The Foreign Service Journal, September 2009

30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 9 civilian roles and contributions to- ward an integrated strategy. Following its approval, the team began to monitor status and ensure actors were fulfilling their tasks dur- ing its implementation. With access to intelligence, knowledge of U.S. programs in Iraq and reachback to most American agencies, the JIATF worked with Embassy Baghdad and MNF-I to report on progress in achieving the national security goals expressed in classified annexes of the JCP. The team also provided data from the field that contributed to revision of the strategy. Countering Focused Threats: Al-Qaida–Iraq and Iran JIATF-I was assigned the ambitious task of neutraliz- ing strategic threats to Iraq’s security, including foreign ter- rorists and facilitators and Iranian influence. The team analyzed these threats and led the military and civilian agencies to design whole-of-government strategies to meet them. Al-Qaida–Iraq . Gen. Petraeus characterized AQI’s threat succinctly in his April 2008 report to Congress on the situation in Iraq: “Al-Qaida’s senior leaders, who still view Iraq as the central front in their global strategy, send funding, direction and foreign fighters to Iraq. Actions by neighboring states compound Iraq’s challenges. Syria has taken some steps to reduce the flow of foreign fighters through its territory, but not enough to shut down the key network that supports AQI.” Gen. Petraeus’ Anaconda Strategy, on which he briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee in the spring of 2008, describes the whole-of-government plan to counter AQI. The image that best describes the strategy can be simply stated: “squeeze and keep squeezing” to cut off AQI from what it needs — money, popular support, safe havens, foreign fighters and weapons — using all dimen- sions of soft and hard power. Anaconda identifies six means of countering AQI: ki- netics (combat operations); politics (promoting Iraqi po- litical reconciliation and countering ethno-sectarian pressures); intelligence (including air reconnaissance); detainee operations (counterinsurgency in detention fa- cilities); non-kinetics (education, jobs programs); and in- teragency cooperation. The interagency members of the JIATF helped to turn this strategy into reality by identifying soft- power means and objectives, main- ly in the area of diplomatic engage- ment, border security, Iraqi gover- nance and provision of essential services, jobs and economic growth. Representatives from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Depart- ment of Energy and USAID tracked and assessed the progress of their agencies’ contributions to the strategy and identified for interagency leadership any obstacles or prob- lems in implementation. Iran. As early as 2006, the Bush administration de- scribed Tehran as a “profound threat to U.S. national se- curity” due to its nuclear program and a regional strategy that included lethal aid to militants in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel. Iran provided Iraqi insurgents with training, funds and materiel for improvised explosive devices and armor- piercing, explosively formed penetrators, according to re- ports from the Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile, Iran was increasing its own emphasis on le- gitimate levers of influence, such as trade. JIATF’s analy- sis and tracking of Iranian influence yielded greater understanding that Tehran’s actions were evolving away from lethal aid and more toward legitimate soft-power en- gagement. Yet even some of Iran’s investment and char- ity organizations in Iraq may serve as front organizations for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force, used as a foothold to carry out nefarious activities. As evidence of Tehran’s role in Iraq continued to accu- mulate, the need for a broader approach to countering that influence came into focus. By 2008 there was growing recognition that U.S. strategy should, in the words of a re- port from the Combating TerrorismCenter at West Point, “counter Iran’s overarching Iraq strategy, not just its sup- port for militias” and “use all forms of national power, in- cluding diplomacy, to counter negative Iranian influence in Iraq.” These concepts, reinforced by observations on the ground, led the task force to design a new U.S. approach. The JIATF’s new whole-of-government strategy to bal- ance Iranian influence — based on parameters set by the National Security Council andWhite House, rooted in the actual programs and actors on the ground in Iraq, and ex- pressed in the JCP — describes goals and tasks along five F O C U S The JCP for Iraq represented a landmark agreement on military and civilian roles and contributions toward an integrated strategy.