GAO: Iraq has met few benchmarks - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

GAO: Iraq has met few benchmarks

The Iraqi government has fully met only three of its own 18 benchmarks for gauging progress towards becoming an independent, viable nation, the U.S. government’s lead watchdog agency reported to Congress on Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office found Iraq had partially satisfied four other benchmarks. But eleven, covering such critical issues as reducing sectarian violence, ensuring that Iraqi Security Forces are even-handedly enforcing the law and equitable sharing of oil revenues, were gauged as “not met.”

The “met” benchmarks, said GAO chief David Walker, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, include items such as “establishing supporting political, media, economic and services committees in support of the Baghdad security plan” and “ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.”

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the acting committee chairman, said he wasn’t impressed. “Those that are met are, frankly, pretty light,” he said. “Light in their impact.”

The assessment by Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, was blunt. “Overall, key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds,” he said.

Asked to sum up the Iraqi government performance in light of GAO’s conclusion that it had only met one of eight legislative benchmarks, Walker replied, “I think you’d have to say it’s dysfunctional. The government is dysfunctional.”

The report marks the start of a mini-flood of paper in Washington over the next seven days at what most regard as a possible turning point in the increasingly unpopular 4 1/2 -year war: the point at which President Bush has said is fair to initially measure the success of his surge of 28,500 troops that has been in place for nearly three months. About 162,000 U.S. troops are now in Iraq.

Other coming reports include two congressionally ordered assessments, one on Iraqi Security Forces and another on the administration’s quarterly gauge of progress on the benchmarks. Then, next week, the administration’s premier assessment will be presented by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. ground commander there.

Crocker and Petraeus are expected to say the surge has improved security, particularly in once-violent Anbar province, and is on track to create the conditions that will allow Iraq to become independently viable.

But Anbar, while a success, is unique, Walker said.

“There’s no question there’s been progress in Anbar province,” Walker said. “But Anbar province is not Baghdad. And Anbar province is not representative of, necessarily, other provinces in Iraq. It’s Sunni-dominated. The issues there were primarily dealing with al-Qaida and primarily Sunni-on-Sunni challenges.

“The question is, which of that is transferable” to areas with more intensely mixed sectarian populations, Walker said.

But there’s a much larger question legislators and the administration should be asking — particularly given that disarming militias is also considered critical to bringing security to Iraq, Walker said.

“What should our role be in Iraq?” Walker said. “Should it be fighting al-Qaida, or should it be providing for safe streets?” A draft version of the report was first leaked in August by The Washington Post. According to the draft, GAO found Iraq had satisfied three of the 18 benchmarks and partially satisfied two more. In the final GAO report, the latter figure was doubled to four.

The Post subsequently reported that the report was leaked for fear that the administration would attempt to influence the findings. Publicly, the administration barked that GAO was doing an “up or down” assessment that lacked nuance.

That would seem to indicate that GAO was moved by administration concerns voiced by Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, who told reporters Aug. 31 that after reviewing the draft report, policy officials “made some factual corrections” and “offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades” made by GAO.

“We have provided the GAO with information which we believe will lead them to conclude that a few of the benchmark grades should be upgraded from ‘not met’ to ‘met’,” Morrell said.

Walker said he adjusted two findings upwards but denied that the independent agency had felt political pressure to make any changes. He said the addition of the two “partially met” items was the result of gaining additional information, some of it from his own researchers.

Foreign Relations Republican leader Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., likely foreshadowed another administration strategy to employ against bearers of data and assessments critical of the surge and the overall war effort: Benchmarks aren’t all that important.

“We should be cautious about basing our evaluation entirely on the success or failure of achieving these benchmarks,” he said. Benchmarks, he said, do not measure “the degree to which Iraqis intend to pursue tribal or sectarian agendas over the long term”; whether Iraqi institutions will be resilient in the future when confronted with violence; the impact of “regional players” such as Iran and Syria; or how much security progress depends on the surge.

And, Lugar said, benchmarks fail to answer “basic questions about the economic, political and military sustainability of our own policies in Iraq.”

But the key benchmark, Lugar said, is a tough question that may be difficult if not impossible to answer: Do Iraqis want to be Iraqis?

“Is there a sense of those 25 million people that want to be one nation as opposed to some Iraqis wanting to dominate the whole lot — and being prepared to take whatever steps are necessary in terms of terror subversion, even perhaps alliance with citizens of other countries, to obtain their hegemony in Iraq?” Lugar asked Walker.

“If the answer to that question is that fundamentally Iraqis have not come to the conclusion that they want to be Iraqis, then we have an awesome problem. And we have been attempting, in a humane way, to solve that with the surge by suppressing people from killing each other. We probably saved a lot of lives by putting walls around neighborhoods so that people could not get at each other and kill each other.

“But the issue then is: How long can you maintain this? And the thought is: Well, not forever.”

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel sounded a similarly sober tone in his questions for Walker. “And when I hear you say such things as, ‘violence remains high in Iraq,’ ‘unclear whether sectarian violence has diminished in Iraq,’ ‘least progress made on the political front in Iraq,’ it leads me to the obvious question: How much more American investment are we willing to apply, specifically investment of American blood and treasure?”

The report made three recommendations:

• The secretary of state provide information to the president that clearly specifies the status in drafting, enacting and implementing Iraqi legislation;

• The secretary of defense and heads of other appropriate agencies give the president information on trends in sectarian violence with appropriate caveats, as well as broader quantitative and qualitative measures of population security, and;

• The secretary of defense, et al, provides additional information on the operational readiness of Iraqi security forces supporting the Baghdad security plan, particularly information on their loyalty and willingness to help secure Baghdad.

Related reading:

Read the full report.