The Shaky State Of Nation-Building

It Doesn't Work. Is There Another Way?

No fewer than nine times over the past decade, Western powers have deployed noble rhetoric, soldiers and taxpayer dollars in the service of nation-building. And no fewer than nine times, they have, to one degree or another, failed to build stable, self-sustaining nations.

The litany consists of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Liberia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The best one could say is that they are works in progress. The worst: Too many of them still can't function on their own and continue to pose threats to their own citizens as well as U.S. national interests. While genuine good -- both humanitarian and security-related -- has come of these efforts, the results have fallen far short of our professed objectives, consumed enormous resources and political capital, and left uncertainty about the U.S. and international commitment.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our interest in taking over "problem nations" has far outpaced our ability or willingness to solve those nations' problems.

Iraq, the biggest and most troubled of these undertakings, has focused attention on the future of nation-building as an element of U.S. foreign policy as never before. The subject has become a cottage industry. Some policy experts are proposing a cabinet-level agency for reconstruction, a civilian equivalent of the Pentagon's Central Command, or a coordinating agency like the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Others want a standby budget or a reorganization of the State Department.

The domestic U.S. politics of nation-building have been scrambled by Iraq, too. This election year no major candidate will assert, as George W. Bush did in 2000, that "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building." Yet, neither Bush nor Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry are going to be suggesting any new projects of this sort, either. With American soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq, domestic support for such ventures is waning. And American politicians seem less interested in perfecting nation-building than in redefining success and pulling out or passing off responsibility more quickly to the very nations we deemed incapable of helping themselves.

That's because nation-building has come to mostly mean the comprehensive occupation of collapsed or defeated states, the remaking of entire societies and sky-high, endless costs. Another approach, however, would feature peacekeeping, economic aid, technical assistance and support for elections that might, in some instances, make costly and frustrating military intervention less likely.

Since the end of the Cold War, the international community can claim noteworthy achievements in countries in crisis: ending years of conflict in Bosnia and Liberia; saving hundreds of thousands of lives in Somalia; halting the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo; arranging elections in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan; and contributing to the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Charles Taylor, Slobodan Milosevic and Mullah Omar.

But more often, the results of nation-building efforts have been disheartening. We have repeat offenders, such as Haiti and Liberia. We have failures, such as Somalia, where the state's complete collapse benefited al Qaeda. Even East Timor, which the world first allowed to be utterly destroyed and now calls a nation-building success story, is decades from running its own affairs without pervasive U.N. involvement.

Bosnia and Kosovo are often advanced as paragons of international nation-building. But we have spent billions of dollars keeping people alive without producing much of a nation in either case. After almost 10 years, Bosnia remains a quasi-state. The central government depends heavily on international handouts and possesses little power. The nationalists who hold sway in the regional governments have only recently begun to feel their writ diminish under the crypto-imperial leadership of international representative Paddy Ashdown. Kosovo's fundamental dilemma -- final status inside Serbia or outside it -- is no closer to resolution than it was the day U.S. bombing ended five years ago. Instead Kosovo is a failed non-state, and the international community's willingness to export this dilemma to the future has stalled economic reconstruction, limited progress toward reconciliation, and generated uncertainty in Kosovo and throughout the Balkans.

In Kosovo and Bosnia we have imposed order while trying to build nations atop unresolved political conflicts. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we have resolutely refused to put in enough forces to even establish order.

The effort to build a decent Afghan state in a place 12 times the size of Bosnia, decimated by 25 years of war, and beset by ethnic rivalries is a remarkable undertaking. A representative government has been established and unprecedented nationwide elections are scheduled less than three years after the fall of the Taliban. However, Afghanistan has also resumed its place as the world's leading heroin exporter; its women remain mistreated and disenfranchised; and warlords and Taliban remnants alike continue to menace the nation. We chose a minimalist approach because of the sense that the place was too big, too complex and potentially too contentious to take over and because of military requirements in Iraq and elsewhere. Are we and our NATO allies really committed to the huge cost and lengthy time needed to reach the larger goals that we profess to seek? No one has the slightest idea.

In Iraq, the U.S. failure to prepare for the end of major combat or deploy enough forces to deal with resisters left us an extraordinarily difficult task -- fighting an insurgency that impedes reconstruction while trying to build a political process whose legitimacy depends on successful reconstruction. Although we have put the Iraqis front and center now, we are still essential to an outcome that is far from preordained and perhaps years away.

Yes, nation-building is an incredibly difficult undertaking -- but much of the difficulty stems from the problems we make for ourselves:

• The nature of peace agreements. When Western countries decide to intervene in conflicts, they have focused -- understandably -- on ending the fighting. Limiting casualties has been the name of the game, an objective that is often at odds with the goals of establishing self-sustaining states. In Bosnia, peace meant leaving the country divided into three ethnic mini-states. In Kosovo, our fear of using ground troops led to a U.N. resolution leaving Milosevic with a legal role in Kosovo. These choices bedevil Bosnia and Kosovo to this day. In Afghanistan, we opted to leave the warlords in charge of their fiefdoms, and in both Iraq and Afghanistan we left hostile elements on the field with access to arms -- a factor that may yet erase our gains in both places.