Well, it's a problem in general with the American military. If you are the biggest and the strongest military power in the world, you have this natural reluctance to learn the quirky ways of the natives in faraway lands.

I think the behavior of the troops has been a huge factor in the rise of the insurgency and in the rise of the anti-American feelings there[in Iraq].

Even if you are a liberal in the Muslim world, when you see Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and you see all the other reports of abuses by American forces, it's very hard to get up and say, "We should simulate the American ways," because this is the face of America now in the Muslim world, for many Muslims.

But in Afghanistan, the general rule was that since you were fighting the Taliban, which was not a lawful government force, the Geneva Conventions did not apply. And that led to a lot of excesses in Afghanistan, excesses like Abu Ghraib that were already well-publicized.

If you are an eighteen or nineteen-year-old with little education, as is often the case, and you're put in charge of many, many people on the other end of the world, you have absolute power and you're not prepared for it.

Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.

The American official was trying to talk about aid and development projects and finally a local tribal chief got up and said, "Even if you turn our country into heaven, we don't want it from you. Just leave us."