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system in the arsenal.
    * In fact, it would take another two years before USAID’s human resources department would add Afghanistan PRT jobs to the “bid list,” so it was next-to-impossible for a tenured USAID Foreign Service officer to get an assignment to a team. Complicating matters, career USAID Foreign Service officers couldn’t legally report to a personal services contractor, and until 2006, the head of the USAID PRT office in Kabul was a personal services contractor.

CHAPTER  7
    The Accidental Counterinsurgents
    In late 2005, the journalist Thomas Ricks paid a visit to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Leavenworth was home to the Army’s Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers, and Ricks had been invited to give a talk to a lecture hall packed with majors, many of whom had seen recent action in Iraq. At that point, he was in the midst of writing a new book on the war in Iraq, then entering its third deadly year. For Ricks, a longtime military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post , the decision to invade Iraq had been a devastating strategic blunder, followed by a series of frustrating missteps by U.S. military commanders. The title of his book was Fiasco .
    Ricks had been working on his manuscript around the clock, seven days a week. When he finished the first draft of a section, he would e-mail it to every soldier mentioned in the passage. When he finished a second draft he would repeat the process. One soldier wrote back, “I am in Iraq, just got back from a firefight, but give me a couple of weeks and I will tell you more.” He was writing history as it unfolded, in near-real time.
    Ricks also immersed himself in French counterinsurgency theory, scouring old volumes and memoirs in a search for answers to the questions he had brought home from his reporting trips to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. “I would read it and again and again find the key to the problems that had bothered me,” he told me. “How should troops deal with prisoners? How should commanders think about the enemy? What is the proper command structure in an operation like this? It was all there.”
    Those same questions were on his mind when he drove out to Fort Leavenworth. I need to leave them with something concrete. The room had a green chalkboard. He began his talk by writing one word, in block letters: GALULA.
    Then he turned and looked up at the thousand or so majors in the auditorium, and asked, “Who knows what this word is, or means?”
    Two or three hands went up.
    Oh no , Ricks thought. “If there was anything you take away from this lecture,” he continued, “you need to go and find out who David Galula was, and what he wrote, and how it might help you in Iraq.”
    Galula, a French theoretician of irregular warfare, fought in North Africa, Italy, and France during the Second World War, and later observed revolutionary wars in Indochina, Greece, Algeria, and China. In 1964, Galula published an influential volume, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice . The book elaborated a simple, compelling idea: Insurgency is at heart a struggle for the support of the population. Eighty percent of the counterinsurgent’s task was civilian in nature: administering aid, building roads, policing villages. It is a manpower-intensive task, and Galula stated that the armed forces are usually the only organization equipped to handle the mission. But soldiers are no substitute for civilians. “To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to undertake them, would be senseless,” Galula wrote. “The soldier must then be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout. But only for long as he cannot be replaced, for it is better to entrust civilian tasks to civilians.” 1
    Galula