Fester's Place

The Gangs of Iraq

Cernig passed along an article by the Independent that US forces routinely ask for Iraqi criminals to be released so that they can be used as intelligence assets against the insurgency. However, Iraqi police are not happy with this practice:

"The Americans are allowing the breakdown of Iraqi society because they are only interested in fighting the insurgency," said a senior Iraqi police officer. "We are dealing with an epidemic of kidnapping, extortion and violent crime, but even though we know the Americans monitor calls on mobiles and satellite phones, which are often used in ransom negotiations, they will not pass on any criminal intelligence to us. They only want to use the information against insurgents."

An Iraqi government source confirmed that criminal suspects were often released if they agreed to inform on insurgents, despite the dangers to ordinary Iraqis. The Iraqi middle class has been heavily targeted by kidnappers since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Many doctors, a favourite target, and businessmen have fled to Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The police admit that they have been unable to do anything to stop the wave of abductions.

This to me seems like a questionable idea, as I mentioned in comments at Cernig's site; if the objective of the US is to help establish a credible, well respected, widely regarded legitimate government, there must be an environment in which there is security within the context of rule of law.

Chaos is the enemy of the United States for two reasons; first it creates more turbulence and insecurity that fosters an environment in which people will support whomever will credibly promise to bring some order and protection to their daily lives. SCIRI, Dawa and the Sadrists all cemented their power bases by providing quasi-governmental services; after the invasion they were the only institutions that were capable of providing basic public goods to the people. If there is chaos and an ineffective government, these extra-governmental ruling bodies will continue to be relevant and gain power. Secondly, purely criminal actions create distractions from the counter-insurgency fight. Purely criminal kidnappers most likely have a credible belief that the US has a shitty tracking system for them as the US does not have an effective information and evaluation system for the Iraqi police force. So once released back to the general population they can disappear. There is little incentive to cooperate by providing good intelligence.

The story is not this simple, as there is an interesting conversation going on a recent Army War College paper(big PDF) concerning the transformation of gangs from local and national actors to international actors on a systemic scale. Criminal gangs have different objectives than the Sunni Arab insurgents but both can and have been feeding off of each other; chaos created by the insurgents creates pressure points on the state which forces a diversion of limited resources that otherwise would have been used for anti-economic crime prevention and apprehension while non-political crime partially finances political insurgents AND creates and further exploits chaos, thus continuing a trend of increasing societal atomization and delegitimation of any government that claims a wide area monopoly on force and coercian.

There is overlap between these two elements as the insurgents have taken hostages and robbed banks and criminal gangs have engaged US, coalition and Iraqi governmental forces while also supplying arms to anyone with the cash to purchase them. However tolerating one chaos inducing agent to go after another, is, in my opinion, counterproductive to anyone who is trying to create some semblance of stability in Iraq.

Labels: insurgency, iraq

posted by fester @ 16:09