Like Tom Joscelyn, I question Vice President Biden’s percentages of Taliban leaders and fighters who are reconcilable and irreconcilable. I have yet to hear an intelligence agency or the military describe the Taliban as such, and in fact most people I’ve spoken to think just the opposite. And as I’ve noted here several times: please, someone, name one of these mythical moderate Taliban leaders willing to negotiate an end to the insurgency and break away from al Qaeda. But Vice President Biden made one statement about the Anbar Awakening that is completely incorrect. He claimed that the Awakening is made up of the “most extreme elements of the Sunni resistance.”
The Anbar Awakening is anything but the “most extreme elements of the Sunni resistance.” In fact, the Anbar Awakening is made up of the more moderate, mainstream elements of the insurgency as well as the prominent tribes in the province. The 1920s Revolution Brigades, a largely nationalist insurgent group, and elements of the Islamic Army of Iraq, another insurgent group largely made up of former military officers, formed the insurgent backbone of the Awakening. These groups are hardly radical Islamists, and certainly not the most extreme elements of the Sunni Insurgency. One measure of how “extreme” the Awakening was viewed by al Qaeda is al Qaeda’s violent reaction to the group’s formation. Al Qaeda in Iraq — clearly the “most extreme elements of the Sunni resistance” — savagely attacked those who took part in the Awakening because they viewed cooperation with the United States and the Iraqi government as a reasonable solution to ending the violence, encouraged Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents to join the Army and police, and opposed the imposition of al Qaeda’s perverse version of sharia. Al Qaeda went so far as to launch suicide chlorine chemical attacks against civilian population centers in Ramadi and Fallujah in an effort to break the Awakening. Now that’s extreme.
