FOCUS ON DIPLOMATS IN CONFLICT ZONES
INTERAGENCY COOPERATION:
THE JIATF IN IRAQ
idden in a classified Strategic Operations Center deep inside Baghdad’s
Republican Palace, the Joint Interagency Task Force staff
strategized to counter an enemy they would never meet.
Overhead, TV screens displayed live video feeds of situations on the ground, surveilled by unmanned Predator aircraft miles away. OPSEC [Operational Security] screen-savers reminded users that “The Threat Is Out There —
Remain Vigilant” and “In Order to Set the Trap, the
Enemy Needs to Know Where the Vulnerability Is —
Protect Your Vulnerabilities.”
Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus agreed in April 2008 to create the JIATF to counter
complex, interrelated strategic threats in Iraq. Initially a
targeting cell to capture or kill “bad guys,” the arrival of
fulltime representatives from USAID, the State Department, the Department of Energy and the Department of
Homeland Security allowed the Joint InterAgency Task
Force to morph into a hybrid group that — for the first
time in Iraq — brought together all elements of the U.S.
H
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE JOINT INTERAGENCY
TASK FORCE IN IRAQ OFFERS RICH INSIGHTS
INTO EFFECTIVE STRATEGIC COOPERATION.
.
BY ROBERT M. BIRKENES
government into a “smart power” planning team to balance the top two threats to Iraq’s stability: al-Qaida’s operations in Iraq, and Iran.
Similar organizations exist elsewhere. For the past 20
years, JIATF-South has integrated military and civilian
counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea, Gulf
of Mexico and the Eastern Pacific. JIATF-S is credited
with disrupting hundreds of metric tons of cocaine shipments each year, and has been called “the epitome of interagency cooperation.” Similarly, JIATF-West has detected, disrupted and dismantled drug-related transnational threats in Asia and the Pacific since 1989, by providing interagency intelligence fusion, supporting U.S. law
enforcement and developing partner-nation capacity.
However, JIATF-I is different from these earlier units
because of the urgent and complex nature of the threats
to Iraq’s stability, as well as the level of attention that the
United States demonstrated by staffing it from an unprecedentedly wide range of civilian agencies to complement the substantial military cadre.
Robert M. Birkenes is the U.S. Agency for International Development representative to the Joint Interagency Task
Force in Iraq. A career FSO since 2000, he has served previously with USAID in Russia, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Jamaica.
Interagency Cooperation: A Brief History
The U.S. government had not always taken a holistic
approach to solving strategic problems in Iraq. Indeed,
with a thousand staff members in Embassy Baghdad, an
additional 500 or so on the Provincial Reconstruction
