Here is a fantastic piece by Lawrence Kaplan on counterinsurgency in Iraq. He focuses on Ramadi and the work of Amy Colonel Sean MacFarland:

Applying textbook methods of counterinsurgency to Anbar’s capital, MacFarland has reversed the trend. The new counterinsurgency manual instructs, “Identity-focused insurgencies can be defeated in some cases by co-opting the responsible traditional authority figure.” MacFarland has courted such figures relentlessly. When 1-1AD arrived in Ramadi last June, it was welcomed by six cooperative tribes and twelve hostile ones. Today, it boasts the support of 15 and the enmity of just three. Of the tribal leaders whose allegiance MacFarland has gained, Sattar wields by far the most power. The sheik heads up an alliance called the “Awakening,” a collection of Anbar tribes who have thrown their lot in with the Americans. Seated beneath the Awakening’s gilded flag, which he designed and which features a sword, scales of justice, and, less explicably, a coffee pot, he recounts his three arrests by the U.S. units that operated here at the beginning of the war. How, then, was he converted to the cause of his onetime jailers? Sattar credits Al Qaeda’s excesses in Ramadi–including the murder of two of his brothers–and the fact that “the old U.S. leadership here was a disaster, but now the Americans work with us.”
Another of Ramadi’s sheiks, Ahmed Bezia–who, unlike Sattar, favors Western attire and has built himself a full-scale replica of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, albeit painted salmon–explains that, in a gathering of Ramadi’s elders, the sheiks signed a document pledging, in Bezia’s words, “that any U.S. losses are tribal losses.” At his headquarters later, MacFarland shows me a map of Ramadi color-coded to reflect tribal boundaries. Pointing to the western outskirts of the city, he explains, “We were hit almost every day in these places before [the alliance], but we haven’t been hit there in months.” Pressed on the wisdom of handing Ramadi over to militias with no allegiance to the government in Baghdad, MacFarland says simply, “There’s no government here.” In fact, not even the capital’s death spiral seems to register in Ramadi, where “most people have probably never even met a Shiite,” according to MacFarland. “It’s not about a civil war here. It’s about Al Qaeda.”

Kaplan believes we can still succeed against the Sunni insurgency in the provinces, but is skeptical about the Baghdad surge. Read the whole thing.