In this feature for the Sunday New York Times magazine, a student of (counter)insurgency applies himself to the Iraq project.

"I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency, until I started doing it."

"I didn't realize how right Lawrence of Arabia was. My first experience of war was the gulf war, which was very clean. We shot the tanks that didn't look like ours, we shot the enemy wearing a uniform that didn't look like ours, we destroyed the enemy in 100 hours.

That's kind of what I thought war was.

Even when I was writing that insurgency was messy and slow, the full enormity of that did not sink in on me. I am seeing appreciable progress, but I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is.

There is no prospect it's going to end anytime soon."