The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

In its campaign against terrorism, human rights are the West’s heraldry. Respect for them distinguishes the United States from extremists of almost any brand. Yet human rights are under siege at home and undermined by much of America’s behavior abroad, weakening the moral and ideological basis of the struggle against violent extremism. It may surprise many, then, that the Army and Marine Corps have raised the banner of human rights in their new counterinsurgency doctrine. The question is whether the rest of the U.S. government — in particular foreign affairs and national security professionals — will leverage the field manual’s principles into a broader campaign against terrorism that protects core human rights regardless of faith or nationality. The Army and Marine Corps doctrine offers the most strategic approach to terrorism currently available within the U.S. government; it is no coincidence that the doc- trine revolves around rights of foreign civilians. Field Manual 3-24, as it is generally known, honestly catalogs the costs and requirements of civilian protection and nationbuilding in pursuit of stability. It demands a paral- lel and overarching national policy for strengthening states against revolutionary challengers, a policy that will, in turn, lead to the development of adequate military and civilian resources to meet that challenge. But the obstacles are enormous. First, the American public has grown weary of Iraq and appears to conflate that war with counterinsurgency more broadly (even though the field manual’s subtext cautions against pre- emptive regime change). Administration officials do not want to admit their failings in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is the first step toward necessary change in national poli- cy. Civil servants are understandably wary of being pressed into the service of “more Iraqs.” And interagency squabbling and parochialism have drained the intellectual coherence and utility from the bureaucracy’s efforts. Because the issues are complex and highly politicized, sound national counterinsurgency policy is not likely to be developed within, or sold by, this administration. Rather, a national bipartisan commission is needed to craft an effective national framework and garner the capabilities to support it in the decades ahead. A New Security Paradigm: It’s Stability, Stupid During the 1990s, the Clinton administration began to recognize that failed states and chronic instability ulti- mately threatened international, and therefore American, security interests. While a peer competitor remained a distant possibility, global crises and headlines arose from state weakness, not state strength. Previously masked by Cold War stasis, the corrosion within the international sys- tem accelerated, fueled by globalization’s inequities, developing technologies and social trends. Complex military and civilian peace operations and nationbuilding efforts were intended to repair the expand- ing holes in a fraying international fabric. But this proved to be challenging, expensive and endless work, without quick gratification; and a skeptical Congress didn’t buy the linkage between failed states and American security. The public had expected the collapse of Soviet communism to produce a security dividend, not a bill. So in 2000, Ameri- cans elected a president who derided nationbuilding, call- ing it counter to American interests. The events of 9/11, and subsequent pursuit of al-Qaida in the skeletal state of Afghanistan, ought to have chas- tened those who dismissed the costs of failed states and disorder. The higher stakes are now apparent. In fact, the marriage of ideological extremism with weapons of mass destruction threatens not just nation-states, but the poli- tics, commerce and perhaps the very cohesion of the modern interstate system. Violent extremists increasingly function not simply as insurgents within states but also as revolutionaries within the international system, with ambitions and targets that transcend national boundaries. They take root within states, threatening the political order or simply thriving in a governance vacuum. Confronting terrorism requires strengthening governments so that they can combat vio- lent and subversive movements and restore order. This is, effectively, counterinsurgency: “Those military, paramili- tary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 Sarah Sewall is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. During the Clinton administration, she served as the Defense Department’s first-ever deputy assistant secretary for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Before that she spent six years as senior foreign policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell. She is the author of the intro- duction to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsur- gency Field Manual (University of Chicago, 2007).