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The irony surrounding the current surge is that it might not be a surge at all. Prior to the bombing of Samara’s golden mosque in February 2006, the primary mission of US forces in Iraq had been defeating or containing the Sunni Arab insurgency and related terrorism. The outbreak of massive, Shi‘a militia violence, like widespread death squad activity, opened another front. Given this new challenge, do the 30,000 troops comprising the surge give US forces much additional combat power relative to these two major threats? Or do they merely help fill a deficit in military strength created by the emergence of the new second front?

Observers should beware of claims of progress at this stage of the game. The fall-off in civilian casualties in Baghdad is mainly the result of the decision on the part of the most active Shi‘a militia, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to either lay low in the face of the surge or take refuge in southern Iraq, largely beyond the reach of US forces.

Meanwhile, however, the Mahdi Army is unable to man its extensive system of checkpoints shielding Baghdad’s largest Shi‘a neighborhoods. This has allowed Sunni Arab fanatics to increase their suicide attacks against Shi’a Baghdadis. While it waits out the US surge, one can be sure the Mahdi Army is tallying up the gruesome Shi’a death toll in the Iraqi capital since the surge. The likely response will be renewed death squad rampages and sectarian cleansing whenever the surge has run its course.

With still too few boots on the ground, the US surge remains a gamble, regardless of its eventual duration, so long as Iraq’s overall political situation remains so fragile.

While an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, I prepared a surge proposal. It called for more than double the troops involved in the existing surge. Yet, I judged the probability of success of even this more robust effort as “substantially less than 50/50.” I was not alone. As a result, I also suggested that the US transition to withdrawal should that more ambitious surge fail to produce meaningful progress in its first year.

The current surge appears set to continue at least through early 2008. It may well last longer. No matter. The Mahdi Army, other Shi‘a militias, and their legions of allies in the Iraqi security forces unfortunately have the patience to wait out the surge and will almost certainly resume their bloody sectarian agenda whenever the surge winds down. In fact, some Shi‘a security elements operating alongside US forces apparently have been warning Shi‘a residents prior to US security sweeps to hide weapons and militia-related paraphernalia.

The reported desertion of many Kurdish soldiers who were sent to Baghdad for the surge draws attention to the greatest challenge facing US forces in Iraq: the creation of a truly national Iraqi security structure to which authority can be turned over if and when Baghdad (and the country writ large) can be stabilized. Much attention has been placed on adequate training and equipment, but the principal problem has been loyalty: a failure, in many cases, to perform duties reflecting loyalty to a shaky Iraqi central government rather than to one’s ethnic or sectarian community.

One bright spot may be a reported change in the situation in the Sunni Arab stronghold of al-Anbar province, where some tribal elements apparently have been moving against Sunni Arab terrorists and jihadists. Sunni Arabs also are said to be joining local Iraqi security forces in numbers not seen before.

These are positive trends, to be sure. But we must bear in mind that eliminating Sunni Arab terrorists as a major challenge would eventually re-focus the attention of their erstwhile Sunni Arab enemies on other dangerous goals: the struggle to end “occupation” and squaring off in a more organized fashion against the Shi‘a militias and Kurdish Peshmerga that have driven Sunni Arabs from mixed areas of the country from Baghdad to Kirkuk.

Indeed, with little loyalty toward a government so often at odds with Sunni Arab politicians, Sunni Arab recruits joining the security forces, like so many Kurds and Shi‘a, could put their training to use in the post-US withdrawal civil war scenario so feared by all.

Success or failure, the surge probably will leave the US facing the hard choice of whether or not to sacrifice still more lives and treasure to keep the lid on a boiling kettle of centuries-old ethno-sectarian strife that outside intervention has so far aggravated, not resolved.