Adam Serwer has a good piece in the American Prospect looking at the role human rights plays in counterinsurgency. I particularly like this observation he extracted from Sarah Sewall, a top Obama-campaign adviser:

Sarah Sewall, a human rights expert at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, says that the idea that human rights groups and the military would share a set of interests isn’t strange. She faced criticism in 2007 for having worked with Gen. David Petraeus to craft an earlier edition of the Counterinsurgency Manual. “One of the most interesting misconceptions that people have is that there is not a confluence of interests between human rights groups and the military,” Sewall says. “Some people who don’t think of themselves as human rights actors actually have a confluence of interests with human rights groups.”

That’s rather spot-on. One of the more important developments augured by the rise of the counterinsurgents is the embrace of a community typically viewed as an obstacle to military operations. Indeed, while the Bush administration castigated human-rights groups for criticizing Guantanamo or torture, a three-star general named David Petraeus invited Sewall to help write his counterinsurgency field manual, producing a section about the dangers to mission success that torture presents. It makes sense when you think about it. If counterinsurgency campaigns rise and fall on attending to the material concerns of a population, then upholding and respecting human rights gains military utility as a tactical advantage. Campaigns that fail to respect human rights will, well, fail.

That’s not to say there isn’t tension. The military is still in the business of killing people, and human rights groups are in the business of protecting them from abuses. But the counterinsurgents are the first in the military to abandon an institutional hostility to the human rights community and seek a partnership, however fraught with natural divergences of interest in some cases. That’s evident in Gen. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency guidance, which prioritizes population protection to a heretofore unheard-of degree. If McChrystal’s command doesn’t live up to that standard, it’ll be operating against what it recognizes as what’s necessary for success. But it’s noteworthy for McChrystal to have set concern for the civilian population as a standard in the first place, and Adam’s piece is a helpful reminder of the context underlying that decision.