By: Yossi Melman – Haaretz

Lt. Col. John Nagl (Ret.) is trying to explain why “making war upon insurgents is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” This imaginative aphorism, however, is not his. It was written by T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, the adventurous and romantic British officer, who helped sustain the Arab Revolt against the Turks in 1916-1918. Lawrence’s turn of phrase stresses that revolts are complex, chaotic and, at times, slow to take root.

With a little help from Lawrence, Nagl, a visiting counterinsurgency expert, attempts to determine America’s chances of conquering counterinsurgency and terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His forecast does not bode well for the West. He believes that the wars in the next 50 years will be characterized by “irregular warfare.” He says there are no instant solutions to this type of combat. In a conversation with Haaretz, he emphasizes that it will take many more years until we see the end of the struggle against the spearhead of radical Islam. But he is definitely optimistic that the scope of the resistance can be reduced if warfare is approached intelligently.

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John Nagl represents the new generation of intelligent and educated U.S. Army officers, who “have learned the hard way,” according to Washington Post journalist and author David Ignatius. Even if that wasn’t his intention, he learned by trial and error.

Nagl was born in Omaha, Nebraska 40 years ago. After finishing high school, he was accepted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and from there he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship (Bill Clinton was also a Rhodes scholar).

At Oxford, he completed his master’s degree and his doctorate. In his doctoral dissertation, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malay and Vietnam” (which was later published), he compared the British attempt to suppress the communist rebellion in Malaysia in the 1950s to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In both cases, standing armies tried to confront irregular insurgents. The British army succeeded; the U.S. Army, less so.

Prior to Operation Desert Storm in 1990, Nagl interrupted his studies in England to join the U.S. Army in its war against Saddam Hussein. During his military career, he was the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in the Iraqi war, a military assistant to the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, and commanding officer of the 1st Battalion 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas, where he trained soldiers and officers for their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A few months ago, he retired from the military with a rank of lieutenant colonel and became a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, some of whose researchers and fellows are expected to be appointed to various positions in U.S. President-elect Barak Obama’s administration. Nagl is also being spoken of as a candidate for office in the new administration.

This is not Nagl’s first visit to Israel. He arrived to attend “The Twenty-First Century Wars: Counterinsurgency and the Challenge of Global Terrorism” conference, sponsored by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.

Life imitating thesis

Nagl says he was surprised to discover from his experience in Iraq that what he had written in his doctorate about fighting insurgents was quite accurate. But he says that “intellectually grasping the concept that fighting insurgents is messy and slow still does not provide the tools for defeating them. Just as knowing how to win is different from knowing how to defeat them; knowing how to win, in turn, is a different thing from implementing the measures required to do it.”

He emphasizes that the first thing an army ought to do to win its fight against irregular armies is to adapt it to the task at hand.

He points out that armies are not accustomed to fighting guerrillas, and that teaching them to adapt, which was his final job in the military, is a difficult and unusual challenge.

He supports Obama’s stated intention to withdraw American forces from Iraq, but emphasizes that we are not talking about the withdrawal of the entire army. Today there are about 140,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Obama intends to decrease their presence to 50,000-70,000 soldiers, and to change their mission. The tasks of fighting on the front line will gradually be transferred to the Iraqi army, and the American soldiers will remain on as advisers.

Is that possible? Can Iraq be stabilized and become a unified country once again?

Nagl feels that it can. He says that already now we can sense a drastic change taking place in Iraq. The Iraqi army functions better and is assuming more and more powers and tasks.

What about the disputes between Sunnis, Shiites and the government of the Kurds in the north? Nagl asserts that nobody wants Iraq to be divided and unstable. “Nobody would gain from instability in Iraq. Neither the world nor the Middle East nor Israel.”

Aren’t the Iranians dictating to the Shiites in Iraq what to do?

“There is antipathy between the Shiites of Iraq and Iran. Certainly there is no love between them.”

He reminds us that almost 90 percent of the Shiite families in the Basra region in the south have lost a family member in the war against Iran in the 1980s. Nagl points out that there is growing cooperation between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq at all levels of government, and there is also a good integration between the two groups in the army and the security forces.

A question of geography

When asked about the lessons that Israel can learn from the experiences of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nagl hesitates to reply, because he says his visit here was too short and he is not familiar with the situation here.

He is willing to say that he agrees with Ignatius, who recently wrote about the relative success of Gen. James Jones – who is slated to be the U.S. national security adviser – in training the Palestinian security forces deployed in Jenin, Nablus and Hebron, among other places.

Nagl points out that there is a difference between Israel and the U.S. The Americans can afford to leave Iraq and Afghanistan even if only 95 percent of the work is done, and to let the Iraqis and Afghanis handle the rest.

He says that when there is a suicide attack in Iraq or in Afghanistan that is terrible, of course, but it’s not a threat to America. Israel, on the other hand, lives alongside its enemies and requires 100 percent success in its security activities.

The U.S. is blessed in its geography, says Nagl, whereas Israel lives in a tough neighborhood. Nevertheless, he feels that the U.S. model in Iraq and Afghanistan can also help Israel: “The model of training and equipping them (the local security forces) to provide security and stability is a worthy cause,” he says.