Word: baghdad
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Kagan, the American Enterprise Institute and former West Point professor, was not the lone architect of the surge. Military planners took Kagan's idea for a more muscular counterinsurgency effort by U.S. forces in Baghdad, which he originally laid out last fall in an article in the Weekly Standard,and crafted something that in some ways is more ambitious than what he envisioned. But he certainly laid the conceptual foundation for the surge, and with that in mind, TIME.com spoke with him last week to get a progress report...
Walking a reporter through what he believes to be the situation on the ground, Kagan unrolled two maps of greater Baghdad and delivered a before-and-after briefing on the surge. On the positive side of the ledger, Kagan said he saw three developments since the roughly 30,000 additional troops went into position in and around the Iraqi capital...
...everyone agrees with those claims. Pentagon officials recently told Congress that many Iraqi units are operating at only partial strength and that their numbers dwindle with each successive rotation through Baghdad. And while sectarian violence is lower than it was before the surge, there has been a spike upward lately. U.S. casualties, meanwhile, are rising. And there is widespread agreement that other Iraqi security forces, notably the police, are infiltrated by insurgents...
...Insurgent groups have had four years' practice in making and camouflaging IEDs. The bombs are especially hard to detect in crowded urban areas full of potholes, drains and sewers. The abundance of garbage on Baghdad's streets can defeat devices meant to locate bombs in relatively uncluttered locales. A discarded refrigerator on the curb could be packed with explosives. Every parked car is potentially a vehicle-borne IED (military jargon for a car bomb). Built-up areas also offer hiding places for those who plant the explosives and set them off. Abdallah says he has been asked to make trigger...
American soldiers have paid dearly for their commitment to their fallen comrades. On Memorial Day, six soldiers were killed in roadside bombings in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, as they rushed to the crash site of a downed OH-58D Kiowa scout helicopter. The two crewmen had died in the crash, but the militants who brought the helicopter down, apparently anticipating that a rescue would be attempted, had set up an IED ambush. A more sophisticated operation was mounted on May 12 by Islamic State fighters in rural Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. They attacked a U.S. patrol, killing five soldiers...