AP Interview: Iraqis to hire security

In a hopeful step, the Baghdad government has agreed to work with U.S. officials on a plan for hiring local citizen volunteers — in some cases, former insurgents — as government security forces, the No. 2 American commander said in an Associated Press interview Tuesday.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said the accord was reached Sunday in high-level talks addressing one of the key issues facing the American and Iraqi governments as President Bush begins to reduce U.S. troops levels: how to maintain the recent trend of declining violence while promoting Iraqi reconciliation.

In recent months, thousands of Iraqis have volunteered as part of local cease-fire deals to work in alliance with U.S. forces to protect their neighborhoods against armed extremists. This has been widely cited as one of the main reasons for recent declines in sectarian violence, but it also has raised questions about how to manage these ad hoc forces and enforce the cease-fires.

One of the sticking points has been Baghdad's reluctance to hire the volunteers as government forces. Because most of them are Sunnis, the heavily Shiite central government has tended to see them as a threat to attempt to restore the Sunni dominance that prevailed under Saddam Hussein. The Americans have viewed them as a way of advancing "bottom up" reconciliation in the absence of significant moves by the central government to strike power-sharing deals.

Speaking by telephone from his headquarters outside Baghdad, Odierno said he spelled out a strategy to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other officials on Sunday that would lead to hiring a large number of the volunteers as Iraqi police or soldiers. Presently most of them are on a U.S. military payroll.

"We came to an agreement (on) how we would go forward with sharing information and the implementation process we would use to get them into the security forces," Odierno said. "They've agreed to it" and plans for how to put it into practice will be issued down the Iraqi chain of command.

"In my mind that is a big step forward," Odierno said.

Stephen Biddle, an Iraq watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations who spent a week in Iraq in November to advise the top overall commander, Gen. David Petraeus, said Odierno's description of the agreement fits what Biddle believes is a key part of the U.S. strategy for sustaining its recent gains.

"I think it's a very positive development that they've actually agreed," Biddle said in a telephone interview. "Now obviously they have to implement it. That's always a challenge with the government of Iraq."

The advantage of hiring the local volunteers as police on the government payroll is that it gives them a stake in the government and therefore makes it less likely they will turn against the government, Biddle said. It also makes the government less fearful of them as a potential opposition force.

Odierno said al-Maliki agreed that the hiring plan would be applied nationwide, beginning in Baghdad.

There are an estimated 60,000 Iraqis in local neighborhood watch groups. Odierno said the goal is to put 20 percent to 25 percent of them on the government payroll as security forces. Many of the others would receive some form of vocational or technical training that would lead to non-security employment.

In a related development, the Iraqi government has agreed to go forward with a "test case" in which several hundred volunteers in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad will be hired in public works jobs like street cleaning or repairing electrical works, Odierno said. He described Jihad as a primarily Shiite area where some government ministries do not have local representatives.

Assessing the overall state of security in Iraq, Odierno said an improving trend has held steady for 23 consecutive weeks in terms of fewer insurgent attacks and declining number of Iraqi civilian deaths.

"I feel pretty comfortable with where we're at" in proceeding with a reduction in the number of combat brigades in the country from 20 to 15 by July 2008, Odierno said. The first reduction took place with the return to Fort Hood, Texas, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division in recent days.

In a less-noticed reduction, Odierno said the 1st Battalion, 77th Armor Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, which was operating in Anbar province, has gone home and will not be replaced. A battalion usually is about 800 soldiers. Once-violent Anbar has become one of the more peaceful Iraqi provinces this year, and Odierno said it might be returned to Iraqi provincial control next spring.

As of Tuesday there were 166,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. Odierno said the number is at a peak that will decline steadily until July when it returns to perhaps 135,000. Whether further reductions are ordered beyond July is an open question that Petraeus is scheduled to address in March.