The most important improvements in Iraq have little to do with the US troop surge and even less to do with the central government.

Although it's true that backing Sunni groups is reaping big gains, the success of that strategy has little to do with the surge and, more importantly, if poorly managed may unleash forces that undermine the ultimate goal in Iraq.

Any opportunity for improved security in Iraq should of course be seized. Engaging Sunnis provides one possible bridge to a substantial withdrawal of US forces. But this strategy also comes with risks.

Sunni groups also want to reverse their current marginalization and position themselves vis-à-vis their Shiite counterparts, and Iran, in the event of a US withdrawal. It is enemy-of-my-enemy logic, not a change of heart or US troop increases, that is driving Sunni cooperation.

See also coverage by Harper's, with commentary from Milt Bearden.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice | Foreign Policy

Here is Ken Silverstein, quoting Joshua Partlow in today's Washington Post:

“For the past few months, the recruits have operated checkpoints, pointed out Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters and located caches of weapons.” Exhibit A was Naiem al-Qaisi, who had once been imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi government. “Now,” the Post reported, Qaisi “wants to be a policeman” and help America fight Al Qaeda.

Silverstein continues:

There’s certainly been some benefit from such deals. However -- and you wouldn’t know this from reading most accounts -- the long-term prospects of the American-Sunni alliance are dicey. Here’s how Milt Bearden, a former senior CIA officer with broad experience in the Middle East and who served as station chief in Pakistan from 1986 until the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, assessed the situation in a conversation we had this morning:

The administration is employing a very prudent tactic by having American commanders in the field striking these alliances, which eases our immediate torment. But the administration is spinning this as some sort of strategic victory for its vision of the Middle East. It’s not. The good news is that the sheiks are accepting our guns and money. The bad news is that the sheiks are accepting our guns and money. Yes, okay, go ahead and make these alliances–but understand how it’s going to play out. Don’t boogey in the end zone and pretend these Sunni fighters are a bunch of Presbyterians.

When I was in Pakistan I asked an Army commander if we could get the Afghan tribes to do something and he said, “We can usually get the Afghans to do something that they want to do.” In Afghanistan, the Soviets made thousands of deals with the tribes, but you don’t buy them–you rent them. These guys change sides all the time. It’s the same thing here. Their needs and goals are completely unrelated to our vision of the world. The sheiks figure that their turf is threatened by Al Qaeda in Iraq and they’re happy to help go after them, especially when the US is doing the heavy lifting. But there will be a piper that needs to be paid. You don’t have to go much beyond T.E. Lawrence to see how this is likely to play out.

Now, revisit Victor Hanson's analysis, recommended yesterday:

Every Shiite gangster should note that Iran’s envisioned future is not one of coequal mafias, but rather a mere concession in the south that takes orders from the real bosses in the north. The jury is still out on whether it is true that Arab Shiites are Shiites first, and Arabs second or third. But at some point someone will start to figure out that Iran also gave arms and aid to al Qaeda to kill Iraqi Shiites.

See also coverage in Foreign Policy.

Milt Bearden, on the Sunni alliance

China is worried about Afghanistan. At some point they may get worried enough to take matters into their own hands. This is to be avoided.

At its August 16 summit in Bishkek, several member governments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) identified narcotics trafficking from Afghanistan as a major regional security problem. NATO should use this possible opening to explore potential collaboration in Afghan security issues with Russia and China. Since the alliance mission in Afghanistan continues to suffer from major problems, assistance from these two countries—to supplement the support already provided by the SCO’s Central Asian members as well as SCO observer Pakistan—should be encouraged.

Chinese officials remain concerned about the Taliban’s ties to Islamic extremist groups advocating independence for China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. A June 2007 People’s Daily commentary warned that

The ‘Taliban phenomenon’ has produced grave concern. ... [I]ts resurgence has severely challenged the authority of the Afghan government. ... [T]he Taliban have grown more robust ... taking full advantage of local feelings of dissatisfaction over living conditions and anti-US sentiments. ... [T]he Taliban have galvanized their link-up with al-Qaeda remnants. ... Afghanistan is at risk of becoming the second Iraq.

An official at the Chinese Foreign Ministry subsequently said that, since maintaining stability in the larger Central Asian region represented a "primary focus" of the SCO, China and other member governments want to cooperate on fighting drugs smuggling and terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.

Inside Track: Afghan Drug Deals | The National Interest

Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

After 9/11, Atlantic Monthly correspondent and bestselling author Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) spent five years living with US troops deployed across the globe. He first reported on his travels in 2005's Imperial Grunts, an incisive and valuable primer on the military's role in maintaining an informal American empire.

In this shrewd and often provocative sequel, Kaplan introduces readers to more of the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who staff the empire's forward outposts. Although the author's travels take him to Iraq, he spends most of his time with imperial maintenance units that are training indigenous troops, protecting sea lanes and providing humanitarian relief from Timbuktu to the Straits of Malacca.

Kaplan saves his harshest judgment for his fellow journalists, whose relentless criticism of anything less than perfection amounts to media tyranny, in his view.

Kaplan sees the war on terror and the re-emergence of China as the US's two abiding challenges in the 21st century and argues that, after Iraq, the military will seek a smaller, less noticeable footprint overseas. Kaplan combines the travel writer's keen eye for detail and the foreign correspondent's analytical skill to produce an account of America's military worthy of its subject.

More of Kaplan, from the MemeStreams archive:

When North Korea Collapses...

Sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness.

The Biology of Conflict cites Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, from 1991.

The Media and Medievalism

"The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions. All questioning is a forcible intrusion. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light."

But few politicians are consistently sly in reading accurately the crowd's daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those who are -- because of the fact of their slyness -- usually find it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power in our age.

Inside the House of Cards, about a military brigade's restoring order to Iraq's second-largest city.

Force Increase Necessary for War on Terror, Leaders Say

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where US Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

The Western Front, where Kaplan introduces us to lone American servicemen whose presence in obscure countries is largely unknown.

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

Wesley Morgan, 19, a sophomore at Princeton, spent his summer vacation in Iraq on a personal invitation from David Petraeus.

His identification card read "journalist," because he keeps a blog about his experiences, but he was treated more like one of the members of Congress or other VIPs who have passed through Iraq.

Petraeus's invitation highlights his desire to attract more people like Morgan to military service -- the guys with degrees from places like Princeton (where Petraeus himself earned a doctorate), the slightly nerdy ones who are as comfortable poring over treatises on counterinsurgency tactics as going out on patrol.

Says his almost step-mother: "I was hoping this day would come when he wasn't sitting alone in his room drawing maps of Iraq and reading."

Talk About Field Trips!

Marcus Griffin is not a soldier. He is actually a professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. He is part of a new Pentagon initiative, the Human Terrain System, which embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders.

Griffin believes that by shedding some light on the local culture -- thereby diminishing the risk that US forces unwittingly offend Iraqi sensibilities -- he can improve Iraqi and American lives. He describes his mission as "using knowledge in the service of human freedom."

The Human Terrain System is part of a larger trend: Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust -- even hostility -- between academe and the military may be eroding.

Professors on the Battlefield

Many popular ideas about terrorists and why they seek to harm us are fueled by falsehoods and misinformation. Leading politicians and scholars have argued that poverty and lack of education breed terrorism, despite the wealth of evidence showing that most terrorists come from middle-class, and often college-educated, backgrounds. In What Makes a Terrorist, Alan Krueger argues that if we are to correctly assess the root causes of terrorism and successfully address the threat, we must think more like economists do.

Steven Levitt calls it "beautifully written."

What Makes a Terrorist

War in the twenty-first century will be very different from what we've come to expect. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare are rapidly evolving to allow nonstate networks to challenge the structure and order of nation-states. It is a change on par with the rise of the Internet and China, and will dramatically change how you and your kids will view security.

In Brave New War, the counterterrorism expert John Robb reveals how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions—like sabotaging an oil pipeline—that will generate a huge return. He shows how taking steps to combat the shutdown of the world's oil, high-tech, and financial markets could cost us the thing we've come to value the most—worldwide economic and cultural integration—and the crucial steps we must take now to safeguard our systems and ourselves against this new method of warfare.

The first chapter is available.

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.

Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win.

... New communications technology, particularly cell phones, makes it possible for gangs to thrive as loose associations, and allowing a geographical and organizational dispersion that renders them nearly invulnerable to attack. The PCC has been particularly successful, growing from a small prison gang in the mid-nineties to a group that today controls nearly half of São Paulo’s slums and its millions of inhabitants. An escalating confrontation between these gangs and the city governments appears inevitable.

... Picture a Russian biohacker who, a decade from now, designs a new, deadly form of the common flu virus and sells it on the Internet, just as computer viruses and worms get sold today.

The Coming Urban Terror: Systems disruption, networked gangs, and bioweapons

Musharraf also had a complaint of his own: His leverage over the tribal militants had slipped because of the US-led war in Iraq.

Foreign fear of the might of the US military, felt throughout the Muslim world immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was dissipating as US troops became increasingly bogged down in Iraq.

Now, he said, tribal leaders who had once cooperated with Musharraf because of his alliance with the Americans saw little reason to be afraid.

"Is that all there is?"

Needless to say, there is something to be said for Hama Rules. Of course, one must always think about how things will look through the lens of history:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Tougher Stance on Pakistan Took Months