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Moral Dilemmas in Counterinsurgency

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03.30.2007 at 10:37pm

I’ve gotten lots of feedback on this National Public Radio (Future Iraqi Advisers Face Hard Lessons) piece that ran this week in which Steve Inskeep and I discussed the moral dilemmas that often confront counterinsurgents. Situations like the one described below are why one of the paradoxes of counterinsurgency is that “Sometimes the best action is to do nothing” and why we put a chapter on ethics and leadership in COIN into Field Manual 3-24.

From the NPR article:

Lt. Col. John Nagl wrote a book about fighting insurgents called Learning to

Eat Soup with a Knife.

He remembers working closely with an Iraqi police chief who provided

valuable intelligence. Then, he learned that the man he had trusted was supporting the enemy — “providing weapons, ammunition, body armor to the insurgents in Fallujah who were then fighting the Marines. And against some of my soldiers.”

Nagl said he found himself “faced with a horrible dilemma.”

“What do I do to this police chief who has clearly risked his life to help

us? Every time I think about it, I wonder if I did the right thing. But ultimately what I decided to do was — nothing. My assessment was that for Ishmael to stay alive this is the minimum he had to do — this is the minimum tax he had to pay to the insurgents.”

Part One of the NPR series: Training the Trainers at Fort Riley.

 

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About The Author

  • Archive Biography: John A Nagl is the ninth Headmaster of The Haverford School. A retired Army officer with service in both Iraq wars, he helped write the 2006 edition of FM 3-24 and is the author of the forthcoming book Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice. ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤBiography from LinkedIn: I have the privilege of learning from and teaching those dedicated to the security of the United States. A retired Army officer, I saw combat in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was the inaugural Minerva Research Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, studying and writing about the influence of culture on warfare; I previously taught at West Point and at Georgetown University and currently serve as a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University, teaching a Masters' degree course on Special Forces and Irregular Warfare. I serve on the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington DC think tank of which I was the second president from 2009 until 2012, and am a Fellow of the Irregular Warfare Initiative in 2023. I helped write the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. I am particularly interested in building adaptive learning organizations; my Oxford University doctoral dissertation on the subject was published under the title "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" (University of Chicago Press, 2005). My book on the wars of the past twenty years is titled "Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice" (Penguin, 2014). I served as the ninth Head of the Haverford School outside Philadelphia, leading an organization dedicated to the education and character development of boys and young men.

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