The second thing to note about the Bosnia pledging conference was how close it came to failing: Most Europeans still regarded the Dayton accord as an American treaty and were not inclined to pay for it. But thanks to an early start in Bosnia, the World Bank's staff had analyzed the country's reconstruction needs in painstaking detail and thus persuaded every participating government, with the exception of France, to pledge money.
Having raised the funds for Bosnia, the bank coordinated the even harder task of spending them. Again, this suited the Clinton team just fine: The United States could not expect rival flag-waving aid outfits to do what America ordained; a multilateral institution was needed to broker cooperation. And although Bosnia's reconstruction later ran into difficulties, the bank's early leadership still gets good marks. When I visited Bosnia last year, Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs were united in praising the bank's achievement. Again, the Clinton Treasury had been right. Since its founding in 1944, the bank has managed projects in just about every difficult country in the world. Naturally, its experience had proven valuable in Bosnia.
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Indeed, the World Bank can be valuable in many contemporary crises, which are more often about imploding weak states than about expansionist strong ones. The mystery is that the Bush administration has failed to grasp this truth, missing the chance to use the bank as a tool of U.S. interests.
Why is this? The answer, I'm afraid, is that Bush and his officials have an instinctive antipathy to multilateral bodies. That is why the Pentagon failed to consult the World Bank's experts when it was planning for postwar Iraq, even though the bank had had experience in reconstruction efforts for Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan as well as Bosnia.
It is also why the Bush Treasury has picked a series of fights with the bank, most of which are based on faulty premises. To take the most extreme example, the Treasury spent much of 2001 arguing that the bank was an incompetent public-sector institution with no idea how to measure the effectiveness of its aid; then it launched a new American aid program called the Millennium Challenge Account, which copies many of its effectiveness measures from the work of World Bank researchers. The Bush administration's disdainful attitude toward the bank blinds it to the institution's usefulness; the same could probably be said for its dealings with the International Monetary Fund and United Nations agencies.
This may not be a polite note on which to end. But, having steeped myself in the World Bank's recent battles -- from the AIDS crisis to the Asian financial meltdown to the post-9/11 preoccupation with failed states -- I cannot escape this conclusion. The Clinton administration was staffed with people who understood the frustrations of multilateral institutions, but also knew how to work with them; the Bush administration is staffed with people who just get frustrated. So I tend to believe John Kerry's claim that he will extract more cooperation from allies. The Clinton period proved it's possible.
Author's e-mail:
mallabys@washpost.com
Sebastian Mallaby is a member of The Post's editorial page staff and the author of the just-published book "The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations" (Penguin).
