Fighting Force Is Giving Way to Police Force

Even as it insists that its soldiers aren’t cut out for police work, the Pentagon is stepping up its peacekeeping role in Iraq and bringing more military police and civil affairs units into the country.

It is a role the U.S. military takes on reluctantly, and one it fears will last for months or years.

The reluctance is driven by the military’s belief that soldiers trained to kill are not well suited to keep the peace, the political sensitivity of American forces imposing order on another society, and the lack of a tradition among U.S. forces of involvement in police work on a large scale. Even military police are not trained as police in the civilian sense of the term; their duties are primarily to handle prisoners of war and maintain order on military bases.

“You can control a city of 5 million people, but you can’t police it,” said a senior defense official of the challenges facing U.S. troops in Baghdad. “We gave a lot of medals in the last three weeks to guys who know how to pull a trigger and hit something. It’s hard to turn around and tell those same guys not to pull the trigger but read them their rights instead.”

But with the U.S. unwilling to cede power quickly in Iraq to regional authorities, as it did in Afghanistan, it appears for the time being that the military has no other choice.

Already, Marines in Baghdad are operating joint police patrols with Iraqi civil authorities, and the widespread looting and mayhem appears to be subsiding. The Pentagon, which has more than 2,000 civil affairs and military police specialists attached to forces in Iraq or standing by in Kuwait, is planning to deploy more.

The civil affairs units, made up almost entirely of reservists, are charged primarily with helping rebuilding efforts. The units include doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and health-care workers.

More civil affairs teams, already stretched thin from a series of deployments to Afghanistan, are on standby to deploy to Iraq, military officials say. Hundreds of soldiers trained as military police accompanying the 4th Infantry Division have crossed into Iraq from Kuwait since Monday. Other active duty and reserve units are awaiting deployment orders.

At the Pentagon on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was vague about how many more civil affairs and military police units will join troops in Iraq. But he said the proportion of such units is likely to increase now that combat operations in Iraq are all but over.

“As the nature of the conflict winds down, which it most assuredly is, the need for certain types of things declines and the need for other types of things increases,” Rumsfeld told reporters.

The conventions of international law imply that the U.S. is responsible for maintaining order in Iraq if it is an occupying force.

The Hague Convention says an occupier “shall take all measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.”

The Geneva Convention of 1949 further spelled out the duties of an occupying army. “To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Army has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population,” it says.

But the law does not say exactly when these duties are triggered.

“That’s a factual determination,” W. Hays Parks, a legal advisor for the Army, said last week. “Not until the fighting has concluded and [it’s] very conclusive, do you reach the point where technically there might be a military occupation.”

The heavy obligation that goes with occupation might encourage extra caution in proclaiming victory, said Michael J. Glennon, a law professor at Tufts University. Despite the rout of organized enemy forces, U.S. military officials still maintain that the war is not over.

“We may well be hesitant to declare victory for just this reason,” Glennon said. “We might be reluctant to assume the full responsibility for the health, safety and welfare of the Iraqi people.”

The military police units that advanced with U.S. Marine and Army units in Iraq to the front lines were deployed primarily to deal with what the Pentagon had expected to be tens of thousands of Iraqi deserters, most of whom did not materialize.

The State Department has pledged to organize a force of 1,200 civilian police and judicial officers from various countries to send to Iraq, and U.S. military officials and diplomats are in discussions with foreign governments about whether and what each can contribute to the force.

The officials are “talking to other countries about forces that they may want to offer up to provide for a stabilization period so that, over a period of time, we’ll be able to have the kind of security environment that is safe and allows a country to fashion a new government and a new approach to how they want to live their lives,” Rumsfeld said.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in recent days that military units in Iraq are moving to contact and vet trained Iraqi police and military officers to see whether they could become part of a reconstituted police force in the country. But there are serious questions about the credibility of officers who worked for the regime of Saddam Hussein, Pace acknowledged.

The U.S. experience with peacekeeping in Bosnia and Haiti has made clear that eradicating the shadowy economic and political structures created by repressive regimes is much harder than taking down a regime’s top officials.

Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia in 2000, for example, but criminal structures allied with him survived until recently.

After the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan last year, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of soldiers to help rebuild the country’s schools, wells, roads, power plants and medical clinics, but very few were sent to engage in stopping crime. Even the task of protecting President Hamid Karzai, first carried out by U.S. Special Forces troops, has been farmed out to private contractors.

What policing U.S. forces did do was limited almost entirely to the Afghan capital of Kabul. A number of civil affairs specialists are still in Afghanistan, continuing to help distribute aid and bolster the country’s primitive infrastructure.

“We were much more willing in Afghanistan, once we got rid of the Taliban, to give Afghanistan back to existing regional tribal entities that passed the minimum test of lack of complicity in the Taliban regime,” said one Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Once you passed that test, we were happy to let you be basically in charge. We have not engaged in any dramatic kind of nation building or police work.”

In Iraq, the task is different. The military campaign has dismantled the country’s centralized authorities, but other prospective leaders have not emerged who can take power without causing ethnic and religious strife in the north and the south.

“In Iraq, we are creating a vacuum of power and we are not initially, and may not be able to, give the country right back to whomever the regional powers are, because in many cases that causes more problems than it solves for us,” said Owen Cote, associate director of the security studies program at MIT. “We have to be the authority, whether we like it or not.”

The Pentagon may be hoping to quell civil disorder through the sheer strength of the U.S. military presence in the country. There are about 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now, but they are broadly dispersed. When the 4th Infantry Division, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Division and other units scheduled to deploy arrive in Iraq, the number of U.S. troops in the country could increase by as much as 100,000.

“It looks like we’re getting ready to have a much more ubiquitous presence on the ground,” Cote said. “We’re just going to smother problems.”

When a much bigger force is brought in, “the feeling is that a lot of the problems will just melt away,” Cote added. “It will be a lot easier through sheer brute presence to establish a degree of order that would be commensurate with what our goals are.”

Times staff writer David Savage contributed to this report.