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Over at Marc Lynch's blog, FP contributor and Georgetown scholar Colin Kahl has been mixing it up with Brian Katulis of the liberal Center for American Progress. At issue: whether Iraq would best be stabilized by a complete U.S. withdrawal (Katulis's position) or a partial withdrawal down to 60,000 to 80,000 troops over the next 18 months (Kahl's position).
It's an interesting discussion between two sharp minds, yet I can't help but feel that both analysts are ignoring a huge and growing problem: what to do about Iraq's refugees. Consider this:
Most of the capital's displaced people have yet to return, and the number of those leaving still outpaces those returning, according to Dana Graber Ladek, the Iraqi displacement specialist for the International Organization for Migration.
Over a million Iraqis have fled their homes in the past year and a half, she said, nearly three-quarters of them from Baghdad. And though the Iraqi government is offering one million Iraqi dinars, or roughly $812, to each Baghdad family that returns, she said, only a fraction of residents has done so.
Emphasis mine. Any plan for Iraq is going to have to deal with the well over 4 million people who have fled their homes. If the Palestinian experience is any guide, refugees offer fertile ground for extremist recruitment. That said, Ladek does say in the above article that the number of Iraqis fleeing each month has gone down recently in concert with good news about declining violence:
Rocket and mortar attacks in Iraq have decreased to their lowest levels in more than 21 months, the U.S. military said Monday. [...] Last month saw 369 "indirect fire" attacks—the lowest number since February 2006. October's total was half of what it was in the same month a year ago. And it marked the third month in a row of sharply reduced insurgent activity, the military said.
Back in September, we were all debating whether the drop in violence touted by Petraeus was real. Now that everyone more or less accepts that it's real, the question has become why the violence has dropped. Is it due to the surge and to improved counterinsurgency techniques, as the U.S. military says? Is it because Iran is playing nice? Is it because Moqtada al-Sadr is laying low? Is it because al Qaeda is being defeated? Is it because sectarian cleansing has largely succeeded? Is it because Sunni Arabs have become strong enough to create a crude balance of communal power inside Iraq? A combination of all of these factors? Nobody seems to have convincing answers on this score, and whatever the reason, violence hasn't gone down enough to convince most Iraqis to return home.
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