TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK?

The results, at last, of the Iraqi elections.

As for the insurgency, military strategist Frederick Kagan (father brother of Robert) is worried that the US may be in too much of a hurry to scale down its forces:

The effectiveness of American forces in Iraq does not result simply from the number of soldiers, of course, but also from what they are doing. Here the news is even more disturbing. Instead of exploiting the successes in the Euphrates Valley and elsewhere, coalition commanders seem to foresee a dramatically reduced role in fighting insurgents and have announced their intention to concentrate the remaining U.S. forces on training Iraqis...

There can be no question that the development of a robust Iraqi counterinsurgency capability is essential to success in this war. But the operations the Iraqi Security Forces are carrying out differ dramatically from the clear-and-hold operations carried out by U.S. forces in the months leading up to the election. ISF troops are not, on the whole, capable of planning and conducting such complex operations, and U.S. military releases describe instead "cordon-and-knock" missions that tend to net relatively few suspects.

We have already had a taste of what might result from too hasty a transition in the evidence of Shiite officials' torturing Sunni detainees, and the accusations of Shiite commando units' complicity in an array of atrocities... It is much easier to relinquish control than to regain it, and much less controversial to continue to oversee operations than to reassert oversight.

[Thanks to Fred Siegel for pointing out the error.]