions and maybe this and maybe that and under these conditions and under those conditions, it gets highly politicized and experience shows that they kind of flounder.
So when you look at Iraq, if you have a full amnesty without a lot of conditions on it, you can imagine how much pride that would require so many different individuals and political and insurgent and militia groups out there to swallow. That is going to be very difficult for them to do, yet it is a full amnesty program which offers them the greatest opportunity for success, yet it is that model which probably has the least chance of being adopted.
So, that said, a very competent Australian air force lawyer has drafted an amnesty law in sort of the King’s English, if you will, without a whole lot of input from -- without any input from Iraqis so far as I know at that time, that may have changed, and that has been shared with the government of Iraq and nothing has really happened with that. I have got a copy of it at home. It is a very impressive piece of work but it is not likely to be adopted anytime soon.
Michael Rubin: Ali and then Mike.
Ali Latif: Let me echo some of the comments here. Implementing any sort of complex amnesty systems is going to be near impossible in Iraq at the moment. A thing with the Iraqi people, especially talking to them and when we discussed this with the politicians, is also normal people on the streets. Their major concern is not how to try those that have been convicted of a crime or maybe suspected of carrying out criminal activity or sectarian violence. They want to see an end to it. If we can convince the people that a blanket amnesty will achieve that, and I think as far the victims go, they will be able to swallow that. I mean Iraqi people have a tremendous capacity to swallow a lot of things. As I have said, their history pays testament to it. But it is only if this blanket amnesty had -- they can be convinced that it would lead to an end to this violence and to end to the militias themselves.
Michael Eisenstadt: The only thing I would just add to this is that one thing that is not too often mentioned in public discussions about the issue of amnesty is timing, which I think is absolutely crucial. Because I think it is potentially damaging if the idea of a blanket amnesty or any kind of amnesty is raised too early because then it creates incentives. If people know that they are going to get amnesty at the end of the day no matter what they do, there is no incentive for them to attack with any restraint. And therefore, I think a lot of the discussions in the United States - I mean it was kind of taken as -- for a while, about a year ago, is the height of wisdom to talk about amnesty as if this was -- but if it is done in a way, I think if the discussion is too detailed and too high profile and if it is almost –- it creates an expectation. That there will be amnesty at the end of the day is counter-productive. I think the timing is very important.
And so I think this is, first of all, more than anything, something that Iraqis have to decide among themselves. But I think that timing is crucial and it has to be sprung at a time when -- usually it works best when one side has its back against the wall and it has a choice of either, kind of an honorable, kind of a settlement or death or surrender, and we are not there, unfortunately. So, again, timing, I think, is very important.
Michael Rubin: There is a question in the center here. Yes, the microphone is behind you.
Vonda Arpetti [phonetic]: Well, thank you my question has to do with --
Michael Rubin: And your name and affiliation please?
Vonda Arpetti: Vonda Arpetti, American University. My question has to do with the reintegration of the militias. As you know, the lack of confidence in the people, in the government is also prevalent in Afghanistan. A publication by CSIS this year stated that one of the ways to restore that confidence is mobilizing communities through National Solidarity Programs, where you have small-scale community projects where people could work on for cash and that way, you have reintegration of the people working on public works. Is there a similar program in Iraq you can have for militias, once this reintegration process does take place, where you could have the militias working on similar public works projects? That way, the money stays within the community rather than American contractors?
Michael Rubin: Let us answer the question first if anyone knows the factual answer for that before we discuss whether it is good idea or not. Does anyone know whether that is ongoing?
Ali Latif: At the moment, there is nothing there at the moment. I mean, there are plans but there is nothing on the ground there that is mobilizing any of sort of community for any sort of public works. We have related to some of them in the report, as in provision of services, but again this needs to be developed by the Iraqi government and successfully mobilize those that want it there -- they have left the militias, or those who have not left the militias who are out there, unemployed, have nothing to do. Rehabilitate them; get them on to training programs; start them on public work programs, and thus zap the pool of young people that are ripe to be recruited by the militias.
Michael Rubin: Larry?
Larry Sampler: The plan has been drafted and it is staffed with a multinational force and with the Iraqis. In the plan, there are cash-for-work programs. Now here is a provocative statement that will not do me well with my employers, but a large opponent to cash-for-work has been, in the past, the US government. It smacks too much of a welfare state and the social welfare programs. They do not like the notion of the government getting cash-for-work. They just do not. That has been overcome. USAID has done a lot of work and a lot of -- there have been efforts for cash-for-work. A problem with what you described, focusing on cash-for-work programs on local militias, is that imagine you are the 17-year-old son supporting your family, who did the right thing and did not join the militia and you do not have a job, but now you look and see that again we have rewarded bad behavior, we are paying militiamen to do work that you could be doing. Why did you hold back? Why did you not follow the peer pressure and join the militia yourself?
So, we have to balance cash-for-work programs in local communities with equal programs for the non-militia young men in the community. That is also a problem, I might add, with the educational benefits we are offering to militiamen. If we are creating welders and pipe fitters and computer technicians among former militiamen, we also have to do the same on the civilian side. One thing your question did not address, which is also important, if we took militia companies and move them en masse into the coming construction companies or road work companies, we have not disbanded that militia. We have exchanged their AK-47 for a shovel. What is important is that we disband this cohesive military units and send them to the four corners of their community, in civilian clothes and breaking up their leadership structure so that they are truly reintegrated in this civilian community. Just re-flagging them from being a militia company to a road grading company is not sufficient.
Michael Rubin: Ali do you have some [inaudible]? Larry first, then --
Larry Crandall: One comment, Michael said do not dwell on the history here, but I think this is important for your question. The $18.4 billion Iraq reconstruction fund, one of its objectives, and I was involved in this back in 2004 for several months, was to employ as many young studs, if you will, as possible, as quickly as possible, and pay them the going wage for whatever it is they were doing in the region in which this project was being undertaken. For a whole host of reasons, some of them reported by SIGIR, the Special Inspector General for Iraq, that has failed miserably. So, there was an enormous pot of American money initially to do these. It did not work. Certainly, one of the reasons was that the predecessor interim governments to the Maliki government were just not capable of providing any meaningful political input, so that was a missing important ingredient.
Michael Rubin: Ali.
Ali Latif: Just to point out, it is important to bear in mind, these militia groups, majority of the militiamen are a part of cohesive military units. It is a very fluid structure. People join up for a few weeks maybe when the tensions are running high and they leave. And so, trying to pick out militiamen from non-militiamen in these areas is going to be very difficult. So I mean, I agree with the point that you are rewarding bad behavior in a way, but trying to separate the two is going to be very difficult.
Also, when I talked about the government, Iraqis need to see the Iraqi government coming up with these plans. You said there are plans going through the various bodies, US bodies, which is fine, and I think it needs to be done but it needs to be done in a way where they feel that it is the Iraqi government coming out with this. This report, a lot of it is there in the DDR literature around the world, but the important thing is it has come through that Iraqis themselves, and I think we need to bear that in mind when we are trying to push through things that Iraqis will not, might not take up because it is not Iraqi, as a sense. It might be the same thing but as long as they got some involvement in it, that might help.
Michael Rubin: So, that is some point. Are there other questions? I see question over here and then first on the side and then inside.
Shawn Mayloft [phonetic]: Hi, I'm Shawn Mayloft from the Miami Times. I have question for Ali Latif. Your proposal or set of proposals included integrating militiamen into the security forces. Is that not already underway at the behest of the militias and is that not part of the problem, that you have a fairly cohesive, particularly Shiite militias, the Badr Organization and the Jaysh al-Mahdi basically moving elements wholesale into the ISF and then carrying on what they were doing before but in government uniforms? Even if you can solve that problem as it exists now, how do you take a militia, move it into a government security force and somehow make those ex-militiamen loyal to the Iraqi government more so than they are loyal to their current militia chain of command?
Ali Latif: Thanks for that question, and I agree there have been problems in the past with integrating militiamen. And one of the proposals in the report is to set up a minimum quota system so that all the various sects per unit are represented. So it will create its own checks and balances, so you are not going to have units composed solely of the Mahdi Army or the Badr brigade, et cetera. Another point is, it is very important to actually put forward the rehabilitation program for these people. You do not just land them into Iraqi police units and say go and do your thing. It is important that there is a rehabilitation program to regain this sense of nationalism that has been lost. It has been lost because 30 years of dictatorship really kills any sense of national pride and you get this fragmentation of identity and it is something -- it is not going to change overnight. It takes time and programs that will seek to regain that national pride, which needs to be implemented as well. I agree with you.
Michael Rubin: I’m actually going to follow up and ask both Ali and the rest of the panel to enunciate on some aspects of Shawn’s questions. First of all, if the panel in general could talk a little bit more about precisely how do you change someone’s loyalty from being in a militia and being loyal to a single political figure? And this is also an artifact of the way the party list system which the Iraqi election system created. How do you switch that loyalty precisely? What are the ideas that are out there? And then, Ali, after the other three answer that question, I would like to ask you, basically you are emphasizing restoring Iraqi nationalism. And will that be effective among many of the militias which have been accused by Iraqis and foreigners both of being under Iran's thumb? Larry, Larry or Mike, do you have any ideas about precisely how we can change the loyalties in the process?
Larry Crandall: I would be foolish enough to go first here on that one. First, I forgot to mention at the outset that anything I say should not be associated with my very recent work with the State Department, so please do not ascribe this to a State Department official. As of tomorrow or the next day, I am not sure which, I will be off their payrolls and then I will be totally independent.
Michael Rubin: You will be a former senior administration official?
Larry Crandall: I got a long timeline on this for Iraq and this question has come up many, many, many times and we have never come up with an idea that has been deemed workable by more than one or two people in the room and usually just by the individual who is putting an idea out there. In early 2003, for example, the initial DDR program that was designed primarily to deal with Saddam's security forces, the special republican guard or Republican Guard or the Fedayeen, et cetera, et cetera, what we had to do with those groups, we all generally agreed that those of us working on these within Cen-Com was to put them through – I hesitate to use the word because of its communist associations - but a re-education program, and that is basically what it was that was put on paper and those ideas are still around some place. I think I might have them at home.
But it was a three-month program that we designed in very rough form where these guys would be put in -- what did we call them, I forgot. There was an Arabic word, I do not remember it now, around the country and they would basically be vetted for whatever past sins -- real or perceived -- that they have done. They would be looked at for whatever skills that they might have that they could either put to work immediately, or which they could wish to have developed et cetera, et cetera. And then there were some programs that were also designed into which they would be put and they could use those skills. That included being re-trained as soldiers or being put into the civil service et cetera, et cetera, all kinds of things.
Now, none of that was done, quite frankly, back then, and none of it has been done since for a whole host of reasons. But there really is not an agreed-upon answer to that question that I am aware of, that anybody has put forth in the last four-plus years.
Larry Sampler: I will argue with that a little bit. I do not think that you can re-educate. I think what you have to do is sort of Maslovian adjustment. The Maslovian adjustment says that if people are queued up for services from a functioning government agency, they do not have time to be hanging out in militia headquarters looking for a job. They have to turn to the state and they have to recognize that the state is where their future lies. If they see a functioning state - Ali alluded to it in his initial comments - if they see that the state is working on viable solutions to the problems they face, then the state is the direction they will turn. If they do not see that, then they are going to turn in whichever direction they can find this instant succor and security, and that is usually going to be an ethnic-based organization, whether it is a militia or otherwise.
Now, I will say on the optimistic side, in Sarajevo today, the police forces travel in tripartite teams - a Serb, a Croat and a Bosniak - and that is specifically to do what Ali was alluding to, which is break up this small ethnically pure cliques within the security forces. In Afghanistan, they are not nearly that far along, but we have the same problems with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, but there is hope and progress in that direction and I think that is the direction that Iraq will have to go to.
So to directly answer your question, you cannot change their loyalty; you can change their Maslovian affiliations.
Michael Rubin: As long as it is not a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak in the trunk.
Michael Eisenstadt: I do not claim to have the answer but I’ll throw out what I think what are kind of parts of the answer. First of all, in a way this is kind of transferring of loyalties and identity and redefining identities or what militaries do. This is what basic training is all about; you enter as a civilian, they cut your hair, you shorten up your individuality, they break you down in order to build you up as a Marine, as a soldier. So, in a way, that is what every army does and therefore you transfer your identity from your group of buddies you hung out in high school to your unit, the service or the primary group, your squad or platoon.
This is extremely difficult, though, in the context in which it is occurring in Iraq. First of all, I think probably the training period is greatly foreshortened, which might have an impact on how -- and also a lot of people are former military police who do not go through extended training, but also it is really hard to take people out of the context in which they live. If the society is polarized along sectarian lines and you have a raging civil war, try as you might, you still have these kinds of countervailing pressures pulling people back towards their community. They get a letter from home or they hear that a member of their family has been killed in a sectarian killing and they look at the guy next to them and say, “Maybe it was your family that did it.” It is really hard to take people out of the situation they are in.
I guess I would just say that and also finally the final situation, the final point I would make is, again, people join militias for different reasons. Some probably just to get money, for the money, to lord over other people, to carry a weapon and those people; you might be able to buy those people off. You say simply you are joining a bigger and better militia, the Iraqi security forces but for others who have ideological or kind of belong to a militia out of identity reasons, that would be much more difficult. And again, the context I think probably will overwhelm whatever progress you make within the military as long as you have the civil war raging in the country.
Michael Rubin: Okay, question for Ali only. Let me just rephrase the question. Do you think it is possible through information operations or any other means to taint or stigmatize acceptance of Iranian money even if that Iranian money is for social service networks?
Ali Latif: That is an interesting question, definitely. Let me just say militiamen or Iraqis in the past, whether they have accepted money from Iran or not, remain very proudly Iraqi. So, it is one thing accepting money from Iranian agencies and it is another thing acting out as they see an Iranian agenda in Iraq. So we have to separate those two things. But a way of stigmatizing that flow of money or flow of arms, I think it is already happening in a way that I did not expect.
Public opinion, especially in most of Iraq, especially among the Shias, is changing with respect to Iran. What I mean by that is they are looking at the increasing intention that Iran is ratcheting up in the area and they are wary of how it is going to affect them in Iraq. They feel that Iran is actually putting its interest first to the detriment of the Shias of Iraq. So public opinion is starting to turn on the Iranian regime and I think through that process, people are less likely to accept, let’s say, help or money from Iran because they feel it might lead to Iran carrying out its proxy-war in Iraq, and I think it is already happening without anyone really directing it. So I hope that answers some of your questions.
Michael Rubin: I think there is a question from Julie? Sorry, I cannot see far enough to read your last name.
Julie Cheslik [phonetic]: Julie Cheslik. I’m with the Department of Defense. How do you propose that Iraq deals with the militia members that have integrated into the security forces such as the National Police and the FTS?
Michael Rubin: As for clarification, how should they deal with the militia members that have integrated into and yet not given up their loyalties, or just integrated into?
Julie Cheslik: The ones that have not given up their loyalties, yes.
Michael Rubin: Okay. Larry.
Larry Crandall: I’ll do that. That is, from a policy perspective, an easy policy answer. The operational one might be more difficult. These organizations should have codes of conduct. If a particular young man was a member of the militia, the most horrific militia you can imagine, but he enters the security services and behaves in an appropriate manner, then he is allowed to be promoted to maintain his status. If the government of Iraq documents that he or he and his colleagues are not behaving in an appropriate manner, then he is gone and the judicial system should deal with that. Now, where it becomes difficult to implement is there is no judicial system in some places, or the judicial system is skewed or not able to behave in an appropriate way. But again, going back to creating a functioning state that people can look up to, I think, as quickly as possible, as we the international community get our hands off and we say you have an Inspector General within the police service and the Inspector General is multi-ethnic and then identifies inappropriate behavior and it is addressed through your own disciplinary channels and it will take time to build and there will be failures, but over time it will begin to accredit and accrue its own credibility.
Michael Rubin: Other questions. Yes, all the way on the other side. Just wait for the microphone please.
Will England: Hi, I am Will England with the Baltimore Sun. Michael Eisenstadt touched briefly on the racketeering and smuggling that supports these militias financially. I’m just wondering, is it not likely that over time these sorts of economic activities would become more and more the point of the organization rather than a means of supporting its pursuit of military or sectarian goals, and will that not likely introduce even more complications in dealing with them?
Larry Sampler: If you do not mind, I will go first. The reason I introduced the Lexicon of illicit structure is that exact problem. It is going to be difficult, increasingly difficult, to separate political arms of – I’m sorry - military arms of political organizations from home defense militias from organizations that have turned to crime. Afghanistan is an excellent case of that and we developed the illicit power structure language in part in response to our inability in Afghanistan to separate out all these different groups. By combining them and focusing on their illicitness, their power or their structure, it is certainly difficult but it is not as difficult. We are no longer trying to decide, is this a militia whom we treat in this particular way, or is it criminal activity that we treat in a different way? I think you are exactly right and it behooves us to identify to the degree we can, those militias that still have strong affinities or loyalties to political parties so that we can use their political affiliation to manage their behavior and those that we have already lost to criminal activity, and I’m afraid there is more in the latter category than the former now.
Michael Eisenstadt: The thing I would add to that is that I think probably each conflict has its own kind of course of evolution, and I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about the full range of human experience in the Balkans, Africa, and elsewhere to know how, but I know enough from some other case studies. And actually, I would recommend to you there was an Adelphi paper by Ken Menkhaus a few years ago about Somalia where he actually showed that with the passage of time, the militia or the warlord problem became less severe, let’s say, because of the changing economic interest of the business community and that there was a point in which I think in the late 90s where the business community withdrew their support for the warlords because they no longer served their interests.
So, I would just say in each conflict, sometimes things could get worst but actually, as I mentioned before, there is always the possibility that people who have gotten rich on ill-gotten gains decide they want to invest in legal businesses and therefore they have an interest in stability and a relatively stable environment. So it can go both ways and I guess each case is unique. And so, I would just simply put that out that we have to watch, look at the uniqueness, and it might go different ways in different parts of the country for all we know.
Michael Rubin: Better take the last question right up here.
Female Voice: Hi, I’m [indiscernible], I’m from American University. I have a question for Ali in your report regarding the short-term plans. Is there a timeframe or timing that directs these plans, maybe like benchmarks, to keep the government accountable and on track with providing services, or do you see these benchmarks maybe ineffective if the government is unable to meet them and then lose more credibility with these people?
Ali Latif: There are some benchmarks. For example, from Phase One, which is the security plan to the beginning of Phase Two, which is providing these immediate services to the community, it is localized. For example, in one area if there is a drop in attacks, 50 percent drop in attacks for a consecutive four-week consecutive period, then that signals the beginning of Phase Two. So it is up to the government to provide these task forces in these regions to start addressing these services. So that is one major benchmark. From Phase Two to Phase Three, it is almost going to be simultaneous, as in once Phase Two starts to begin and we see the effects on the streets and the militias are standing down, then the political wheel can start to be initiated. So these are some of the landmarks and benchmarks of the report.
Michael Rubin: Okay. I do want to thank all our panelists, some of whom had come from quite far and all of whom have done significant research in Iraq and in Baghdad. I very much hope that we have either you back or colleagues from the Baghdad Institute back as your plan further operationalizes and develops. And last but not least, I have been pretty much on the road the last couple of weeks, and so while it would be nice to take the credit for such a wonderful panel, I really do need to thank the organizers of this panel, my research assistant, Jeff Azarva, and intern Samuel Tadros who have done all the leg work. I will take all the credit. If you have any complaints, go to them. Thanks.
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