Today's Financial Times contains a detailed and thought provoking article by Andrew Woods on efforts by Major General Douglas Stone and Task Force 134 in conducting "counterinsurgency inside the wire". Here are several excerpts, be sure to read the entire article...
... An imperial city like this -- guarded by an occupying army whose legitimacy has been in the balance since the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in 2004 -- is an unlikely place to test the claim that a more humane military is a more effective one. But, then, Stone is an unlikely commander. A Marine reservist who made a fortune in Silicon Valley before taking a doctorate in public administration, he is now fanatical about winning what he calls "the battlefield of the mind".
Since arriving in Iraq, he has instituted significant changes to coalition detention centres, including new review boards which explain to detainees why they are being held and what they can do about it; a pledge-and-guarantor programme whereby soon-to-be-released detainees swear in front of a judge that they will not return to the fight; increased family visits to the prisons; education programmes, including maths, Arabic and English classes; vocational training programmes; and religious discussion classes, where privately hired sheikhs discuss the Koran with detainees...
... Stone himself brags that he has "a high tolerance, a very high tolerance" for killing. "Don't get me wrong," he says. "You have to have violence. The moderate mosques had extremist imams. Those extremist imams are now with Allah."
Stone's great innovation, however, is that the US and its allies must limit indiscriminate killings -- and detainee mistreatment -- as a matter of public diplomacy rather than principle. This theory is a military doctrine that offers rare common ground for human rights advocates and hard-nosed generals, and it is one Stone has been working on for a while...
... Euphoric as it sounds, this is the way Task Force 134 was originally envisioned. Several policy planners say, off the record, that detention was always thought of as the cornerstone of a new civil society in Iraq. Because they suspected that the rule of law was corrupted under Saddam, American planners decided they would have to rebuild the country's legal system from the ground up. Detention was seen as a good incubator for "rule of law programmes" -- a training ground for Iraqi judges and lawyers, and thereby a means of manufacturing civil society.
None of that materialised. By the time the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004, detention was a shambles and cycles of rioting and repression were the norm. While Abu Ghraib provoked better oversight -- at least of soldiers' cameras -- detention's basic contours remained static, but the number of detainees was rising fast...
Much more, read and learn.