Recently retired U.S. Army counterinsurgency expert Col. John A. Nagl, who traveled with Mr. Kahl to Iraq, partly attributed the slow integration to bureaucratic problems.
"I´m sure that there is some sectarianism in these decisions, but I also am confident that some of it is just inefficient bureaucracy," said Col. Nagl, the author of several books on counterinsurgency, who helped write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual published in December 2006.
Mr. Kahl also warned against a strategy of limiting integration to Sunni leaders and placing them in low-level jobs.
"Oh, sure, we´ll let that colonel in the ... Republican Guard into the Iraqi police, but we´ll make him an enlisted beat cop," he said, describing the attitude of some Baghdad officials. "Do you know how low on the social scale that is in Iraq and how humiliating this is?"
"You don´t have to believe that 100,000 of these guys are going to turn back into insurgents," Mr. Kahl said. "If 5,000 of them do, that could be a big problem."
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