Month: September 2008

Processing Phosphate

The Plant manager, who has worked the phosphate plant for thirty-three years and been the general manager since 1997, told us that the Phosphate Plant employs roughly 50-60 permanent workers. A full operating work force would be around 200-250 full time employees.  He explained how the plant works.

After the phosphate comes from the quarry it is crushed and mixed.  The various layers of phosphate have different levels of purity.  The Al Qaim phosphate plant requires a purity level of 20%, so the Akashat plant crushes and blends the material to reach that mix.   You can see the operation above.  This will be loaded onto trains and sent to the Al Qaim Phosphate PlantA short digression: the phosphate quarry and primary processing operation was in business before the phosphate plant in Al Qaim, which got going in 1984.  Production there was seriously disrupted by the UN sanctions after 1991 and the 2003 war essentially stopped it from working.  It is now operating at around 10%.  The plant in Al Qaim is clean and still well kept (which is different from the Akashat operation), but there are serious structural and technology problems.  The Phosphate Plant is actually a complex of several facilities.  In theory, it produces phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonia, three types of fertilizer, aluminum fluoride/cryolite, and freon production.  The plant is working only at around 10% of capacity and fertilizer is the only product it still makes. 

After years of sanctions and neglect, it might make more sense just to build a new “greenfield” factory complex (although around here open fields are khaki.)  There is a lot of open space, after all.

Short of War?

The phosphate quarry was largely undamaged by the Iraq war in 2003, but suffered mightily from UN sanctions in the 1990 until 2003.  We drove through ghost parking lots full of buses and heavy equipment. They originally stopped working for want of spare parts.  Many of them are now too far gone to repair, even if parts became available.  I assume all that scrap must be worth a lot, however.

It does make you wonder about sanctions, however.  War is brutal business, but in some cases sanctions can cause similar or worse damage.  It might be better in the case of this quarry to start completely over.  The old equipment will just get in the way.

In human terms, I have seen how sanctions caused breakdowns in the health and education systems.  People certainly died as the result of the UN sanctions, which prevented medicines and machines from getting to hospitals.  The environment was harmed as bad practices spread and new techniques were foreclosed.  This is Saddam’s fault.  There were ways to get food and medicine in Iraq, but Saddam Hussein abused & corrupted the oil for food program and refused to let the sanctions interfere with his political ambitions and he directed most of the money to his palaces.  How do you deal nasty and dangerous dictators short of war when sanctions hurt everybody else more than the bad guys?   Sometimes peace hurts more than war.

Model Railroad

The railroad tracks stretch all the way east to Hadithah where they connect in the south to the Persian Gulf and northward eventually to Europe (remember the Kaiser’s Berlin to Baghdad RR dream).  But just west of Akashat they run into the featureless desert and that is the end of them.  The station in Akashat is deceptive.  It looks like a hub, but a terminus is what it is really. There are plans, actually at this point more like aspirations, to link this line to Syria and Jordan.  The director of the phosphate quarry told us that in the early 1980s there were firm plans to connect the rail line with Jordan, but the war with Iran, followed by the war with Kuwait, the war with the UN, UN sanctions and the invasion by CF derailed this project.  Saddam’s adventures were not good for business.

The tracks are beautiful.  They are well made, well installed and well maintained, or more correctly they require little maintenance out here in the desert w/o significant traffic.  Most of the people who ran the railroad are still around.   They have the skills to do it again.  The sleepers are concrete, each emblazoned with the Iraqi Rail Road logo.    The road beds are leveled and supplemented by the right size gravel.   You have everything needed to run a railroad, except running trains because there is nothing much to carry.The phosphate quarry sporadically sends a trainload of raw material to Al Qaim.  Empty cars return.  Even if/when the phosphate and cement operations in Al Qaim are working full out there still won’t be much to carry.   The tracks leading nowhere often carry nothing. 

Practically, this situation is easily remedied.   If these tracks were extended west across Jordan to the Red Sea or the Med, Akashat would be in the middle and this track would carry a prodigious amount of freight.   I have heard estimates that containerized cargo going from the Med to Southern Iraq and the Persian Gulf could cut eight days off a trip through the Suez Canal around the Arabian Peninsula, not to mention the simple beginning of a distribution network for the whole of the Middle East.  Iraq is shaped like a keystone and it is the geographical keystone of the region.   Of course, political would far outweigh engineering challenges in this venture.

As I travel Iraq, I am always bolstered by the energy of people but saddened by the opportunity lost.  This country is rich in many ways – water, soil, location, oil – but so much was wasted by dictators and bad choices.  We did the right thing in removing Saddam.  I am certain of that.  I don’t know if the people of Iraq, the region and the world will make the most of the opportunity we have now, but it would be a shame to waste it again.  

I was worried that Akashat was a place I would never see.  This would have kept me in the company of almost everybody else on earth with the only difference being that I wanted to go.   I planned to go to Akashat on a couple of occasions and ran into bad weather.  I went to Akashat today.  Hallelujah.  Life in Iraq is now complete and I have visited everyplace in Western Anbar that I heard was worth visiting.

We traveled in the Light Armored Vehicles, shown below.  You have to stand and look over the top.  They are good for short distances.  Notice the boat-like shape.  They float … in theory.  Of course, there are no rivers or lakes anywhere nearby to test that out.

If the world was flat and there was an edge of the world, Akashat would teeter on that edge.  I would have to say that Akashat is worth seeing, but may not really be worth going to see.  It looked a lot like lots of other places in Iraq built along the railroad tracks.  It is nice (in the Iraqi context) but unremarkable.

Akashat is a sub-district of Waleed, which is a sub-district of Rutbah, which is a district of Anbar, which is one of eighteen Iraqi provinces.  You get the idea.   In true sons of liberty style, however, the citizens of Akashat elected the town councils w/o approval from Baghdad, Ramadi, Al Qaim Rutbah or Waleed.  The council is more active than most town councils we have seen, but they are not recognized as legitimate by GoI, since Akashat is a company town – a fully owned subsidiary of the Department of Industry.  You have to respect their gumption.

We stopped into the city hall, which is being renovated with CERP funds, and met the City Council Chairman and his colleagues.   He is educated as a lawyer.  He seems very intelligent and honestly interested in the good of his people.   We also talked to a contractor interested in practical money-making enterprises.  He is a Kharbouli, which is the biggest local tribe.  This extends his power and his reach into city politics and development.According to what we learned, Akashat gets a little shortchanged because it falls between jurisdictions.   It was built as an industrial village in 1985, attached to the local phosphate quarry and administered by the Ministry of industry.  As an official part of Waleed, Akashat gets its police, security and political direction from Rutbah.  Economically, however, it looks to Al Qaim, where it does most of its business and where its parent phosphate plant – the place where all the raw material from the quarry goes – is located. The director general of education from Al Qaim, not Rutbah, funds and supplies the schools in Akashat. 

Akashat also benefits from the ambiguity.  Local officials admit trying to get something from each jurisdiction.  The stakes are potentially higher than who controls the village on the edge of nowhere, since there are reports of massive nature gas deposits under the flat and forbidding local landscape.

We really don’t have a precise idea how many people live in Akashat.  Officially there are around 5000.  A short look around the town indicates that is an inflated figure.  On the other hand, greater Akashat (there really is such a thing) is supposed to have 12000 residents.  I saw a couple of sub villages, such as the garden community of Sikak (below).  No matter which figure you use, Akashat is much bigger than its “parent,” Waleed that has a permanent population of only around 500. 

Akashat is built on relatively high ground, so the climate is more pleasant (i.e. noticeably cooler) than most of the rest of Iraq.  Nevertheless, there is nothing there but the phosphate operation and the railroad.  This reason for the city’s existence might not be reason enough for all its citizens.  

The picture below is not related to the article.  The Marines let me play basketball with them.  It was the majors and above v the captains and below.  I was on the old guy team and we won.  Evidently experience and guile beats youth and energy.  Maybe we were just lucky.  I was just happy not to get hurt.

A lot has changed in Western Anbar since I arrived here almost a year ago and as my assignment comes to an end, I can appreciate them.  

The first big difference is the physical appearance.  Last year much of this province looked like what it had recently been – a war zone.  Shops and homes were boarded up, in ruins or flattened.  People looked shocked and sullen.   Anbar is still not up to what most of us would consider acceptable standards, but improvements are phenomenal and the change palpable. 

Along the whole Western Euphrates River Valley (WERV) and into the desert oasis cities of Nukhayb and Rutbah markets are open; streets are busy; the shops are full of goods; things are happening.   We used to use a “banana index” where we looked at produce in the shops as a proxy for goods being available.  Bananas available that were not green or brown indicated a decent distribution network. Today that index is overtaken by events, since shops are full.  We now are thinking of going over to a “gold standard” since we now see gold and jewels in shop windows and assume that the owners must feel safe enough from both insurgents and ordinary crooks to be so confident.

Security is increasingly taken for granted by many people and now they are moving on to other concerns, such as economy, traffic and building their lives.We have much more freedom of movement.   I didn’t do my first market walk until January of this year.  Now we walk in the Iraqi markets on almost every trip, talking to people and finding out about their hopes and problems.

A year ago there were serious fuel shortages.  While problems remain (many resulting from government controls on prices and supplies), the refinery at K3 in Husaybah is up and running.  This seemed like an impossible dream when I first saw the place a few months ago.   K3 produces naphtha, kerosene, benzene and heavy fuel oil.  It is still not up to 100% production, but it is way up from … nothing last year.  The crude oil, BTW, arrives from Bayji by rail.  This railroad was not working and was not secure just a few months ago.  I remember flying over the rail/highway route in a Huey, with the narration being that it could work, but there were lots of challenges. Getting the rail system up and running is another great accomplishment of the past year.   CF are vacating a big rail yard in Al Qaim within weeks.  (This is a little sad for me, as.  Camp Al Qaim was the nicest of the FOBs in our AO.  It had a great chow hall.)  This will essentially clear the lines all across Anbar.

The rail network in Anbar is essentially intact, although there was heavy looting of stations.   This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Much of the equipment was old and the opportunity to replace it with much improved and new computerized gear will pay dividends in the immediate future.  There is nothing to stop heavy materials such as phosphate and cement from travelling by rail, and within a few years Iraq will certainly take its place as a transportation keystone of the Middle East. We have also seen a reassertion of the pattern of centralized order in Iraq.  When I arrived last year, I had more confidence in the ability of local authorities to get things done, and my perception of the society here was patterned more on my own previous experience than the experience of the Iraqis. 

It is a common historical pattern.  It happened on a bigger scale when the Roman Empire declined.  As government order breaks down, localism comes to dominate.  Last year, in the immediate wake of war, the people of Anbar had been localized.  They were more dependent on nearby authorities and institutions such as family/tribe & religion that were simpler and closer.   This looks like it was an ephemeral condition.  As order returns, so does centralization.  

We are seeing a reassertion of the top-down pattern, where the center controls the resources. Local authorities look to provincial authorities for resources and direction; provincial authorities look to Baghdad.  Mayors are administrators w/o an independent power base.  Everybody grumbles and does this somewhat grudgingly, but the system seems to be coming to life and working reasonably well, especially when pumped up by the steroid of vast oil wealth.   This is not a completely positive development, IMO.  I personally don’t like such concentrations of governmental power, but we have to recognize that Iraq will not be a bottom-up society, like the U.S.   It is not what most Iraqis are accustomed to, not what they expect and it is not what they want.   An ePRT like mine working at the sub-provincial level increasingly runs up against the power of higher-up Iraqi authorities.   These are the guys who make the decisions and these are the guys we need to influence.  I wonder if our time is not almost done, at least in our current incarnation. We did a good job and maybe this is it.

I am ambivalent about this.  After all, it is a bureaucratic imperative to perpetuate itself.  But a greater imperative is to know when your work is done and not hang around like a fart in a phone booth.  When the western hero is finished, he rides off into the sunset; he doesn’t rent a bungalow in town and make himself a nuisance. In order to influence the Iraqi society and institutions, our organizations will need to mirror theirs, at least in an operational sense.   We need to act at the nodes of power, principally at the provincial and national level, so our ePRT will need to be integrated with the PRT in Ramadi, maybe absorbed, and through them to our colleagues in Baghdad.  This is coming.  I work directly for the Office of Provincial Affairs (OPA) in the Embassy.   My successor will work for the Team Leader of the Anbar PRT in Ramadi. 

I just don’t know and I don’t think I will figure it out in my last week here.  I will recommend changes in form and give my opinions.  It won’t be my decision, but I cannot envision this team still being here next year in anything like its current form. 

As it says in the Book of the Tao, “Withdraw, your work once done, into obscurity; this is the way of Heaven.”

As I get ready to leave post, I have some thoughts & lessons learned on my job here.  Please indulge me. 

PRTs and ePRTs were/are experiments.  There was no script to run my ePRT.  Its initial form was not well suited to our environment.  We learned by trying new things, eliminating the failures and building on success.  I could call it a plan, but it was more of a process.  The first rendition of the ePRT was a version of the main Anbar PRT.  We had experts on banking, budget etc.  We were centered in Al Asad and in theory we would make forays into the hinterland. This didn’t work.  Our ePRT is different.  We had a lot more physical area to cover and a lot less need for specialists.  A full-time banking expert is not so useful when you have only a few banks and none of them are really independent.  We could and did bring in experts to consult on special projects, but we didn’t need experts; we needed presence.   

Our ePRT is unique in its extreme decentralization.  We adapted to an area of operations the size of South Carolina and its arduous & uncertain travel conditions by developing a system of embedded team members, who stayed with the battalion task forces in each of our five sub-districts.  We effectively implemented this only in the last few months, as staff changes made possible in practice what we sketched out in theory late last year.  The system got our team closer to the U.S. forces doing counterinsurgency and to our Anbari friend.  You really cannot maintain a long distance relationship.  We have come to resemble a robust network, which is exactly what is needed for thisplace and time. This is not a novus ordo secclorum and we certainly did not invent this organization type, but I am proud of the role my team and I played in adapting it for Western Anbar. I had something like this in mind when I started but I admit that I am a little surprised how well my team and our associates took up the vision and how quickly it became OUR shared vision.   

I believe much of our success followed from this initial-state decision, which gave us closeness to our “customers” and ability to respond quickly and appropriately.  All our towns now have functioning councils and mayors who have received training from us in governance, finance etc.   Markets are open.  Infrastructure improving.  We have helped establish links with provincial authorities to help get Iraqi resources flowing to solve Iraqi problems.  In fact, the thing that makes me happiest is how we have been able to reduce USG money as we have informed, persuaded and cajoled our Iraqi partners to use their own resources as supplement or in place of ours.  This is the responsible and sustainable solution.(I will add a caveat.  I think our particular network organization will need to adapt soon to change in Iraqi society and what I expect will be its return to a more centralized structure.   As team leaders, we need to be more catalysts for the work of others than directors.  I see what we have here today as transition and I don’t think my successor will just be able to pick up and carry on.  He will need to adapt to the rapidly changing Iraqi reality, as I did, and our solutions will not be the same.)

My team members are known, respected and trusted by our CF counterparts and the Anbaris.   I am familiar to many the Iraqis all around our AO and I believe my own optimistic diplomacy has encourage them.  My team and I got out among the people and in this stressed environment just seeing and being seen in “ordinary activities” made a big difference. I was personally flattered at a recent engagement with a police chief.  One of my RCT colleagues was about to introduce me, when the chief said “everybody knows him.”   I had indeed met the chief on a couple of occasions, but we didn’t know each other well.  What I think he meant is that people know of me, of us, at the ePRT.  We stand out – literally – on the streets when we do market walks.  I usually take off my helmet and my bald head stands around five inches higher than the average Anbari.  We are seen and talked about when we buy kabobs from the local vendors, or when we play politician by meeting and greeting everybody along the way.  Being there is important. 

Western Anbar will not be like Switzerland anytime soon, but we did a good job in a tough environment.  (I can tell you about the relative comfort level of almost every kind of military vehicle or camp type.)  We helped establish prosperity and the potential for democracy in a place where neither of those things has grown much before. This is the biggest thing I have ever participated in doing, the most challenging and the most rewarding.  I leave Iraq still glad that I volunteered and content with the part my team played. 

This is FDR and King Saud in the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, on 14 February 1945.  Our relations with the Middle East go back to the birth of our republic, but our modern history with the region stems from relationships like this.

—–

There was no operational link between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11.   We have been fighting the organization – Al Qaeda – that planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks IN Iraq for the last five years.  Iraq and Afghanistan are both part of the struggle against terrorism and success in one enhances success in the other.  The surge could not have succeeded w/o factors such as the Sunni Awakening, but w/o the U.S. forces the brave Iraqis who stood up to Al Qaeda would have been beheaded and their families murdered.   Causality is usually complex with mutually reinforcing forces at work.  I don’t understand why it seems so hard for many otherwise competent journalists and analysts to hold all these ideas in their heads at the same time?   Too often they are trying to find the one – clean – cause.  This is just childish.

In Iraq our forces and those of our Iraqi allies are killing foreign fighters and terrorists trained, ordered and paid for by Al Qaeda.   Al Qaeda a couple years back declared Iraq (specifically Anbar) the central front in their war against the West.  They came to fight us in Iraq hoping to take advantage of the opportunities available to establish their base in Anbar.  They boldly bragged as late as 2006 that they had indeed accomplished their mission and that from their bases in Iraq their screaming fanatics would spread their evil influence around the region and to Europe and America.  We kicked their asses in Al Anbar.  Now they are cowering in desert holes or laying dead there. Had we not done that to them, they would have succeeded in their goal. 

Al Qaeda is an international organization that seeks to extend its influence wherever it can.  It has to be confronted where it is making its moves.  We can seize the initiative and fight them where they are, but we cannot always choose the places where we must fight them. 

It is like the old story re the drunk looking for his keys under the street light.  When asked where he lost them, he points across the street.  “Then why aren’t you looking over there?” the passerby asks.  “Because the light is better here.”  We had to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq because Al Qaeda came to Iraq to fight us and and given the particular conditions of geography THIS was the most urgent fight.

During WWII, Franklin Roosevelt chose put more resources first into our fight against the Nazis, even though the attack against the U.S. came from Japan.   He did this because Germany was the more URGENT threat.   American generals in East Asia and the Pacific complained that they were not getting the resources they needed.  They rightly pointed out that they were not achieving the results they could if they had more men, ships and firepower.   But Roosevelt and Marshall knew that while we would need to fight both wars, Germany came first.

The same goes for Iraq and Afghanistan.   Both are important, but Iraq was more urgent.  As our victory in Iraq makes resources available, we can shift resources.   Of course, we all need to remember that you cannot just flood resources at a problem.  There is a carrying capacity for any place.  It is not necessarily true that 1000 men can accomplish ten times as much as 100 men.  We have to have APPROPRIATE numbers and missions.

There is a good garden analogy.  If you want to grow beautiful flowers, you probably need to apply fertilizer.  At some point, however, there is enough fertilizer and after that there is too much.  It won’t make the plants grow any faster than they have the capacity to grow and it may even be harmful or fatal.

That is another reason why you have to understand the connection between Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other places. 

I would also point out that the situation in Afghanistan would be worse if Al Qaeda had been able to concentrate its resources on Afghanistan from the start.   All those foreign fighters who died in the Western Deserts of Iraq would have been dispatched to the mountains of Afghanistan.  And if Al Qaeda had a secure base in Anbar, there would have been a lot more of them.  

Iraq under Saddam was a sworn enemy of the U.S.  Today we have many friends here and a good chance that Iraq will become a reaonably democratic and stable place.  This is good.

——

Terrorism is like piracy.   In fact, the two often overlap.  It is interesting that our country’s first significant overseas intervention was against the Barbary Pirates, activities and ideology were remarkably similar to some of the enemies we face today.   Terrorists and pirates can never be eliminated entirely, but they can be controlled with diligence and vigilance.   When pirates or terrorists control states where they can establish bases and safe havens, their depredation cannot be stopped.   When their nests are cleaned out, you can control them. 

BTW – We Americans often forget that Stephen Decatur didn’t have the final word against the Barbary Pirates.  It wasn’t until the 19^th Century superpower – the British – punished them so severely that they curtailed (not gave up) their evil ways.  A lot of other social and technological factors were also at work.  It was that complex causality thing again.  No matter.  The world didn’t thank the Brits much at that time, just like we cannot expect the gratitude of the rest of world for the service are performing to make the world safer for good people and commerce … and freedom.