Insurgency in Its Last Throes Again?

Not quite, but Joe Klein reports on noticeable improvements in combating Al Qaeda in Iraq:

A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.

Those who say the solution in Iraq lies in politics, not military strategy, are right for the wrong reason: The politics is built-into the military strategy at the ground level. Under David Petraeus's thoughtful command, MNF-I are learning how to navigate the sticky tribalism of Sunni regions where jihadists have become parasites of convenience. As Klein adds,

[A]n alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war.

Any optimism, however, should be tempered by a dogged awareness that much of the good work now being done in this failed state is merely the undoing of much of the bad work done over the last four years.