I strongly encourage every American who cares about protecting this country from another terrorist attack to listen to John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and Iraq War veteran who served as managing editor of the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
Specifically, I wish I could grab every American voter by the hair (call it tough love) and force him or her to sit down and listen to a recent interview Nagl gave to National Public Radio’s program “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. (Just to give you extra incentive to pay attention to what Nagl has to say, you should know Nagl is a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University in international relations, and a veteran of both the 1991 Iraq War — he led a tank platoon – and the current Iraq War.)
Here is what I consider the most crucial excerpt from his July 22 interview:
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GROSS: In the introduction to the counterinsurgency manual — and again, you were on the team that wrote and edited the manual — Sarah Sewall writes in that introduction, “counterinsurgency can bring out the worst in the best regular armies. Even when counterinsurgency forces explicity reject insurgent tactics, they often come to imitate them. In particular, the insurgents invisibility often tempts counterinsurgents to erase the all-important distinctions between combatants and non-combatants.” Was that difficult for you and your troops that because you couldn’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, that it was sometimes tempting to just assume the worst and either shoot or arrest or whatever?
NAGL: We rarely assumed the worst and shot, I’m proud to say. I’m sure there were cases where it happened. We did often, I’m afraid, assume the worst and arrest. And I am confident, and I’m embarassed to say this, but I’m confident that it’s true that some of the innocent people we arrested and who lingered in Abu Ghraib and other prisons for long periods of time, um, became disenchanted, became in some cases probably commited to removing the American presence from Iraq because of the way they were treated. And I’m pleased and proud to say that we’ve done a much better job recently of being more precise in our targeting and in whom we arrest, better in the legal procedures that we use to keep them under custody. And in particular, we’ve started practicing what we call “counterinsurgency inside the wire,” which Marine Major General Stone was responsible for this at Abu Ghraib. And his deputy was my old friend Paul Yingling, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, and Paul is still there doing this. We practiced counterinsurgency by setting up job programs inside the detention facilities, by, um, getting better at releasing the people whom we didn’t have firm evidence on. And so, we’ve learned and adapted as an organization and become better at that important part of counterinsurgency that is treating detainees with respect. This is something H.R. McMaster did when he was in command of the 3rd ACR. When he released people from his detention facility, he set up a program he called “Ask the Customer.” So he asked them how they were treated, and asked them for recommendations on how to do it better, how to perform detention operations better. That’s something we’ve institutionalized now as an Army, as a Marine Corps on the ground in Iraq. And we’ve got Air Force and Navy folks helping us guard these prisons. So it’s a true DOD (Department of Defense) effort, and we’ve gotten far better at something that I don’t think my own organization or all of us at the time, back early in the war did very well, and that is understand that the way you treat the people you detain can influence whether they come back speaking well of you, or shooting at you.
GROSS: And your point is, it’s in our best interest to do that.
NAGL: It is absolutely in our best interest to do that. Every person we convince not to fight against us is somebody else we don’t have to kill, and it’s somebody else who, um, may not kill one of us or more of us. And that’s one of the really frustrating thing about this kind of war: The number of actively commited insurgents fighting against you is actually relatively small. I had a sector of about 60,000 people I was responsible for between Ramadi and Falluja. Of those 60,000, as near as we could tell, about 300 — about one half of one percent of that population — was actively dedicated to killing me and my guys. So everyone matters. And if you can turn one of them, and if you can turn a leader and he brings his ten-man cell with him, you’ve made a huge impact. And even better if he turns hard and he’s willing to tell you who the other cells are and provide you with some of that information. And even better if he’s able to bring a number of cells with him and says, “I’m no longer going to fight against you, Americans. These Al Qaeda guys, these are bad people!”
GROSS: You mentioned that you fear that some of the people you detained ended up in Abu Ghraib.
NAGL: I know they ended up in Abu Ghraib, and some of them should have. And some of them should still be there. Some of them were very very bad people. What I’m afraid of is that, is first that some of them I sent there shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have sent there, or they weren’t treated as well there as they could have been. We weren’t as advanced at our counterinsurgency inside the wire. But I’m also concerned that some of them were released because of problems in the justice system, perhaps starting at my level. Right? We’re making this up as we go along and we didn’t get great training in how to prepare a legal package on an Iraqi detainee. We developed these systems as we went. So I’m concerned both that we imprisoned some of the wrong people and we released some of the people we shouldn’t have released. And we paid the price for that on both sides.
GROSS: At the time that you were in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, did you have any idea what was going on in Abu Ghraib.
NAGL: Not until that was publicly released. What I did know is, we didn’t have a good program for sorting the wheat from the chaff, the bad apples from the good, and that system wasn’t as well developed as it could have been. And, um, we didn’t have a good rehabilitation program for people coming out of Abu Ghraib, so people coming out of Abu Ghraib were at least, were no more opposed to the United States presence in Iraq than they were when they went it. So I didn’t know about the Lyddie England stuff until it was, until everybody, until the world knew about it.
GROSS: And were you still in Iraq then?
NAGL: Yes, I was. It was discouraging.
GROSS: What impact did it have on the ground level? Because, quoting the counterinsurgency manual again, it says abuse of detained persons is an immoral, illegal and unprofessional.
NAGL: Yeah, we felt pretty strongly about that, as a matter of fact, in the manual. And we continue to do so, obviously.
GROSS: Oh, and I can’t remember whether it’s the manual or something that you personally said, but the quote is, “lose moral legitimacy, lose the war.”
NAGL: (joining Gross) “–lose the war.” I think that’s Conrad Crane’s phrase, and that’s exactly right.
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We can reasonably expect conservatives to be deeply offended by almost everything Nagl said above. That’s why it’s so important, for the sake of our national security, that we elect a liberal to be the next commander-in-chief. His remarks above are applicable not just to the war in Iraq, but to the overall War on Terror.