THE Fighting Illini

By Army Lt. Matt Spartz

Editor’s note: Army Lt. Matt Spartz, a lifelong Lombard resident, was deployed to Afghanistan in May with the 101st Airborne Division. A 2008 journalism graduate of University of Illinois, he is submitting occasional reports for the Daily Herald.

Walking out the gate of an outpost for the first time is what I imagine an inmate feels like during his first steps outside of prison; a more literal translation may paint the American outpost more like freedom and the war zone I walked into as more like the prison. But my first time stepping “outside the wire was like waking up to the sunny dawn after a rainstorm.

Finally I was leaving the shadow of dirt-filled, wire Hesco barriers that surround and protect combat outposts. Although I’ve been in Afghanistan for five months, it felt like this was my first day actually in the country. I found myself walking down a regular street next to a field being harvested in the distance. Kids were playing on a blue and white-striped swing set hidden beneath a shady grove. Without the M4 rifle in my hands and the body armor soaking up the warm autumn, I could have been strolling through the Illinois countryside.

I’ve gone from being an artillery platoon leader to being the fire support officer for an infantry company. Instead of overseeing my platoon firing howitzer cannons to support the infantry, I’m now the infantry commander’s expert on planning artillery and air assets for his missions. The lieutenant I’m shadowing who will go on to lead the beloved platoon I trained and fought with for 18 months.

While I shadow his job, our first big task is to meet with the local Afghan official who runs the civil projects I’ll soon be managing.

This official’s reputation is for being one of the few honest Afghans who can set deadlines, stay on budget and keep people accountable. He served us Mountain Dew – his favorite drink – and packaged banana cakes. As the midmorning meeting went on we were brought the usual fare: dishes of chickpeas, raisins (stems included), a portion of an unknown, aquamarine seed with a flowery taste and a spicy mix of crunchy chips. The chai tea was the same tint as Mountain Dew, with heaping spoons of large-grain sugar.

Unlike the reputation of the usual Middle Eastern business meeting, ours consisted of nearly all business talk with what seemed like tangible results. We followed up on the election of the local development shura, and laid out plans for multiple projects. Our interpreter is so fluent in American slang he regularly drops the “F-bomb in perfect context when referring to the Taliban, and can convey our jokes in Pashto to get the entire group laughing.

This meeting will take place weekly in my new job and probably will seem very trivial to some. But that day I left the typical American comfort zone. I connected with regular Afghans working to better their homeland, putting into place the actionable arm of American diplomacy. Here, hope exists to make an impact on the lives of real, poor and war-torn people. Here, and in thousands of these shuras across Afghanistan, over sugary chai with handwritten contracts stamped with purple finger prints, is where the war against extremism will be won.

Times like these makes me feel bad about any time thinking down on this country and these people. If one official like this exists, there must be thousands more. If one exists, there’s a chance this mission will succeed.

Copyright © 2010 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

We’ve had a little back-and-forth lately on Operation New Dawn, what it means for us on the ground, and what it means for Iraq.

From Danger Room:

“It’s not clear how rapidly the U.S. will pull those troops out of Iraq ahead of the full December 2011 withdrawal. But for the time being, “in terms of a purely train-and-advise [mission] for a military that’s got its feet on ground, it does seem to be a whole lot,” says Steven Metz of the U.S. Army War College.

Adds retired Major General Paul Eaton, who served in Iraq during the war’s early years, “50,000 is a nice round number, and it’s attractive to [use] 50,000 simply for that reason.” Surprise, surprise: the U.S.’ continued involvement in Middle Eastern politics does more to explain the current force size than military necessity…

According to Collins, the number of troops ready to prevent Iraq from unraveling is closer to 33,000. But even if the unraveling occurs, expect that force to take a back seat to the Iraqi soldiers and police, who have been protecting Iraq’s cities since last June. U.S. troops are “not going back to leading a counterinsurgency again,” Metz assesses. Nor is there any appetite in the Obama administration for re-surging troops to Iraq, as a top White House adviser indicated to Danger Room on Tuesday — something that would probably be necessary if the Iraqis are overwhelmed by a revived insurgency. If it took 150,000 troops years to tamp down the insurgency, 33,000 troops — a figure on its way down to zero — don’t stand much of a chance.

“To be perfectly honest,” Biddle says, “I think the most important function the troops are serving is more psychological than technically, concretely military.”

That is, they’re there in that number as a political reassurance to Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds that the Shiite majority isn’t going to go all Saddam Hussein on them. Even if the U.S. isn’t visible on the streets of Iraqi cities anymore, their nearby presence helps steady Iraq’s shaky post-civil war political balance. It’s like the NATO peacekeeping role in the Balkans, Biddle contends, allowing “the parties to become accustomed to living together without having their minds focused on the moment of [U.S.] withdrawal.” (That’s why Biddle says he’s increasingly worried about the full U.S. pullout next year.)”

The other possibility?

“Metz adds another point. Those 50,000 troops are a check on additional regional meddling in Iraq. The Iraqi military is built around light and mobile forces that can provide internal defense against insurgents. It doesn’t have a large armored corps or a mature air force that can deter an invasion, especially from traditional rival (turned quasi-sponsor) Iran.

For the next year-plus, U.S. troops are a “tripwire, as much of a symbol of commitment as anything,” Metz says. “We do not have the numbers there to actually fight off an invasion, but it’s enough that the U.S. is committed to deter one.”

Good points made by men much smarter than me, but here are my questions:

We can’t undo Iranian infiltration into the Iraqi government, nor have we been effective in reducing their influence. If we are trying to return to the status quo antebellum, our focus should be on the Iraqi government before the Iranian military. How does a contingency force deter an Iranian invasion that could, arguably, be augmented by sympathetic Iraqi militias? Second, if our purpose is to check the rival factions, how long are we prepared to stay there until some sort of national reconciliation can take place? Is Operation New Dawn more than a line in the sand facing both outward and inward? Will some form of the Biden’s vision come true?

Things to think about during the Spring deployment.