Civilians in the Build Phase
by Colonel Gary Anderson
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"You Americans should not leave. Iraqis are incapable of governing ourselves. Within a year after you are gone, there will be chaos or another dictatorship. You are capable of ruling us; Iraqis are not"
-- Farmer Jamail, February, 2010
I was coming to the end of my tour. My conversation with Jamail that day was the last I would have with him. Nearly a year earlier our Governance Team had found the market area of Zaidon in a state of near chaos with a lethargic population, filthy and unpaved streets strewn with rubbish, and a pile of ruins where the milk collection plant had been. Without the collection plant, the dairy industry was depressed. That last day, the streets were clean and lighted, the potholes were gone, and solar lighting made night shopping possible. Business in the shops was booming and the once hostile populace was eager to talk and gossip with us. The foundation for the new milk collection facility had been laid, and it was scheduled to reopen within a year; indeed, it did open in early 2011.
None-the less, my conversation with Jamail depressed me. My job was not just to rebuild. It was to build up the local and national government in the eyes of the population. Jamail's words echoed those that I had heard too often that week in my farewell tour of the Abu Ghraib Qada'a which I had become fond of despite its challenges. We'd tried hard. When we sent out our Mobile Rural Support Teams (MRSTs) all carried the logo of the Abu Ghraib government. We had tried our utmost to give the Deputy Governor (Qaimaqam) and the Qada'a council credit, but the people saw through the ruse. They knew who was paying the bills and supervising the real work. Leadership by example can only go so far.
Download the Full Article: Civilians in the Build Phase
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense on Counterinsurgency from 2003-05. He served on an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq in 2009-10 and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Relations.
About the Author(s)
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who has been a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.
Comments
Much straightforward wisdom in this depiction; it reflects a lot of what I saw in eastern Baghdad heading an EPRT 2008-09.
We, too, could not really start seeing a transition until the security situation stabilized, but getting good Iraqi leadership in the IA brigades and slowly IP brigades started making a difference.
Governance development was uneven among local and national authorities, but we realized more progress once we shifted focus to the "executive" branch entities (Beladiyas, Ministries) and away from the US-created "legislative" branch district councils (who wanted more oversight and influence on the service-delivering institutions but could only get it if we conferred it on them).
Exactly right about needing to be sensitive to when the local authorities start resisting our mentoring -- that seemed frustrating at first but really was an important sign that things were shifting, mostly for the good. It reinforced our own mental transition from "doing it for them" to "helping them do it". We had to see ourselves no longer as primary actors but as consultants to the primary actors, on both the military and civilian side.
From a longer-term perspective, the transition from Hold to Build is the transition from doing COIN to doing development in the traditional sense, with focus on sustainability of efforts, local buy-in, etc. One lesson I took is that that we needed to be mentally pushing toward that shift sooner than we were.