Hayden and COIN Pt. II

Sarah Sewell, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was one of the academics attacked in Tom Hayden's anti-counterinsurgency article in The Nation. She and several of her colleagues respond in the Harvard Crimson:

“The Carr Center’s mission is to make human rights principles central to the formulation of public policy,” Sewall said. “Civilian protection in war is premised on core human rights and has become a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. Helping to ensure that international humanitarian law is fully embraced in military doctrine will contribute to human rights protection.”

In recent articles for the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, Sewall highlighted the lack of instruction given to U.S. troops when dealing with civilians.

She said she hopes this new manual will fill this educational gap in the soldiers’ training.

As to Hayden’s concerns that “counter-insurgency, being based on deception, shadow warfare and propaganda, runs counter to the historic freedom of university life,” Sewall said that, as a knowledgeable outsider, it was her role to help educate the military about humanitarian concerns.

“Academia has a unique responsibility and opportunity to apply its research and insights to public policy challenges,” Sewall said.

Sewall’s colleague, Carr Center Faculty Affiliate Jonathan Moore, echoed the sentiment about whether a university should be able to advise the military, calling Hayden’s argument “worse than nonsense.”

“If the scholarship is serious and thorough and knowledgeable, or at least has a base of knowledge that it attempts to expand,” Moore said, “it should not restrict itself by a narrow interpretation of the mandate of the organization it stems from. You do not let an ideology distort your scholarly efforts.”

Nina M. Catalano ’09, co-president of the Harvard College Human Rights Advocates, wrote in an e-mail from Bogota, Colombia that the Carr Center and similar institutions cannot afford to remain isolated from important world events.

“The human rights movement did not win a place on the global stage just by engaging other like-minded organizations,” Catalano wrote. “While Hayden fears the Carr Center may be succumbing to what he dramatically calls ‘the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind,’ he offers no alternate, ‘clean’ opportunity for human rights defenders to influence wartime policy.”

Though she said her organization has not taken an active stand against the war in Iraq, Catalano wrote that, “one need not accept the validity of war as a political option or the premises of the current war to appreciate the desperate need for strong legal and moral guidelines for warfare.”

Sewall said she thought it was absurd for people to think that collaborating with the military went against the Carr Center’s mission.

“How can you hope to change the conduct of war without engaging those who practice it?” Sewall said. “We should all hope to live in a world without war, but there are many steps we can take to minimize war’s horror along the way.

Although this is an reasonable defense, it's also wishy-washy. Hayden attacked counterinsurgency itself as an inherent evil, and her "changing the system from the inside" answer does not rebut that. It almost seems that Sewell is afraid of defending the military doctrine she (among others) helped create.

Adrian of Politics and Soccer's comment on this sums up the problems with Hayden's thinking:

Sounds like Hayden's reasoning against COIN is a democratic one based on a few assumptions:

1) that in order to exist or flourish, insurgencies require the support of the population,
2) that support is giving freely, and
3) if a government is in the position where it has to ask for outside assistance in a COIN effort, it probably doesn't deserve to survive anyway.

A tempting argument for those who believe in democracy. However it is wrong because:

1) insurgencies do not require the support of the population to survive or flourish, such as the examples you gave using child soldiers - furthermore, instead of a unified population there can be many divided populations (Shia, Sunni and Christians in Lebanon, Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Turkmen in Iraq, etc.),
2) even when insurgencies have the cooperation of the population, that population is not necessarily given out of free will,
3) therefore, deserving governments can require outside assistance.

(h/t Duck of Minerva)