Center for a New American Security

I woke up this morning to the terrible news that John Redwine had died while climbing in Lebanon. Missing since the weekend, his body was found this morning. I first met John in 2004, in a bank in Beirut. We were both new graduate students at the American University of Beirut and were trying to set up bank accounts in order to pay our tuition -- me in English, and he, hilariously, in the classical Arabic he had perfected over years of study in Fez. When John had made the journey from Morocco to Lebanon a few days earlier, he had done so in romantic fashion: overland, in a beat up, wheezing Renault he finally abandoned at the border with Syria.

John met his wife Irina while they were both graduate students at AUB. Their marriage was a source of delight for their many friends. The most fun I have ever had at a party was surely at their wedding celebration, which took place in the hills overlooking Tangier. The party itself, which would have made Rabelais blush, lasted three days. On the last evening, the 30 or so of us who remained standing danced to Thriller at four in the morning. (Which would not have been remarkable were it not for the fact that a) we were all in a pool at the time and b) we were all still fully clothed.)

I will remember those times, and many quieter nights spent sipping beers and trading stories. Many Americans moved to the Middle East after the September 11th attacks, but John embodied the best values of his native country and his home state of Iowa. John was unfailingly polite and generous toward others. He spoke softly and with humility. He had real intellectual curiosity about the peoples of the Middle East. He was quick to laugh at jokes -- especially those told at his expense. He was a fine student of the Arabic language and had mastered it in both its classical and Levantine forms. He would have made a fine ambassador one day.

John and Irina were recently blessed with a son. My thoughts and prayers are with them this morning.

Update: John's family has released the following obituary.

John Newland Redwine, II, age 33, of Beirut, Lebanon, formerly from Sioux City, IA died Sunday, December 18 doing what he loved, alpine climbing in the Lebanon Mountains.

John was born on June 13, 1978 in Kansas City, MO to Dr. John and Barbara Redwine when his father was in his senior year of medical school. The family moved to Sioux City, IA where his father completed a residency in family medicine and established a family practice in Morningside. John attended Clark Grade School, Hoover Middle School, and he graduated from Sioux City North High School in 1996. Between earning two bachelor’s degrees at the University of Montana and a masters degree at the American University of Beirut, he studied for two years at the Arabic Language Institute in Fez, Morocco and was fluent in both spoken and written Arabic.

John served in many capacities as an independent public relations and communications professional. At the time of his death, he was the communications officer and editor on a regional cooperation project on water issues for the United Nations Regional Economic and Social Development Commission in Western Asia and the German Federal Institute for Geo-Science and Natural Resources in Beirut. He also had served as a freelance producer and journalist at Fox News, project director at Albany Associates, managing editor at Executive Magazine, Analyst and Copy Editor at The Middle East Reporter, and desk editor at ABC News. He recently helped organize the very successful Banff Mountain Film Festival Beirut.

John had many publications in political, governmental, and professional journals and was well respected by his peers. In their leisure time, John and his wife, Irina enjoyed mountain climbing, motorcycling, camping, and entertaining their many friends across the Middle East and the world. He was a skilled alpinist and big-wall climber. He climbed extensively in Yosemite and Zion National Parks, climbed the nose on El Capitan, 6 of the 7 Grand Tetons in one day, on-sited classic routes in Stanage, Mont Blanc and Wadi Rum and established new routes in Morocco, Lebanon and many other countries. John took great pride in introducing others to climbing and worked at building the capacity of the climbing community in Lebanon.

Two months ago, John and Irina welcomed their first child into the world, Winston Prentice Redwine. Irina and he survive, as do John’s parents, Dr. John and Barbara Redwine of Rogers, AR, his two brothers William Redwine and his wife Brooke of Sioux City, IA, and Adam Redwine and his close friend Aliya Gordon of Augusta, GA, and many aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.

Services will be in held Beirut, Lebanon on Friday, December 23 and in Sioux City, IA on Tuesday, December 27. Burial will be at Memorial Park Cemetery in Sioux City.

Distinguished scholar and strategist Steve Metz complained earlier today on his Twitter account that he had cancelled a presentation he was scheduled to give at the British International Studies Association conference in Edinburgh, Scotland because EUCOM regulations stipulate he must first ... wait for it ... go through SERE training before traveling to western Europe. (Now, I know some of you possibly think it prudent that civilian scholars at U.S. military colleges go through Survival Evasion Resistance Escape training before wandering into some neighborhoods in Glasgow, but this is Edinburgh we're talking about.) 

Although the SERE training in question is not the hellish full two-week course but rather the one-day course, this is absurd nonetheless. Just yesterday, I met with a collection of junior U.S. Army officers, and we all agreed that U.S. military personnel -- and officers in particular, because they are often de facto ambassadors for the United States -- were better at their jobs if they had traveled widely or, even better, had lived abroad. But it can be a nightmare for U.S. military personnel to travel internationally, such have we elevated force protection to ridiculous importance. (One U.S. Navy officer related that six of his fellow officers were traveling on a trip to India with a U.S. university and needed signatures from four separate flag officers to do so!)

The bottom line here is that if we are willing to send young men and women to fight and die in Helmand Province, we should go out of our way to be accomodating when U.S. military personnel want to broaden their experiences by traveling to countries with which we are not at war. Stupid regulations designed to cover someone's fourth point of contact do not serve the broader interests of the United States.

LTG Dave Barno, Matt Irvine and I have a new policy paper out at CNAS, which you can read here. This paper is in a lot of ways the logical follow-on to our Responsible Transition report from December of last year, which, looking back, still seems quite relevant. (Check it out if you have the time.)

LTG Barno and I sat down with about a dozen journalists this morning and went over the particulars of new report. Our primary concern -- and the reason why we felt the need to write this report -- is that U.S. and allied commanders in Afghanistan have not yet made the mental leap that, whether they like it or not, the United States and the rest of the NATO coalition are transitioning in Afghanistan. In 2008, the situation in Afghanistan may have required large-scale counterinsurgency operations to buy time and space to build up Afghan security forces. (And I argued, in 2009, that it did.) Some would argue the situation still demands such large-scale operations, but with the transition already under way, the time to make the switch from counterinsurgency to security force assistance is sooner -- while you still have the relevant enablers in the country -- rather than in 2014. If those Afghan units you have been building are lemons, you also want to know that sooner rather than later.

Some U.S. and allied officers might argue the United States and the rest of the coalition are already working by, with and through the Afghans, but the reality on the ground suggests that is the exception, not the rule. In 2009, the NATO/ISAF command in Afghanistan stood up NTM-A to train Afghan soldiers and police, and that effort, while flawed, has been a lot more successful than what came before it. But the old training-and-advisory component of the mission was folded into the combat command in Afghanistan, and that work has since been uneven. "Partnering" -- which Gen. Stan McChrystal felt would allow Afghan units to fight alongside U.S. and allied units and thereby increase the development of the former -- never really materialized. U.S. combat units have been more proficient at finding and killing the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, so they have done the jobs themselves.

But developing security forces is like any other development work. What matters most is not whether or not the school or dam gets built but rather the process through which you take the host nation government to build a school or dam. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan now need to take short-term security risks in order to get Afghan units into the lead. The time to do this is now, not in 2014. Among the forcing mechanisms available to a president are to change the mission, change his commander, or change the resources. President Obama has already done the second and third this year. He should now do the first as well.

Anyway, read the whole report here and sound off in the comments section. 

Reading through the 76-point resolution produced by Afghanistan's Loya Jerga, I was struck by how welcome so many of these points will be inside the White House. Afghan leaders, I often think, do not realize how closely Americans pay attention to what they say -- hence the insults Hamid Karzai periodically lobs at his U.S. sponsors, much to the annoyance of U.S. military officers, diplomats and tax-payers. But this administration has been particularly masterful at actually holding Afghan leaders to that which they say they want. That 2014 deadline for transition, for example? The origins of that date were not in President Obama's 1 December 2009 speech to West Point but in President Karzai's second innaugural address earlier that fall. Karzai likely threw that date out there for Afghan consumption -- but it was picked up on by folks in the White House, who essentially held him to it.

In the same way, Afghan leaders have now, in this 76-point resolution, pretty clearly demanded a rapid "Afghanization" of the conflict in Afghanistan. They want Afghans in the lead, now, and U.S. and coalition units subordinate to those Afghans. LTG Dave Barno, Matt Irvine and I are about to argue in a new paper for CNAS that it is wise for the United States and its coalition allies to make the switch from counterinsurgency to security force assistance in 2012 -- while the United States and its allies still have a lot of resources on the ground -- rather than later on, closer to the 2014 transition. So I agree with many of the Loya Jerga's points on merit. Many of the points in the resolution, though, provide the United States and other reluctant coalition allies with a great excuse to precipitously reduce their presence and operations in Afghanistan.

There is a lot of other stuff in this resolution that provides U.S. diplomats with plenty of ammunition in negotiations toward something that looks like a Status of Forces Agreement. The Afghans ask for a lot from the United States -- more military equipment and training, financial and monetary assistance, scholarships, etc. That gives the United States room to ask for a lot in return. Otherwise, the United States can rapidly modify its combat operations against the enemies of the government of Afghanistan -- and can claim it is just carrying out the will of the Afghan people in doing so. 

In an essay on the alleged crimes at Penn State, Iraq War veteran Thomas L. Day does the best job of anyone summing up why I am so frustrated with the generation that precedes my own:

A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation.

 

They have failed us, over and over and over again.

 

I speak not specifically of our parents -- I have two loving ones -- but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

 

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

 

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

 

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

 

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

Read the whole thing. Then go read Mark Bowden's wonderful -- and wonderfully balanced -- take on the attack at Wanat. It includes this brilliant passage:

The lieutenant’s battle was over. His bravery had little impact on the course of the fight. He could not rescue the men on Topside, and those who survived would have done so anyway. As it is with all soldiers who die heroically in battle, his final act would define him emphatically, completely, and forever. In those loud and terrifying minutes he had chosen to leave a place of relative safety, braving intense fire, and had run and scrambled uphill toward the most perilous point of the fight. A man does such a thing out of loyalty so consuming that it entirely crowds out consideration of self. In essence, Jon Brostrom had cast off his own life the instant he started running uphill, and only fate would determine if it would be given back to him when the shooting stopped. He died in the heat of that effort, living fully his best idea of himself.

I have rarely read a better tribute to a fallen officer.

On a recent plane ride home from Germany, I finished Steve Inskeep's Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, which I can recommend to all of you with confidence. I was, as I mention in my interview with Steve, happily surprised by this book. It's a really great introduction to both the mess that is Pakistan and the greatness that is the Pakistani people. It's also an interesting reflection on urban planning and the rise of mega-cities. Interviewing Steve bleeping Inskeep of all people can be an intimidating experience, but as with all of these things, I just posed some questions and let the man himself take it away.

I was happily surprised by this book. It's multidimensional: on the one hand, it tells the story of Karachi, but on the other hand, it also succeeds in telling that story within two broader contexts. First, it places Karachi within the context of Pakistan's history and politics. Second, it treats the development of Karachi as one example of what you see as a global trend: the rise of "instant cities." (I'm married to a woman who works on development in South Asia, so this is that rare book that we can read together.) Explain to the blog, though: what is an instant city?

Thanks for your generous comments. An instant city is a metropolis that’s grown so swiftly that a person who knew it at the end of World War II would scarcely recognize it today. I keep this definition impressionistic, because I’m not sure I fully trust all the statistics I’ve seen. But to be a little more precise, I define an instant city as one whose population has grown since the war at a substantially higher rate than the country to which it belongs. Those cities tend to be destinations of the greatest mass migration in human history, the worldwide move to cities in recent decades. As different kinds of people concentrate on a city, they mix together, trade ideas, or clash.

In an instant city, the new overshadows the old—as in Karachi, which has at least 30 residents today for every resident at war’s end. In historic terms, the city has appeared in an instant. It can change in an instant. Or turn deadly in an instant. In these respects, Karachi is normal in the developing world, as you both know from experience.

For American policymakers, our swift evolution into a mostly urban species affects everything from economic plans to foreign aid strategies to the battlegrounds of future wars. Or current wars: see Baghdad, ten times larger than in 1950 and a nightmarishly complex killing field for several years. Yet for all the horrors of such swiftly changing places, they’re also expressions of hope. People moved there seeking better lives.

The story of Karachi, meanwhile, as told in the book, is in many ways the story of the state of Pakistan. For an American audience, what does Karachi tell us about Pakistan today?

Pakistanis call Karachi a microcosm of their country, and they’re right. People have migrated from all over the country, as well as every other part of South Asia, to form Pakistan’s most diverse city. And so you see microcosms of Pakistan’s great conflicts between different ethnic groups who speak different languages, between religious groups, between rich and poor, between the military and everybody else. The military’s economic power is spectacularly on display along the waterfront, where they own many square miles of land near the beach, and have been developing luxury apartment towers, a “six-star” club, and a golf course. At the same time, far-flung neighborhoods have hardly any electricity or other services, and the real estate market thrives on unauthorized development on government land. It’s an impossibly complicated and stressful place. Yet there is a certain endurance in the people that keeps things moving, as does an eye on the main chance—you can make money in a growing city. Karachi still functions as the economic heart of Pakistan, which is one reason I don’t agree with those who describe Pakistan as a failed state. When I think failed state, I think Afghanistan in late 2001: little armies wandering around, burned-out tanks along bomb-cratered roads, scarecrow men trying to hand-crank the last dregs of fuel out of a gas-station pump. Pakistan is not that bad yet, although in all fairness the electricity does go out daily, and citizens use words like “crazy” or “mafia” to describe their government, and I do think large swaths of Karachi have evolved beyond conventional government control.

Middle Easterners and South Asians often tell me they "love Americans but don't very much like the United States." I sometimes feel the same about Pakistan -- a nation that has, at the very least, sheltered so many enemies of the United States over the past decade and has frustrated our efforts in Afghanistan. But I have so many wonderful Pakistani friends, and there are so many great Pakistani heroes in your book. The Edhi family -- "passionate, witty, resilient, and gloriously strange" in your words -- stands out in particular. At the nadir in U.S.-Pakistani relations, who are some other Pakistani heroes Americans should know about?

Let me call your attention to Dr. Seemin Jamali, a woman who for years has run the emergency department of a major public hospital in Karachi. On February 5, 2010, her emergency department was flooded with victims of a bombing and their families. A Shia procession had been struck—an attack on a religious minority, which is normal in Pakistan. And then a second bomb exploded at the entrance to the emergency department. Many people were killed, the windows were blown out, and the medical equipment was looted in the panic that followed—yet Dr. Jamali and her colleagues had the emergency department running again the next day. (Note: this fairly incredible story of courage and duty is told at greater length in the book.)

She told me afterward that she believed in treating every person the same, regardless of color, caste, or creed. It was a statement echoing an old speech by the founder of Pakistan. For all the awful things that some people have done over the years in Pakistan, the country also has a different and more honorable tradition. Some people struggle to uphold that tradition, even though many have been beaten, intimidated, silenced, driven into exile, or killed. This book will be worth the time and effort if I manage nothing other than to introduce Americans to a few such people.

My wife and I, like many thousands of other Americans, wake up to your dulcet voice every morning. Which begs the question: how the hell did you find the time to research and write this book while fulfilling your duties at NPR?

Thanks for listening. The short answer is that I missed a little work, lost a lot of sleep, and will forever be grateful for the forbearance of my family and friends. The longer answer is that I first reported Karachi in 2002, and did a series of reports on the city in 2008, so I had some history with the place. Then I took a series of trips expressly for the book in 2010, burning vacation time I had accumulated. Between trips I was gathering archival information from the Library of Congress and several other archives. And of course Pakistan has been constantly in the news, so I was regularly covering and learning about the country for my day job.

You report mostly from Washington. Does this book -- and the reporting from Pakistan that inspired it -- make you want to report more from abroad? Do you, like some think tankers I could name, sometimes feel chained to your office in the 202 area code?

I try not to be. Just before taking host jobs at NPR, I reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and knew I needed that to continue. I would not have accepted the Morning Edition job had it not included the freedom to travel and see things for myself. NPR embraced that idea and didn’t want it any other way. So I’ve been over the years to Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, and many other places at home and abroad. Every trip abroad informs interviews I do later from the studio. It’s true that I never travel as much as I think I should, and that I have to keep my trips very focused and hurry back to the show. Sometimes it kills me – I was in Egypt last spring, for example, but never made it to Libya. But there is some compensation. I work a job where, in the course of a few months, I might talk with a general, a novelist, an economist, the President, the governor of my home state, a poor laborer in a Cairo cement factory, voters in Ohio, and a widow outside New Orleans. It’s this wonderfully broad education. If you feel that I ended up writing a “multidimensional” book, maybe it grows out of my multidimensional job. It encourages broad thinking, and seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated stories, and feeling the sweep of history.

And here I was, thinking I had a pretty sweet gig myself. I end each of these things with a question on food and drink. What are the top three restaurants in Karachi, and why?

I’m delighted that you asked. If you visit friends in Karachi you will almost certainly be taken to Barbecue Tonight whether you ask to go or not. Nor should you mind. If you arrive early for dinner—and by early, I mean Pakistan early, about 10:00—you can get a table on the rooftop, looking across the harbor toward the central business district. Everything on the menu is outstanding. The restaurant is several floors high, and as you walk downstairs to leave at midnight you will notice that every table is filled and there is a line of people at the door.

I recommend the surreal experience of eating at Shaikh Abdul Ghaffar’s Kabab House, which is on a pier at the harbor known as the Native Jetty, now rebranded as “Port Grand,” a heavily guarded row of upscale shops. The meat here is so finely ground as to be almost creamy, but the real reason to go is the craziness of the setting. In one direction you see the harbor cranes; in the other, a waterside Hindu temple.

You will find some middlebrow choices if you venture through the chaotic traffic on Burns Road, or out in the industrial zone called SITE Town, where a gigantic madrassa makes some extra money running a rather clean and formal restaurant. But if you have a basic faith in the safety of cooked food, then I suggest that you bypass these choices and pick out one of many simple restaurants that are open to the street, with no front wall. They may serve only two or three dishes, cooked in metal pots by the entrance. The restaurant you want is probably not spiffy: a certain level of dilapidation often signals comfort food, sort of like when you arrive at an older American diner. In the book I feature one such restaurant called the Delhi Darbar, near the old city hall. The menu does not include much beyond soft drinks and biryani, hunks of meat and other ingredients mixed into rice. I have always found it to be excellent, although it is so powerfully spiced that in all honesty, if it wasn’t any good, I would never know.

Thanks for the tips! Steve can be heard each morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and his book can be bought here. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to the Knesset:

Members of Knesset, I have spoken, and I must admit not always successfully, about strength and responsibility. I also want to talk about something that links the two: unity. Two weeks ago we brought home our soldier Gilad Shalit after being held captive by Hamas for over five years. Like everybody else, I was extremely moved when I saw Gilad step off the helicopter. For a few days the entire country was united, unified, excited about one soldier whom we had brought home.

 

Last week, in coordination with Egypt and with the help of the American government, we released Ilan Grapel, who made aliya alone, volunteered to the paratrooper unit and was injured during the Second Lebanon War. We will continue to work for the release of Uda Tarabin who has been imprisoned in Egypt for 11 years. And I want to tell you and the entire people of Israel, I never, not for a moment, forget Jonathan Pollard, who has been in jail in the United States for 26 years. We will continue to do everything we can to bring him to Israel and we will not cease to try to obtain information about the fate of our missing soldiers.

Really, Mr. Netanyahu? You're now elevating Jonathan Pollard to the same level as Gilad Shalit? (And what does that make us? Hamas?) Jonathan Pollard is a U.S. citizen and intelligence analyst who betrayed his country and sold secrets to South Africa and Israel -- and he attempted to do the same for Pakistan. He deserves to spend the rest of his life in a dark hole.

Considering the number of times the United States has bailed out Israel this year -- from Cairo to the United Nations -- one wonders what goes through the prime minister's head when he insults the United States like this. 

I was away the entire day and returned to the office this afternoon only to be met with the news that Chris Boucek had passed away. I was floored. Chris was 38. Chris was also a tremendous scholar, and the policy community was lucky to have had him. I first met Chris on a trip we took we took to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia with Jon Alterman. Chris was bright, incredibly knowledgeable about issues relating to the Arabian Penninsula, and was in firm possession of a delightfully wry sense of humor.

The policy community that works on Islam and the Middle East is often filled with hucksters and ideologues, but Chris was the real deal: he was a serious scholar who approached his subject dispassionately but with great intellectual curiosity and rigor. His work set a high standard for the rest of us.

My heart and prayers go out to Chris's family -- and especially his young children. Rest in peace, Chris. 

Having pretty carefully considered the arguments for and against leaving troops in Iraq beyond this year, I ultimately found Doug Ollivant's argument to be the most persuasive. So I support the president's decision to end U.S. military involvement in the war in Iraq. But wars, like history, do not stop when America decides it no longer wants to be involved. This is worth remembering, both in terms of what is taking place in Iraq today as well as what might take place in Afghanistan in 2014. So by all means, say U.S. involvement in the war has ended. But think carefully before saying the war has ended.

The photojournalist Bryan Denton has been a friend for several years, and this past year has been a career year for him. Those who followed the reporting of C. J. "Chris" Chivers from Libya probably also know of Bryan's photographs. Bryan and I caught up a few weeks ago at the wedding of some friends, and I convinced him, late one night, to answer a few questions for the blog. What follows is some pretty incredible testimony from one of the bravest men in the business.

What a year! I hardly know where to begin, given all that you and your cameras have seen over the past 10 months. Let's begin with something you didn't see -- Egypt. After living in the Middle East for all these years, you missed the kickoff to the Arab Spring!

Ha, I wish I had been able to be there. I was stuck for most of February on a small base in southern Helmand Province, embedded with U.S. Marines on an assignment that had taken some time to get set up so I couldn't get out of it. I was leaving Beirut for this assignment on January 29th, just as Egypt's protests were beginning and I remember having goosebumps as I watched al-Jazeera in the airport with virtually everyone else on my flight to Dubai, in total silence. I knew, after Tunisia, and based on the size of the protests I was seeing on TV, that the region was changing in a way no one had called or could have foreseen. Sitting it out in Helmand was tough, but I came back just in time to be in position for Libya, once the revolution there really got under way, and the borders opened.

Man, Libya was an entirely different kettle of fish from Afghanistan. As someone who has always tried to make myself as small as possible while under fire, I do not envy any 6-foot, 8-inch combat photojournalist trying to cover high-intensity conflict. Talk us through the beginning of that campaign. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced as a photojournalist?

I think in the beginning, myself and most of my colleagues thought that Libya's revolution was going to be more tear gas and rubber bullets than a conventional war, including combined artillery, armor and airpower. Virtually no one I know, myself included, even brought body armor into Libya in late February/early March, and I, despite my time spent in Afghanistan over the past years, was in no way prepared for the level of combat that kicked off in early march. I don't know if anyone was.

Most of us had been in Benghazi covering the aftermath of that city's uprising for about a week when Qaddafi forces attacked the city of Brega on March 2. We'd spent the previous two days documenting the rebels as they were in the very beginning stages of starting to think about some kind of self defense force, as many of them were calling it. Mostly, it was young students washing 14.5mm ammunition that had long been in storage, putting it into links, and then spending their mornings learning to line up in formation. On March 2, I was at one of these training camps when news broke that Qaddafi loyalist forces had attacked Brega, and the camp emptied out as men took to the road. It was as if all of Benghazi had decided to fight that day, with hundreds of cars full of men and boys, mostly unarmed, heading towards Brega. By the end of that day, the rebels had repelled what in retrospect was a small probing force of about 45 trucks, simply through sheer numbers of bodies on the road. Qaddafi had begun using airstrikes though, and I remember going back to Benghazi that day thinking that the revolution in LIbya had now become a military conflict.

I have always been pretty gung-ho, but what followed in the coming days, as the rebels continued to push west, bouyed by what they saw as a victory at Brega, and their destiny, along the coast was a hard introduction to a kind of fear I hadn't felt before while working. They encountered relatively light resistance up through Ras Lanuf and into Bin Jawad on March 5, where there was a day-long celebration by rebels and some residents. I had bought a bottle of Jameson with me that I was planning on cracking open once we arrived in Tripoli, and at that time, I was convinced that was going to be in a week or two tops. The next morning, March 6, we woke up to an entirely different reality.

Qaddafi troops, not in trucks, but in tanks and aided by loyalists in Bin Jawad had begun to push back against the rabble/horde of mainly unarmed rebels. The force had come from Sirte, the garrison town that is now under siege, and they were firing 122mm and 107mm rockets, T-72 tank main gun rounds, mortars, Qaddafi's airforce was dropping unguided iron bombs on groups of rebels massing on the road—which at the time was all the rebels really knew how to do, and Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters were straffing rebel positions. I had four of the most harrowing close calls of my career that day, all within the span of about four or five hours, as did a number of my colleagues. By the end of the day my fight or flight mechanism was completely shot, and I was the closest I've ever been to all out panic — it took a lot to keep my composure.

What compounded the fear most was the realization that many of the things I'd taken for granted while embedded with U.S. troops, like a robust Medevac chain, advanced communications and situational awareness tools, and all the other goodies that I'd grown accustomed to were absent. Our access was total and completely unfettered, which I think is why most of us braved it through those days ... the pictures, if you could muster the courage, were amazingly dramatic, but for the most part, and this became a theme throughout the Libyan conflict, we were working in the blind, and basing decisions with very real deadly consequences on very little information, if any at all.

The conflict turned nasty quickly. But the rebels improved over time. You had previously spent a lot of time with seasoned U.S. troops in Afghanistan and know the difference between well-trained regular units and the kinds of citizen militias that were fighting in Libya. Talk the readership of this blog through what you were able to witness in terms of battlefield learning and innovation.

The learning curve for the rebels was most certainly steep. I think the best way I've heard them described was by Chivers, who referred to them as "accidental combatants," a term I've always thought was pretty prescient. They were engineers, lawyers, students, unemployed youth, and I don't think at the outset, they anticipated such a long grinding conflict that would take so many of their lives, and require so much innovation in the field. There wasn't a lot, if any combat experience within their collective ranks at the beginning, and everything they did — especially in the early days, was learned through a school of pretty hard knocks. No place better illustrated this than Misrata — which was under siege for two solid months. By the time we arrived there in mid April, it was like a mad scientists workshop of urban warfare tactics. They'd taught themselves how to move between buildings by knocking out "rat-holes" dug through multiple walls along the frontline, and had turned downtown Misrata — essentially a circular network of roads that link up at various roundabouts—into a virtual maze by blocking off streets at various points with shipping containers and sand berms. In the beginning, they built these fortifications by putting a brave sole in a bulldozer or forklift, and having him brave blistering machine gun and RPG fire in order to build them in place, when they lost enough people and bulldozers, they started welding steel plates onto the bulldozers. Electricians and steel workers who had worked in the oil industry perviously were now working in make-shift weapons workshops, mounting all kinds of things onto the backs of pickup trucks as rebel units filtered in for refits or repairs, suggesting tweaks here and there. From an objective point of view, watching a civilian population it was awe inspiring to watch. In April, maybe two out of five rebels in Misrata had a weapon, and most of them were fighting from their neighborhoods.

No amount of training can give a man absolute belief in his cause. Most American troops I've spent time with in Afghanistan, where politics and fighting are constantly happening side by side, and often times at odds with one another, fight as much for each other as they do for their country. A lot of the soldiering I've seen, in a variety of places, relies on brotherhood more than rank to hold a unit together. In Misrata, what they may have lacked in training was replaced by this sheer will and belief in their cause and the notion of their city as a cohesive family unit. One thing Americans haven't had in over a hundred years, thankfully, is the experience of fighting over our own physical land. Fighting for something physical, like your life, or your house, rather than something almost existential, like your security changes the dynamic completely.

I remember this one day, in the hospital, a rebel came in badly burned. I was talking to his friend later who said that he'd been been in Birwaya, west of the city, when a Qaddafi forces tank had begun pushing on their position. According to his friend, the man had charged the tank with a grenade and a molotav cocktail, and in the process of trying to climb onto the moving tank to drop the grenade in the hatch, the molotov cocktail had exploded and engulfed him in flame. Perhaps not the smartest of tactic if self preservation is concerned, and there were plenty of similar cases of negligence in handling weapons that come along with an untrained fighting force, but the belief one has to have in their cause to charge a tank with a grenade? You can't buy, train, or equip a soldier with that ...

This has been a very tough year for photojournalists. First, at the end of the last year, Joao Silva was horrifically wounded in southern Afghanistan. Then several journalists -- including your friends Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington -- were killed in Libya this past spring. What effects have these events had on you as a professional? And is there anything readers of the blog should know about these men and the other men and women who put themselves in harm's way to bring us the news here in the United States?

It has been a brutal year for our group, which is a small one. Joao Silva's wounding in Afghanistan, as well as Tyler Hicks' and Lynsey Addario's capture in Libya in March — both of whom I was working with just days before they were captured -- had me very rattled before the loss of Chris and Tim. More than any others, Tyler, Joao and Lynsey have been my mentors in covering conflict through the early years of my career in places like Georgia and Lebanon. I was lucky enough to get my start in this business by working alongside them, looking up to them both as photographers, and as individuals, and as a novice, they've often helped me gauge the safety of situations. What each of those three went through, before Chris and Tim passed, was chilling in that I think for the first time I really understood that this work potentially has serious consequences, no matter how much experience you have. Tim and Chris' deaths didn't really confirm this any more than it needed to be, but I still think about both of them a lot and haven't been able to shake the sadness knowing that both of them somehow ran out of luck, together, in Misrata, at such bright times in their lives.

None of us are immune, and we live and die by the choices we make in the field. I think Chris and Tim both knew this better than most. Both were brave in their reporting, but mostly to me, what I think about, is how thoughtful they both were. Tim I only met in Benghazi, but over two weeks or so working around him and talking over pictures in the evenings, I was in awe of how he could freestyle incredibly sensitive narrative jazz into a visual record based on what he was seeing. In an industry known for its large personalities, he traveled almost directly from the red carpet at the Oscars to the western gate of Ajdabiyeh, and arrived with no pretense or posturing. I, like most I imagine, met him and knew immediately that he was someone genuine and special, and am sad that I didn't get the opportunity to know him better.

Hondros I'd known since 2008, when we had both covered the war in Georgia, and we had hung out in Afghanistan, New York and Egypt several times in the intervening years. Chris took his work quite seriously, and I was always struck by his ability to look at situations in a very un-stylized way and let what was actually happening come through the image. It sounds easy, but it's not, and he was one of the best in the business in my opinion. His last set of photographs from Misrata, of rebels storming a building on Tripoli street, are as terrifying as they are a perfect example of his dedication to his work — especially knowing that he went back out to keep working after taking a break to file them.

Along the same lines, we spoke at length last weekend about risk mitigation in combat -- a subject I also discussed with Chris Chivers recently. Tell us about your philosophy for managing and mitigating risk in your work. What steps do you take to report what you need to report while doing so in as smart and safe a way as possible?

After March 6, which I wrote about above, I knew that covering the war in Libya would require a significant rethink in terms of managing risk if I was going to continue to cover it on a long term basis. I was extremely lucky to have had the chance to work with Chivers on my second trip, which included our Misrata reporting. I had some idea about what I was doing, but Chris (Chivers) can look at a battlefield, through all the light and noise, and see it as a three dimensional and dynamic entity. As we probed the front in Brega, and later, the frontlines in Misrata, and the Western Mountains, we came up with a system that both of us were comfortable with. As soon as we were within range of artillery, we wore our body armor and kevlar if we were outside or driving, and would only travel to the frontlines if there was news or a specific story that would justify the risk. Once there, we would do our reporting, get the material that we needed, and then get out.

Artillery was probably the single greatest threat during much of our time reporting together, and there were instances on the road to Brega early on that had led us to believe that the teams directing Qaddafi's rockets, mortars and artillery were striking pre-registered targets on the map such as intersections, or key installations — many of which were occupied by rebels, so hanging around at these positions just waiting for something to happen was potentially quite dangerous.

What was amazing was that by not simply chasing the noise, as I watched many photographers do — it's a natural reaction for many, including myself — we were able to do what was, in my opinion, some of the better reporting, particularly from Misrata, on the gears and moving parts of the rebellion.

I always end these interviews with something related to food and drink. You and I have together polished off several bottles of Laphroig on the balconies of Beirut. Where are the three best places in the Middle East to sit down with your photojournalist peers and swap stories over a cold beer or glass of Scotch?

A great part of this year and the last has been drinking less to be honest. Afghanistan and Libya are both fairly booze-free zones for me. I'm realizing that I need to start exercising more, and living healthy if I want to keep doing this job. That said, when in Beirut, one can never go wrong going for a cocktail at Kayan in Gemayze, or on my balcony as you mentioned, particularly if there's something on my BBQ. I was just in Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia as well, and that place nearly gives Beirut a run for it's money.

For those of you in New York City, an exhibit of Bryan's photos will be running from 20 October until 19 Novemberat the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. The rest of you can follow Bryan on Twitter at@bdentonphoto.

My hat is off to my colleagues Nora Bensahel and Travis Sharp as well as my Ranger Buddy Dave Barno for their latest report. I reviewed earlier drafts of this report and was impressed by its rigor and potential utility within the public debate. The final draft is really, really solid and incorporates a lot of the debates we had both internal to CNAS and also within the broader defense policy community. So read the report, and register for the event on Friday.

We at CNAS, by the way, are going to have a big size-of-the-defense-budget hole to fill when Travis leaves us for <ahem> Princeton </ahem> next year.