Culture-the missing piece of effective Counterinsurgency Policy

Counterinsurgency’s Comeback, a piece by Nasser Hussain published in the January 2010 edition of the Boston Review, discusses the effects of various counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq and other wars in the past going back to Vietnam. Hussain also outlines the long history of counterinsurgency methods from various field manuals and publications that illustrate step by step methods for how to “win over” the “host population” in the country at hand. Such a task has proved to be nearly impossible in recent history, often due to issues of legitimacy, according to Hussain. Legitimacy is arguably the most significant reason that the majority of counterinsurgency tactics mentioned in this article have failed; they cannot win over the “host population”. Hussein mentions that almost every counterinsurgency tactic has a goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of the population, yet it is often very difficult for those in the country to see the US presence as legitimate. Why does the US fail to convince the host population that their presence is legitimate? Read the rest of this entry »

Prison Reform: In BR and On the Hill

As Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate this past weekend, Guantanamo may be America’s most infamous “prison problem,” but it is far from our only one.

Our sentencing and incarceration system is broken. With the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population and yet almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we are imprisoning people at nearly five times the world average; according to Lithwick,

approximately one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, jail, or on supervised release.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who famously served as Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and was at one point thought to be under consideration as Obama’s running-mate, has introduced landmark legislation to retool our prison system. Called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, Webb’s bill would set up a commission to examine the American criminal justice system and make recommendations about how to best reform it.
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