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Petraeus to assess surge by September

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq promised Thursday to provide a “forthright assessment” in early September of the ongoing troop surge but cautioned that any successes will be unsustainable if insurgent death squads are not rooted out and destroyed.

“There can be no sustainable outcome if militia death squads are allowed to lie low during the surge, only to resurface later and resume killing and intimidation,” Army Gen. David Petraeus told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

Petraeus touted recent successes, such as the detention of the heads of the Sadr secret bomb cell network and the Iraqi leader of an Iran-based explosively formed projectile network, and a two-thirds reduction in sectarian murders in Iraq in recent months.

At the same time, he acknowledged that the overall level of violence, which features a recent spike in car bomb attacks, “has generally been unchanged.” And, he said, “It can get much, much worse.”

Petraeus said there is evidence of cooperation with Sunni tribal sheiks to tamp down al-Qaida activities in Anbar.

“Candidly, a mistake we may have made in early days was not to pay enough attention to these very important elements of Iraqi society,” he said.

Even so, he said, Sunni insurgents “are still forces that must be reckoned with. The operational environment in Iraq is the most complex and challenging I have ever seen.”

Petraeus said he and new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker have developed a draft matrix for the September benchmarks that he provided this week to Congress in closed sessions and to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Petraeus said he and Crocker will “probably focus” on four areas: security, economics, politics, governance and rule of law.

While not providing specific details on those proposed measures, Petraeus said he and Crocker will look at the degree to which security has improved for the Iraqi population; decreased influence of the militias; progress in the development of Iraqi security forces; and civic functions such as how effectively the Iraqi government is spending money on capital improvements, whether institutions such as banks are flourishing and how the criminal justice system develops.

Petraeus said he sees signs of incremental progress in those areas, but added, “It’s very difficult to demonstrate.”

What officials view as progress, he said, is “often eclipsed by the sensational attacks that overshadow our daily accomplishments.”

He also acknowledged the political pressure in Washington to produce results that run at odds with the difficult task at hand in Iraq. He said there are two “clocks” — one in the U.S., one in Baghdad — and that the former’s faster movement demands more signs of progress.

“That clock is moving and it's moving at a rapid rate of speed,” Petraeus said. “And it reflects the frustration, impatience, disappointment, anger and a variety of other emotions [many U.S. citizens] feel about the pace in Iraq and the situation in Iraq.

“And you know, I am not immune to those emotions, either, having given over two-and-a-half years of my life and watched a number of our soldiers give the last full measure of devotion to it,” Petraeus said. “So we want to see faster progress. And, again, that is understandable that that clock is moving pretty rapidly.”

Not so with the Baghdad clock, he said. That is primarily due to the fact that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is “not the Prime Minister Tony Blair of Iraq,” Petraeus said. “He does not have a parliamentary majority. He does not have his ministers in all of the different ministries. They are from all kinds of different parties. They sometimes sound a bit discordant in their statements to the press and their statements to other countries. It's a very, very challenging situation in which to lead.

“That’s a tall order, but that is what does have to happen,” Petraeus said. “They understand it. I think a number of them are determined to do what is necessary to achieve resolution of these very difficult issues. But, again, I make no bones about the challenges that are involved there.”

He called Iraq the “central front of al-Qaida’s global campaign” and that it remains the main focus of the U.S. effort there. He reiterated the connection, previously expressed by U.S. officials, between Iran and explosively formed projectile networks in Iraq, but added a bit of detail.

The Khazali bomb cell network, Petraeus said, has been backed by the Iranian Quds Force and provided “with substantial funding, training on Iranian soil, advanced explosive munitions and technologies as well as run-of-the-mill arms and ammunition, in some cases in advice and in some cases even a degree of direction.”

But Petraeus said he doesn’t know the extent to which higher levels of the Iranian government may be involved.

“That is such a sensitive issue that we do not, at least I do not, know of anything that specifically identifies how high it goes beyond the level of the Quds Force commander,” he said.