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Sarah Sewall on Warfare and the Humanitarian Ethic

Protecting human rights during war is a serious challenge for military leaders, soldiers on the ground, and politicians at home. Tenants of longstanding international law are often tested in the battlefield and beyond as the fight against terrorism goes global. Sarah Sewall, lecturer in public policy and director of the Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, runs the program on National Security and Human Rights. Her current research focuses on counterinsurgency.

Q: What are the most significant human rights challenges facing military leaders in the Iraq war and in the greater war on terror?

Sewall: The hardest challenge for any professional military is maintaining its ethics in the face of an enemy that does not respect the rule of law and purposefully places innocent civilians at risk. It takes enormous moral fortitude and discipline to fight well against an enemy that is goading you - tempting you to abandon your principles and the laws of warfare. This is the case today in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the broader 'war on terrorism.' Yet respect for human rights is the central distinction between the West and the enemies it is fighting, so the stakes are very high.

In Iraq, the U.S. military faces additional challenges, particularly as it plans to redeploy forces and increasingly relies on Iraqis to take on more of the fighting and protection of civilians. Those challenges flow from the lack of sufficient American forces to secure the civilian population. One issue is effectively regulating the use of air power, because a smaller footprint on the ground can induce over-reliance on air power to compensate. There are also a host of challenges associated with the training of foreign forces because, while you hope to instill respect for human rights in those forces, insuring accountability is a very difficult challenge - and one that will continue in Iraq for some time.

Q: You recently helped craft the army and Marines' new counterinsurgency war fighting field manual. What were the primary arguments you made in that manual?

Sewall: The field manual starts from the premise that the military focus in counterinsurgency is protecting the civilian; the civilian is the center of gravity. A host of implications follow. My central role in contributing to the manual was drawing out and focusing attention on the doctrine's tactical and strategic implications from the human rights perspective. These pertain not only to the short term physical risks to troops that are inherent in civilian protection, but also to the larger strategic challenge of developing and sustaining both the military and the nonmilitary capabilities that are essential to performing counterinsurgency effectively. In the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the field manual, I sought to explain these radical implications to people serving in uniform and to the American public more broadly. It is essential that Americans begin to understand the costs and risks of meeting irregular challenges in the 21st century.

Q: Do academics have a responsibility or a moral duty to collaborate with the military in planning counterinsurgency operations?

Sewall: In my view, the academy has an obligation and an opportunity to inform public policy. Certainly a school like the Kennedy School considers this part of its mission. Every individual has to make his or her own choices about the degree or nature of their contribution, and not everyone has a chance to contribute their analysis directly to ongoing policy and operations. For me, the opportunity to help military actors understand the humanitarian implications of their actions - and to help them appreciate why supporting human rights principles and expanding civilian protection can help them accomplish their mission - is an important one. I feel fortunate that my research has allowed me to engage in such concrete and applied interaction with the military during a critical time of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and of strategic conceptualization of the Long War.

Q: How do you foresee wars changing in the future - either for the better or for the worse - in regards to the protection of human rights?

Sewall: I think that human rights will be increasingly under challenge. Both terrorism and insurgency really strain human rights at their core by eroding the distinction between combatants and noncombatants and thereby prejudicing the status of civilians by purposely targeting civilians as a means to accomplish political objectives. Americans pride themselves on their commitment to human rights; they pride themselves on their moral standards. There is no question that when a nation feels under threat it is very tempting to abandon those principles and then sink to the level of the terrorist or the violent extremists. I think that we will have to be extremely vigilant and that our political discourse needs to expand in order to prevent ourselves from compromising our values in the years ahead.

Q: If recommendations like yours in the field manual are followed, and human rights are more respected and troops on the ground are having more direct positive contact with civilians, does that increase our chances of accomplishing our goals in Iraq?

Sewall: Human rights protections are central to success in counterinsurgency, at least 'by the book' - as defined in field manual 3-24. The issue of accomplishing U.S. objectives in Iraq is quite different. The U.S. military is facing a far more complicated situation in Iraq than that envisioned by the manual. The manual assumes that counterinsurgency is a conservative exercise, aimed at preserving the status quo. Counterinsurgents are to support the 'host nation government' against internal challenge. Yet the Iraqi government emerged from an externally imposed revolution - regime change - which undermines the government's legitimacy at the outset. In addition, the manual is being only partially applied late in the game. The document was released long after a litany of official U.S. government acts of omission and decisions had contradicted the doctrine's precepts. So while the human rights protections remain central to fostering legitimacy of the Iraqi government and the security of the population, it is an open question whether adherence to the manual is even possible in Iraq today. I am pessimistic about the degree to which current U.S. military operations can change fundamental realities on the ground or among Iraq's political leaders.

Reporters:

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Sarah Sewall.

Answers to questions submitted via e-mail:

Answers to questions submitted via e-mail:

Professor Sewall,

With respect to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual released in July, how would you say that progress has been implemented and secured with respect to shifting tactics of insurgency leaders and their fighting followers? More directly, how has the civilian population in Iraq adjusted to or accomodated the new suggested tactics; research had been done in the Vietnam era but, as far as it has been observed by journalists and other researchers, this was not followed by implementation in guerrilla and insurgency situations that lasted throughout that particular war and up until the current Iraq war. As a result, we have not had the opportunity to see counterinsurgency reactions from an occupied civilian population's perspective. Can you shed some insight into this occasion?

Robert S.
Richmond, VA

Sewall: It is not possible to implement the field manual in contemporary Iraq. This stems from the original purpose of the invasion - the destruction of a regime, not its defense. The new Iraqi government's legitimacy is undermined by the process through which it emerged. Furthermore, decisions made in the aftermath of the invasion, as well as the enduring reality of too few counterinsurgent troops and limited and largely ineffectual non-military nation building efforts, combine to make the manual's "prescriptions" unattainable.

In the face of these constraints, General Petraeaus has sought to apply some of the manual's underlying precepts - focusing on security for the population, strengthening the economy, and encouraging indigenous political solutions and leadership. There has been success in Baghdad in reducing the level of violence that many civilians experience, but broader challenges remain both in the capitol and throughout the country.

Nationwide polling is unlikely to capture relevant changes in local dynamics, but surveys have revealed growing objections to the American troop presence as well as concerns about the country's future. Absent fundamental changes in the overall counterinsurgency effort, principally in decisions that can only made by Iraq's political leaders, it is hard to envision a reversal of this trend in civilian perspectives.