Yesterday, a suicide bomber killed 28 people in the Northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. It puts a gruesome exclamation point on the demise of the lone bright spot in the Iraq war, and serves as a microcosm of what might have been in Iraq, versus what actually was.

A little history is in order here. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, the city of Tal Afar was a particularly nasty place. It was a hotbed of insurgent activity, and its position near the Syrian border made it possible for such insurgents to get outside support. The city was one of the worst places in Iraq, and its outlook was bleak.

Enter Col. H.R. McMaster. He was tasked with stabilizing Tal Afar and suppressing insurgent efforts there. Beginning in May-June of 2005, McMaster’s forces engaged in a three-phase plan to secure Tal Afar and the surrounding Ninawa province. It started with a methodical sweep of the city to kill or capture insurgents and their leaders. Then the entire city was actively patrolled by armed troops to keep the peace and discourage new insurgent attacks. Finally, they put their good intentions into practice by rebuilding the infrastructure of the city. The strategy became known as clear-hold-build. And it worked.

If you ever saw footage of American troops fraternizing with Iraqi civilians — smiling, chatting, taking pictures, etc. — there’s a good chance that this footage came from Tal Afar. Clear-hold-build was a blueprint for how to establish peace in Iraqi cities. If it could work in Tal Afar, one of the worst places in all of Iraq, why couldn’t it work elsewhere?

Many people in the government took notice, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. She and others actively went to bat for clear-hold-build as a strategy moving forward. There was one big problem, however: Clear-hold-build is very manpower-intensive, and it therefore ran directly counter to the administration’s preference to try to execute the war with a thin force. With the 2006 midterms looming, and the American public already weary of American efforts there, clear-hold-build was rejected, with the administration foolishly accepting Iraqi government promises that they would do the holding and building.

We all know how this turned out. To be honest, by the time all this happened (roughly September of 2006), it was almost certainly already too late for anything like success in Iraq. But the limited success of clear-hold-build in Tal Afar, while it lasted, shows that whatever you might think about the justification for going into Iraq, proper planning and adequate deployment from the beginning could have limited or prevented the disaster we currently have on our hands.

Tal Afar, once the lone beacon of hope, has once again fallen into the despair that plagues the entire country. What could have been a model for American success in Iraq is instead yet another example of the completeness of our failure there.

(Primary sources here and here. I highly recommend both.)