Petraeus’ ‘Anaconda’

It’s a shame Sen. Carl Levin failed to take the time to call public attention to Gen. David Petraeus’ “Anaconda Strategy” chart. Gen. Petraeus briefly referred to the chart during his initial testimony this week before Mr. Levin’s Senate Armed Services Committee.

The Anaconda chart is a complex graphic that depicts an intricate, multidimensional war. It’s tough to describe even with a copy in front of you. However, the strategic concept behind Gen. Petraeus’ chart (titled “Anaconda Strategy versus al Qaeda in Iraq”) is dirt simple: Squeeze and keep squeezing.

A commercial artist would certainly describe the chart as “too busy,” but war isn’t an exercise in aesthetics.

The Anaconda Strategy identifies six routes of attack on al Qaeda in Iraq:

(1) Kinetics (which includes combat).

(2) Politics (which includes countering ethno-sectarian pressures and Iraqi political reconciliation).

(3) Intelligence (operations from air recon to intel assessment).

(4) Detainee ops (which includes counterinsurgency in detention facilities).

(5) Non-kinetics (education, jobs programs).

(6) And interagency.

Anaconda’s Interagency is a hodge-podge and a kludge of a category, including diplomacy, information operations and — an interesting specificity — engagement with Syria.

On the chart, these six broad routes become operations that converge upon and compress al Qaeda’s command and control capabilities, finances, ideological appeal, safe havens, weapons and popular support.

The U.S. military uses the acronym DIME as verbal coin for “the elements of power”: Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic. Gen. Petraeus’ Anaconda Chart is DIME in big dollars.

Since Gen. Petraeus’ and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s September 2007 testimony, “the Anaconda” (the incremental synergy of this complex war-fighting and nation-building process) has dramatically squeezed al Qaeda. No, it hasn’t crushed it — but the organization is physically damaged. Moreover, with the “Sunni Awakening” and similar programs, al Qaeda has suffered extraordinary political and information defeats as Sunnis publicly turned on the jihadis.

Is this victory in Iraq? No. But it suggests we’ve won a major battle with potentially global significance, the kind that in the long term squeezes al Qaeda’s ideological appeal in all corners of the planet.

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