Despite his optimistic public comments about the success of U.S. forces in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has privately expressed the need for better intelligence on whether Iraqi insurgents are replenishing their ranks faster than they are being killed and captured.
In a closed-door session with defense analysts and retired officers three days before Thanksgiving, Rumsfeld said he was not quite as confident as Gen. John Abizaid, his top military commander in Iraq, about U.S. gains in counterinsurgency operations because he cannot gauge the extent to which foreign terrorists and new Iraqi recruits are joining the fight led by former Baath Party members, a person who attended the session said.
Another who attended the Pentagon session said Rumsfeld commented: "We know we’re killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms. We just don’t know yet whether that’s the same as winning."
"That was a very legitimate point," the attendee said. "We don’t really have a sense. He did mention that 90 percent of the country is quiet."
Rumsfeld’s comments mirrored those in a private memo he sent to his closest advisers in October in which he said defense officials and military commanders lack a good set of measures to determine how well they are doing in the global war on terrorism.
In the memo, Rumsfeld predicted that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan would only come with "a long, hard slog" and said, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror."
During the closed-door session on Iraq, according to four of those in attendance, Rumsfeld made a similar point about the lack of accurate "metrics."
"The best you can say at this moment is that we are holding our own," said one attendee, explaining that Rumsfeld and other top defense officials do not seem to have a good sense of precisely who they are fighting, what their level of organization is or how fast they can replenish their ranks.
Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, who teaches strategy and security issues at Boston University, said Rumsfeld is "right to be concerned. There has never been a time in U.S. military history when, six months into a war, we have known so little about the enemy."
"Apart from the issue of numbers," Bacevich said, "we don’t know who is in charge, we appear to have very little knowledge about organization, and we don’t seem to have a clear understanding of the enemy’s purpose."
An officer in Mosul said quantifying success against the Iraqi insurgents "is not a science. Some of it is literally just a commander’s feel — your sense of whether there’s more bad guys out there than less."
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