Why Don't the Insurgents Simply Run Away from the Surge Attacks?

Here is a conundrum that I think is on a lot of people's mind, sent to me by a friend: Even the most elementary student of guerrilla warfare knows that if you loudly proclaim that you're going to attack at H, and actually deploy your forces and do attack at H, that insurgents will take their operations elsewhere for awhile. Give this elementary fact of guerrilla warfare, why did General Petraeus design the surge around exactly this strategy."

The answer is that this makes sense if you are not primarily interested in getting the jihadists who are setting the car bombs.

There are two elements to guerrilla war: local resistance to occupation and what Mao called "mobile war." Mobile war involves full time soldiers who organize hit and run attacks against the occupiers (or government) and then run and hide in some sympathetic place when the occupier masses its troops to counterattack. These sorts of full-time units behave run away from a confrontation virtually every time (the slogan is that they should never fight unless they are certain to win). The surge could not hope to catch such mobile warriors. The jihadists, who organize the suicide bombings, are fighting a mobile war, since they are full time soldiers and they have no abiding ties to the host community in which they prepare their attacks. And...the surge has admittedly not done anything to capture these jihadists; they all escaped and relocated elsewhere.

The U.S. military probably knew this would happen, but they had another purpose in mind: they wanted to capture or kill the nationalist insurgents, who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of attacks on U.S. troops and main purposes are to prevent the U.S. from conquering their communities and to drive the U.S. out of Iraq.

This brings us to the second element to guerrilla war, what Mao actually designated as guerrilla engagements. Guerrillas are not full time soldiers; they take up guns only for a specific operation and then return to their civilian identities as soon as it is over. Their ability to hide depends on them staying in the village or neighborhood in which they live and becoming workers, fathers, sons, etc. Guerrilla fighters generally fight defensive battles -- they set IEDs or snipe at invading armies and attempt to harass them so that they cannot complete their patrols, catch their quarry, or wreck the neighborhood.

The surge strategy (and virtually all of the U.S. offensives before the surge) was designed to root out these guerrilla fighters who could not leave (they were not mobile full time soldiers) and would not leave (since they would want to stay and protect their family and neighbors from the American onslaught). The surge involved invading every house and looking for evidence of insurgency (guns, ammunition, leaflets); so if the guerrillas did flee, they would have to take their families along (many have, creating even more refugees). In order to stop evacuation the guerrillas along with their families, the U.S. surrounds the target community and only allows women and children out, trapping the guerrillas. American soldiers then go house-to-house, seeking to apprehend or kill the guerrillas. In practice, since there is still no real way to recognize them, they actual they go after every fighting age man, arresting those that do not resist and trying to kill those that fight back or run away.

What makes the strategy backfire is that (after the handful of jihadists sneak out, often long before the offensive is announced) the U.S. strategy forces the guerrillas to fight. When these fights begin, the U.S. applies its massive firepower (including 50 caliber machine guns, artillery, helicopter gunships, and the occasional 2000 pound bomb). Large chunks of the community are rendered uninhabitable and large numbers of bystanders (trapped in their homes) are wounded or killed.

The U.S. hopes that the result is that people see that it is hopeless to continue to resist and deliver over to the U.S. the identities of the actual guerrillas amongst them. That is, this is a form of state terrorism, not unlike the firebombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II, which was supposed to make the residents of these cities withdraw their support for the war.

But the actual result is that more and more people join the resistance, because people are not willing to hand over their brothers, fathers, relatives and neighbors. They have no choice but to fight.