US forces could be needed in Iraq for a decade to battle insurgents, the top coalition commander said overnight while vowing a "forthright" review in September on whether a troop surge is working.
Speaking on Fox News, General David Petraeus said there's broad recognition in Washington that Iraq's daunting challenges will not be resolved "in a year or even two years".
"In fact, typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years," he said.
President George W. Bush and other US officials have taken to invoking South Korea as an example of a protracted US presence in a country long after formal hostilities have ended.
But in Congress, Democrats agitating for an early withdrawal of US forces have fastened on Gen Petraeus's appraisal report due in September as a make-or-break moment for Mr Bush's war campaign.
A Pentagon report last week said overall levels of violence in Iraq have not gone down, even if unrest has eased in Baghdad and the long-restive province of Anbar, where the US military surge is focused.
In fresh violence overnight, assailants killed at least eight people, while a Sunni mosque south of Baghdad was bombed in the latest in a spate of tit-for-tat attacks on shrines, security officials said.
The White House has sought to diminish expectations about Petraeus's report on the impact of the deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Iraq, which reached a climax last week.
The general insisted that he would present a "forthright assessment" in September, and said early results showed a marked improvement to security in parts of Baghdad and Anbar.
Gen Petraeus stood by his rosier view after the US Senate's Democratic leader, Harry Reid, accused him last week of "not being very candid".
"The fact is that there are signs of normalcy throughout a good bit of Baghdad. There are tens of thousands of kids that will be out there tonight playing soccer," the general said.
But in any case, the surge will need longer than September to restore security throughout Iraq, he said.
"It is certainly the case that the surge by itself does not fix the problem," Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad, said on the NBC network.
"The surge buys time for a political process to get some legs under it," he said.
However, US critics said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government has failed to enact pivotal measures such as a law to distribute Iraq's oil earnings fairly, or to reconcile warring Shiite and Sunni factions.
Gen Petraeus said any long-term deployment will depend on whether Iraq's sovereign authorities want to extend the US military presence.
"And I'm not sure what the right analogy is, whether it's Korea or what have you," he said, while emphasizing that a long-term security arrangement is "probably a fairly realistic assessment".
Gen Petraeus also conceded that there were valid doubts about a new US tactic in Iraq of arming Sunni insurgents against al-Qaeda extremists, following criticism of the move by Mr Maliki.
Asked if the US-supplied weapons could later be turned on US forces or Shiite Muslims, the general said: "Well, those are legitimate concerns, and we have the same concerns."
But he said US military commanders are vetting their new local allies "as best we can" through compiling biometric data and keeping track of weapons serial numbers.
"The fact is that over time in any of these conflicts, individuals at some point have had to end up sitting across the table from those who at best tacitly were aware of what was going on against their adversary and perhaps aided and abetted it," Gen Petraeus said.
In comments published yesterday by Newsweek magazine, Mr Maliki warned that the new US tactic is "dangerous because this will create new militias".
"I believe that the coalition forces do not know the backgrounds of the (Sunni) tribes. It is a job of the (Iraqi) government," he said.
Mr Crocker said Mr Maliki had ordered the formation of a new committee to evaluate "what we are dealing with before we move too far down the road".
Source : www.theaustralian.news.com.au
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