Armed Humanitarians (23 page)

There would be no massive U.S. military presence in El Salvador: Less was more. The Reagan administration, its hands tied by a Democratic Congress, avoided the temptation of committing massive amounts of men and matériel that would undermine the will of the host country to fight for its own survival. “We would train the Salvadorans to fight … but we would not advise them,” Passage told me.

The United States compelled the government of El Salvador to make significant internal reforms; retrained the Salvadoran military, which had been guilty of grotesque human rights abuses, and, most important, kept the U.S. military footprint small—no more than fifty-five trainers were in the country at a time. In Passage's view, El Salvador was a model of successful counterinsurgency.

As a retired diplomat, Passage was often invited to lecture senior military officers on counterinsurgency. But he found that the Vietnam conflict remained a taboo subject: “The military as a whole did a reasonably complete job of putting Vietnam aside. We were simply not allowed to use Vietnam as a case study. We used Angola and Mozambique. Anytime anybody suggested Vietnam, a sort of advanced palsy or Saint Vitus' dance would take hold.”

This changed after the Iraq invasion. In early 2006, Passage, then a retired ambassador, received a letter from the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Center for Army Lessons Learned was convening study groups under the direction of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who was leading an effort to write a new counterinsurgency doctrine. The team drafting the manual wanted input from civilians who had experience in the mission of armed nation building in Vietnam, and Passage was uniquely qualified.

The U.S. military, chastened by the horrific failures in Iraq, was about to undergo a serious culture shift. Confronted by failure, commanders would reach out to diplomats, development experts, even human rights advocates for fresh insight into what was now acknowledged as a nation-building mission. In part, commanders were searching for a bureaucratic fix. “Getting it right” meant that the rest of government would sign on for the mission, and the military would not have to go it alone. That was supposed to be the template for success in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan.

Getting nation building right, however, ignored some larger historical lessons. When U.S. intervention was massive, and intrusive, it threatened to wreck local self-reliance. Building a functioning state and a robust civil society was a difficult, drawn-out process that took decades, even lifetimes. But like the generation that preceded them in Vietnam, the military planners and policy practitioners dealing with Iraq's implosion were can-do types who thought that “we” could somehow save the situation if enough energy, ingenuity, and resources were brought to the mission.

*
William Colby would later quietly change the R in CORDS to stand for “rural” to soften the implication that development would be imposed on the population in a draconian, top-down way.

*
Foreign Service ranks go in reverse numerical order: The lower the number, the higher the rank.

CHAPTER  7

The Accidental Counterinsurgents

In late 2005, the journalist Thomas Ricks paid a visit to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Leavenworth was home to the Army's Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers, and Ricks had been invited to give a talk to a lecture hall packed with majors, many of whom had seen recent action in Iraq. At that point, he was in the midst of writing a new book on the war in Iraq, then entering its third deadly year. For Ricks, a longtime military correspondent for the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Washington Post
, the decision to invade Iraq had been a devastating strategic blunder, followed by a series of frustrating missteps by U.S. military commanders. The title of his book was
Fiasco
.

Ricks had been working on his manuscript around the clock, seven days a week. When he finished the first draft of a section, he would e-mail it to every soldier mentioned in the passage. When he finished a second draft he would repeat the process. One soldier wrote back, “I am in Iraq, just got back from a firefight, but give me a couple of weeks and I will tell you more.” He was writing history as it unfolded, in near-real time.

Ricks also immersed himself in French counterinsurgency theory, scouring old volumes and memoirs in a search for answers to the questions he had brought home from his reporting trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. “I would read it and again and again find the key to the problems that had bothered me,” he told me. “How should troops deal with prisoners? How should commanders think about the enemy? What is the proper command structure in an operation like this? It was all there.”

Those same questions were on his mind when he drove out to Fort Leavenworth.
I need to leave them with something concrete.
The room had a green chalkboard. He began his talk by writing one word, in block letters: GALULA.

Then he turned and looked up at the thousand or so majors in the auditorium, and asked, “Who knows what this word is, or means?”

Two or three hands went up.

Oh no
, Ricks thought. “If there was anything you take away from this lecture,” he continued, “you need to go and find out who David Galula was, and what he wrote, and how it might help you in Iraq.”

Galula, a French theoretician of irregular warfare, fought in North Africa, Italy, and France during the Second World War, and later observed revolutionary wars in Indochina, Greece, Algeria, and China. In 1964, Galula published an influential volume,
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
. The book elaborated a simple, compelling idea: Insurgency is at heart a struggle for the support of the population. Eighty percent of the counterinsurgent's task was civilian in nature: administering aid, building roads, policing villages. It is a manpower-intensive task, and Galula stated that the armed forces are usually the only organization equipped to handle the mission. But soldiers are no substitute for civilians. “To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to undertake them, would be senseless,” Galula wrote. “The soldier must then be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout. But only for long as he cannot be replaced, for it is better to entrust civilian tasks to civilians.”
1

Galula was writing primarily about twentieth-century insurgencies, anticolonial liberation movements or Communist insurrections, but his description seemed to neatly describe how so many nation-building tasks had fallen to the military in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army had published an interim counterinsurgency manual in October 2004, but the literature on the subject was still scarce. Many of the classic counterinsurgency texts were out of print. In the Pentagon library there had been a waiting list to check out the lone copy of Galula's book.

Fortunately, a boutique publisher in St. Petersburg, Florida, had stepped in to provide reprints of many of the classics. Hailer Publishing was founded by Jamie Hailer, a thirty-something devotee of military history and strategy who had a day job in the business planning department of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, an ammunition manufacturer. Hailer had done graduate work at Missouri State University, where he first read Galula, and he had first toyed with the idea of starting a publishing company when he tried to find a copy of
From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow
, a five-volume series on the history of the Royal Navy. When Hailer looked for a used set on the Internet, it priced out at $1,200.

But Hailer's decision to launch a publishing venture was sealed in late 2004, when he read an article in
Inside the Pentagon
, a defense trade paper published in Washington. The reporter, Elaine Grossman, described the reading list that Colonel H. R. McMaster had prepared in advance of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment's deployment to Iraq. On the top of that list was Alistair Horne's
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962
, but it was out of print.

Grossman had surveyed top officers, retired intelligence officials, and strategists about what was on their essential reading list, and found that some of the most enthusiastic suggestions were for hard-to-find books like Galula's. “May I suggest that you run—not walk—to the Pentagon library and get in line” for Galula's book, a retired CIA officer with Vietnam experience told Grossman. The book should be read as “a primer for how to win in Iraq.”
2

Hailer decided to reprint the Galula book, as it seemed to fill the most urgent need. “Guys came back [from Iraq] and said, ‘What are we doing?' ” Hailer later told me. “That's what frustrated me: We are fighting a unconventional war, and all these books are out of print. It's like taking an economics course and Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations
is out of print.”

He found a copy in the University of South Florida library and tracked down the company that had acquired the book's original publisher, and offered to pay royalties for reprint rights. The publisher agreed. Hailer then found a Florida firm that could make a high-quality scan of the original book and located a printer in Minnesota that could handle the job. By October 2005, the book had sold around twenty-four hundred copies. The Army's Command and General Staff College had ordered fifteen hundred of them.
3
The books were a key addition to the Fort Leavenworth bookstore.

Ricks later got a note from a friend at the Command and General Staff College who had asked a young officer he knew about Ricks's talk. “Oh, that reporter?” the friend said. “He got up and mentioned some French guy and said we were stupid if we didn't know who he was.”

In early 2006, a quiet revolt was gathering momentum at Fort Leavenworth, home to the Army's Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers. Located on the west bank of the Missouri River, this historic Army outpost was once the jumping-off point for the settlers headed west on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails; the wide trail ruts left by the thousands of wagons are still visible from the commanding bluffs above the river. The sturdy, nineteenth-century brick houses and manicured lawns give the place the feel of a Midwestern college, although the uniformed student body, Civil War cannons, and equestrian statues were a reminder of the place's martial purpose. A stint running Fort Leavenworth was seen as something of a career killer—or at least not the place to be if you wanted to go on to become a four-star combatant commander or Army chief of staff. In October 2005, Lieutenant General David Petraeus began a new assignment commanding the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus had returned to the United States after two and a half years in Iraq, first as commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, then as the head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, which was charged with training Iraqi security forces. His predecessor at Fort Leavenworth, General William Wallace, had been promoted to the unglamorous job of running U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, which oversaw the service's schools and training facilities.

Just a few months after Petraeus arrived at Fort Leavenworth, things took a dramatic turn for the worse in Iraq. On February 22, 2006, bombers struck the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. The mosque was a major Shia shrine, where the earthly remains of the tenth and eleventh imams were buried, and the attack, orchestrated by al-Qaeda in Iraq, had a very deliberate aim of starting a full-blown civil war in Iraq. In the weeks following the Samarra mosque bombing, a wave of sectarian reprisals swept Iraq. During one thirty-hour period alone, eighty-six bodies were found dumped on the street in Baghdad, with the bodies of many victims bearing signs of gruesome torture. Neighborhoods of the capital were being systematically ethnically cleansed.
4

News of the Samarra mosque bombing reached Fort Leavenworth in late February of 2006, while Petraeus was hosting a conference to review the first draft of FM 3-24, the Army's new counterinsurgency field manual. The document was supposed to be much more than a professional handbook: It was supposed to serve as a template for reforming the Army, and fixing Iraq in the process. It was also intended to launch a broader conversation about reinventing government. The meeting, convened by Petraeus and Sarah Sewall of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was a chance to test-market the new counterinsurgency document to the broader foreign policy community. Representatives of other government agencies, the human rights community, think tanks, and even a few journalists were invited to offer critiques.

Work had begun in earnest on the new counterinsurgency manual in late 2005, when Conrad Crane, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had graduated in the same West Point class as Petraeus (1974), brought together a small writing team to produce an early first draft. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the armor officer who wrote the influential
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
, was a member of the team. Colonel Peter Mansoor, the armored brigade commander who had administered parts of Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, would later help revise the final version of the document. But the most remarkable thing about the writing process was the amount of input that came from nonmilitary people. Harvard's Sewall played a unique role.

Sewall is not just a tenured academic but also a Pentagon and Washington policy insider. During the Clinton administration she served as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Before that she served as senior foreign policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell on the Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. Under Sewall's leadership, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy had quietly emerged as an influential player in military and national security circles. In November 2005, working with the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, the Carr Center had cosponsored a colloquium on irregular warfare in Washington. Sewall invited Lieutenant Colonel Erik Kurilla, the commander of the First Battalion, Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment, part of the Stryker Brigade that had recently policed Mosul, and other officers, but the panelists were not all military. To place emphasis on the issues of minimizing the use of force and reducing civilian harm, Sewall invited representatives of NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Refugees International, and the International Rescue Committee, all organizations that normally were reluctant to be associated with the military.