Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    These groups often had an adversarial relationship with the military, but Sewall managed to persuade senior officers to sit at the same table with human rights advocates. Getting academics and representatives of nongovernmental organizations to show up was also a struggle. Tyler Moselle, a research associate at the Carr Center, helped Sewall work the phones to persuade nonmilitary participants to attend the conference. “We open up the window and try to rush as many people in the room and then close the window,” he said.
    The role of the Kennedy School of Government was particularly important because the military and the scholarly worlds had been at odds since the Vietnam War, and the estrangement and mistrust had continued for decades. Introduction of an all-volunteer military widened the rift, as did policies like the military’s ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in uniform. The Bush administration’s disastrous preemptive war against Iraq was not particularly popular with academics nor with human rights advocates, either. But Sewall and Moselle believed they were on a mission; they justified the Carr Center’s close collaboration with the military as working within the system to minimize the use of force and reduce civilian harm. When people asked Moselle to describe his job, he liked to say, “We try to humanize the military.”
    But it was a two-way street. Petraeus and the counterinsurgents also needed the imprimatur of the Kennedy School. They wanted to reach policy wonks, think-tankers, and academics who would help shape the debate about armed nation building. Equally important, they wanted to cultivate prominent journalists. Peter Maass, the journalist who had written a thoughtful profile of Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl for the New York Times Magazine in 2004, shared a panel with Kurilla at the Carr Center’s 2005 conference on irregular warfare.
    It was easy to understand why journalists gravitated to articulate officers with Ph.D.s such as Petraeus and Nagl. Counterinsurgency was an irresistible story of military reform. Smart counterinsurgents such as Colonel H. R. McMaster and Nagl favored a subtle, culturally nuanced approach that emphasized development work over violent action, and they found common cause with journalists who had witnessed firsthand U.S. troops’ uncomprehending first encounters with Iraqis. A subtle cultural prejudice may also have been at work. Sophisticated officers with Ph.D.s made for better protagonists than old-school knuckle draggers who preferred to kick down doors in a fruitless hunt for insurgents.
    For Greg Jaffe, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal , media-savvy officers such as Nagl—sometimes nicknamed “COINdinistas” because of the military’s inevitable reduction of the word “counterinsurgency” to an acronym, COIN—were an irresistible story. “The counterinsugency narrative became an interesting one to me when I was trying to figure out how the hell we were losing this war,” he told me. “And the COIN folks were offering compelling alternatives that you could write about.”
    Jaffe