Articles by Sarah Sewall
Modernizing U.S. Counterinsurgency Practice: Rethinking Risk and Developing a National Strategy
by Sarah Sewall
Published in Military Review, September-October 2006 edition
Sewall argues that if the U.S. hopes to win the global War on Terror, it must take some active steps to improve its ability to wage counterinsurgency operations and must not simply rely on military doctrine to inspire a changed approach.
Read more
Blinded by Haditha
by Sarah Sewall, Op-Ed
Published in New York Times on June 13, 2006
Dealing with the reported massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, last fall may actually turn out to be an easy case for the military. After all, American troops don't need refresher training to know that killing children at point-blank range is wrong.
The hard cases are the ones that happen nearly every day: these are the grindingly routine judgment calls, the snap decisions soldiers have to make when their foes (like suicide bombers) refuse to wear uniforms.
In the spiraling violence of Iraq, American troops are constantly learning on the job. Their actions must be closely monitored, especially the bellwether of civilian harm. Yet the military consistently denied the value of tracking civilian casualties. It therefore had no early warning system.
What's more, the military's institutional procedures helped keep the reality of abuses at a distance. The mechanism to make war more humane — the law of war — paradoxically limited understanding of war's impact.
Such a legalistic lens can create a blind spot. Investigations are not routine; they occur when the system suspects a problem. With civilian casualties invisible, it's harder to find a problem to suspect.
This spring, though, the military began investigating civilian deaths not simply to assess culpability but to enhance effectiveness. This groundbreaking approach builds on efforts, begun last year, to track incidents involving civilian harm at checkpoints and during convoys. Commanders were told to investigate the most serious of these incidents.
Why? To minimize civilian harm. The effort appears to have succeeded. Since January, Iraqi civilian deaths in these situations have been reduced from four to one per week. American forces have finally begun using meaningful metrics to improve their tactics and guard their professionalism.
If Haditha spurs outrage, it should be directed in the right place. Determining culpability is the best we can do after the fact. But prevention is a far better goal. The military didn't start analyzing checkpoint shootings until well into the war. Had it acted sooner, arithmetic suggests we could have spared hundreds of Iraqi lives.
This is why the coalition should broaden its inquiry of civilian deaths to include house raids and aerial bombings. And this is why the military should focus on expanding an array of counterintuitive techniques that are now being woven into field doctrine: less force may be more effective, assuming greater risk can make you safer, and your best weapons may be money, services and relationships.
To learn from Haditha is to learn to notice not just the alleged massacres but the steady stream of civilian deaths that for too much of this war have remained invisible.
Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, was deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996.
Defining Success
by Sarah Sewall
Published in Boston Globe on January 22, 2006
Yes, the future of Iraq matters. But it’s one thing for an outcome to be important, and an entirely different question whether we can obtain it — let alone at a price Americans are willing to pay. The debate in Washington misses this distinction entirely, focusing instead on whether to adopt a timetable for our departure. This is the wrong way to frame the nation’s options. Watching the clock is not an exit strategy. Nor is honest appraisal of a military campaign providing comfort to the enemy. The question is when we’ve done enough, which means confronting an enduring truth about counterinsurgencies: Intervening foreign powers can be handmaidens of victory, but they cannot win what is ultimately someone else’s war.
This truth helps explain the apparent disconnect lurking beneath the political melee. While most Americans have lost faith in the war, the US military has regained its tactical footing. Military officers privately profess faith in their progress on the ground. It’s not entirely due to their self-described ”operational responsibility” to believe in the mission. They admit that they floundered, unprepared for a no-fooling counterinsurgency. But as they’ve figured out the basics — intelligence matters more than firepower, for example — they’ve sensed a changing tide on the military front. They now fear a repeat of a ”lesson” of Vietnam: a disillusioned public depriving them of victory.
At home, the public has grown impatient with this grandest of democratic experiments. Most Americans are ready to leave Iraq to its own devices. They would apply a different lesson of Vietnam: Align US objectives with the limited war the nation is in fact fighting. The public may well underestimate the costs of failure in Iraq. But regardless of the stakes, Americans fundamentally question the prospects for success. Ironically, for all their parochialism, average Americans can see a bigger picture than the soldier on the ground.
Americans historically will support costly and sustained military operations if they believe in the mission’s objectives and the likelihood of its success. In his recent blitz of Iraq speeches, President Bush has stressed the importance of the cause. Despite switching horses to justify the intervention, the president’s case for creating a viable, democratic, and secure Iraq remains compelling. Certainly the alternative — an Iraq imploding in civil violence and spawning global terror — is sobering. But is the administration’s vision of success in Iraq achievable? Both the disillusioned and the true believers should gauge America’s departure by the answer.
Seen in a broader history of counterinsurgency, the answer depends largely upon the emerging Iraqi government. American actions can provide support and breathing space for an indigenous regime to solidify or mature. It matters, then, that US military forces have gained some traction in ensuring security in key districts, obtaining actionable intelligence, and training Iraqi security forces. But at this moment in the conflict, the crucial challenges are political. With parliamentary elections completed, the new representative Iraqi government will play the determining role in overcoming the insurgency.
This is why it can simultaneously be true that the US military’s performance is improving and that victory in Iraq, as the president defines it, is unattainable. The linchpin is the integrity and effectiveness of Iraq’s government and institutions. Without them, US efforts, however heroic or sustained, simply defer a reckoning with reality. Thus, the Iraqi government’s ability to make difficult choices and take forceful actions will determine whether it’s worth continuing the US effort there.
The statistical progress to date — votes counted, expanding police ranks, numbers of offensive operations conducted by Iraqis — cannot compensate for dramatic changes required in more critical arenas. Prerequisites for stability, as the US ambassador to Iraq noted, include constitutional changes that fully invest Sunnis in the nation’s future, strangling the hydra-headed militias, and real compromise in political power sharing. More equitably sharing oil revenues is another metric for assessing Iraqis’ commitment to ethnic and sectarian cooperation. It’s critical that the government reform its operational arms, particularly the security and intelligence services, to create truly national institutions rather than sectarian fiefdoms. Absent that reform, the United States is simply training and equipping factions in a nascent civil war.
Judging Iraqi progress requires honesty, of course. This will be difficult for an administration whose argument for staying the course is less related to the probability of success than to the necessity of avoiding failure and reckoning with the costs of this adventure. Over the coming months, both the disillusioned and the true believers should frankly evaluate whether the new Iraqi government is willing to do what everyone agrees is critical. If not, then even the most bullish among us should recognize the limits of continued American support. It’s time to accept that the war is no longer about us.
Sarah Sewall, former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
