As troop levels shrink, combat duties in Iraq will not

By ROBERT BURNS - Associated Press
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 12:44 PM PDT

U.S. Army soldiers stand guard outside a reconciliation meeting between Sunni and Shiite leaders in the Radwaniyah area of southwestern Baghdad, Sunday. The meeting was held in Ghartan village, a former battleground between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.

WASHINGTON — If as expected President Bush cuts the number of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq by 25 percent by next summer, that will not necessarily mean less fighting for the troops who remain.

Their numbers may shrink, but their role will not.

The Americans are likely to perform the same mission — leading the fight against the insurgency — at least through next year, in part because Iraq’s army is nowhere near being ready to take over that job.

And although parts of the insurgency took a beating this summer in parts of Baghdad where extra U.S. troops began operating, the militants have shown they are too much for the Iraqis to handle on their own.

Administration officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Bush will announce this week that he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by five brigades — from 20 to 15 — by next summer, as recommended by his Iraq advisers.

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Eventually, if the hopes of U.S. commanders pan out, there will be a transition in the U.S. military’s role from leading the fight to backing up the Iraqis as they assume the lead. But in the meantime — probably until the current force of 168,000 U.S. troops shrinks below 100,000 — the American role will be a combination of securing the Iraqi population, training Iraqi forces and targeting terrorists.

That’s not welcome news for war critics in Congress who have pressed for a quick transition from combat to support. Others, including an independent commission headed by retired Marine Gen. James Jones, call for shifting the mission away from combat to put more focus on securing Iraqi’s borders with Iran and Syria.

As he reiterated in a second day of congressional testimony Tuesday, the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, sees a long road ahead in Iraq and is leery of handing off combat responsibilities too quickly to Iraqi security forces. At some undefined point in the future Petraeus would have U.S. forces performing what he calls an ‘‘overwatch’’ role, with the Iraqis handling all security operations and the Americans in essentially a backup role. He did not predict when that would come about, but it sounded like he was thinking in terms of several years.

‘‘A premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences,’’ he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He also cited a U.S. intelligence assessment that ‘‘a rapid withdrawal would result in the further release of the strong centrifugal forces in Iraq and produce a number of dangerous results, including a high risk of disintegration of the Iraqi security forces’’ and higher levels of violence.

Thus it appears to be Petraeus’s view that it is too early to forecast when the counterinsurgency mission can be transferred to the Iraqi army and police. He has the benefit of his predecessor’s experience of having made long-range predictions about security progress that fell short of their mark.

In his long-awaited war assessment, Petraeus made no mention of increasing U.S. emphasis on training the Iraqis. Some private analysts have advocated shifting the U.S. mission in that direction, on the theory that more training would hasten the day when the Iraqis are ready to provide their own security.

Petraeus believes the main mission must remain what he calls ‘‘securing the population.’’ That is the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency strategy he began implementing when he took command in Baghdad in February. That means keeping U.S. troops inside Baghdad neighborhoods, along sectarian faultlines.

Others favor a different emphasis.

Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., thinks more weight should be given to the problem of al-Qaida in Iraq, the terrorist group that until this year held sway in Sunni Arab-dominated Anbar province.

‘‘Counterterrorism efforts in the Sunni regions should be our top priority,’’ to avert the possibility of Iraq becoming a haven for al-Qaida, she said Tuesday.

Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a telephone interview that Petraeus appears determined to keep his main focus on the counterinsurgency fight, even as U.S. troop numbers dip.

‘‘My guess is that for the next year or so there’s probably not much difference’’ in how the U.S. fights the war, Biddle said. ‘‘We would continue to be providing a lot of population security in Baghdad’’ because Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker both believe it’s not impossible to get the Iraqi central government to move toward a grand political settlement — ‘‘it’s just slow.’’