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Blogger Call with General Bergner

By Michael Goldfarb
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The Pentagon held another in its series of blogger roundtables yesterday morning. Major General Kevin J. Bergner, deputy chief of Staff for Strategic Effects, MNF-I, was the featured guest. Bergner spoke at length about the concerned local citizens (CLCs) that have had made such a tremendous contribution to security in Anbar, and which are now being replicated in the still restive province of Diyala. Bergner started by saying that, “Most importantly, these groups have one thing in common, they have found the courage to take a stand and start fighting against the extremists…they’re becoming a solution to a very serious security problem.” He also noted a recent operation that resulted in the elimination of a seven-man al Qaeda cell and the capture of

terabytes of electronic files, some 800 names of al Qaeda terrorists, some 143 lists — or names of al Qaeda terrorists who were either en route or had perhaps already been delivered to Iraq. And that included things like not only their normal biographical information — name, where they’re from, addresses and phone numbers, passport information — but in many cases also included things like their transit routes and their other coordinating activities that were involved in getting them here.

There were some concerns expressed, however, about the reliability of these forces, mostly by Talking Points Memo’s Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman asked whether these forces might be an accelerant for violence following a U.S. withdrawal. He also inquired how the U.S. military could be sure that the people they are targeting “are truly terrorists and extremists.” Bergner responded that the forces are “a work in progress, there will be challenges, setbacks, these are people who are helping make a difference at the local level in security.” When pushed for more information, Bergner explained that his “sense is they are working well with the security forces in their area, and they are being accountable for their actions. And the coalition commanders that I’ve talked to are — have a high degree of confidence and believe there is good accountability in them.” On the question of foreign influences in Iraq, Bergner responded to a question from the WWS about General Petraeus’s statement last week that there was “no doubt” as to Iranian support for extremist militias in Iraq by saying that Petraeus’s statement was merely a “stipulation of fact.” Bergner added that with regard to the flow of foreign fighters from Syria:

Well, we have seen some progress, for example, and more progress necessary certainly. But we have seen some progress in our operations against the foreign fighter flow that has been, as you know, a central part of al Qaeda’s efforts to incite sectarian violence. Foreign fighters are heavily used as suicide bombers, and suicide bombers are very important to the kind of spectacular, barbaric attacks that have been — that have in the past fueled the sectarian violence. And so we have seen some progress against them, and it’s a combination of all the factors that I just talked about. I can’t point to any one of them in particular, not the least of which I would also say is our own kinetic operations against these different cells.

But with regard to Iranian influence, the story isn’t quite so positive:

Yeah, that’s a more difficult one to quantify. And we certainly have welcomed the commitment that the government of Iran has made to the government of Iraq. We would like very much to point to their excellence in fulfilling those commitments. We haven’t seen that yet, and that’s something that we hope they actually do follow through on. And there is — there becomes some sort of statistically significant discernible improvement. In the meantime, we do continue to conduct the operations that are targeting the networks and the facilitators — and most recently, Mahmoud Farhadi, a Qods Force officer detained in northern Iraq a couple weeks ago — because that’s our mandate. That’s our responsibility, to take the necessary actions to improve stability and security here — so more to follow — more to be seen on that front.

A transcript of the call is available here.

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