Crafting a new counterinsurgency doctrine.

• Author: Bullington, J.R.
• Position: Book review

The new U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual has not only "raised the banner of human rights" but also "offers the most strategic approach to terrorism currently available within the U.S. government," according to Professor Sewall. Moreover, its principles should be adopted by civilian foreign affairs and national security professionals and leveraged into a broader and more effective national counterinsurgency framework including civilian agency capabilities to support it, she maintains.

Professor Sewall wrote the introduction to the University of Chicago's edition of the Manual, of which General David Petraeus was the principal author. She outlines its doctrine in this essay and finds great merit in it. This positive view is especially notable because she is not a Bush partisan, having served as a Defense Department deputy assistant secretary in the Clinton administration and as long-time foreign policy advisor to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

She acknowledges that because of Iraq, "it is understandable that the bureaucracy and public suspect that better counterinsurgency tools will be used offensively against governments, rather than defensively to support or mend them. ... Before civilians build counterinsurgency capability...