Looking The Other Way

Captain Adam Grim readies his men for a nighttime raid in Mekanik, a gritty neighborhood in southern Baghdad. The target: a suspected militia safe house. Grim's platoon won't be leading the raid, however. Instead, the Americans will be supporting Iraqi forces led by a wiry police commander named Colonel Salih Hashim. Hashim knows the neighborhood well and chose the target himself. Together the two men discuss the plan one last time. Hashim and his men will storm the house while Grim's platoon secures the street outside and provides cover.

The raid should be a model of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation, capturing bad guys while building the confidence and skills of the Iraqi police. But there's a problem. Grim has reason to believe that in the daily struggle between U.S. forces and the armed Shi'ite groups suspected of carrying out most of the executions in the area, Hashim "plays both sides." Grim certainly doesn't trust Hashim and suspects him, at the very least, of giving ammunition to Shi'ite gunmen and sometimes even letting them sleep in the same Iraqi police compound where U.S. troops meet with Hashim during the day.

There are now more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers serving as advisers to Iraqi security forces. If the recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group are put into practice, that number will grow substantially. The Baker commission's report calls for the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi units to increase to as many as 20,000 over the next year. The report argues that boosting the number of advisers will lead to improvements in the quality of Iraqi forces and pave the way for a pullback of all U.S. troops from the front lines by 2008.

But based on where Iraq's forces stand today, such a timetable is wildly optimistic. Iraq's 300,000-strong security forces--in particular the national police, which is overseen by the Interior Ministry--have been so thoroughly infiltrated by militias that some U.S. trainers will have to bring in new recruits and retrain much of the current batch before they can turn combat responsibilities over to the Iraqis. There are already concerns that by rushing to strengthen the Iraqis, U.S. forces may be ignoring abuses committed by the very people they're training. "I am greatly concerned that U.S. aid--including weapons--has gone to Iraqi security forces who have violated human rights," says Senator Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat from Vermont who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "We want to build up the Iraqi forces, but that does not mean we should support people who commit atrocities."