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Rome wasn’t built in a day.
That maxim certainly serves as a reminder of the challenges
of nation building. Countries going from chaos to order need
way more time than it takes for the ink to dry on a pact.
Getting a country up and running requires years and many resources,
including large sums of money from the international community.
The basic structure of a country is the same: political, economic,
taxation and judicial systems; infrastructure; cultural, educational,
and medical institutions; and more. Because these are so interconnected,
fitting them together into a unified, organic whole is a complex
undertaking.
The latest and sudden exigency for nation building is Afghanistan.
And it’s a start-up of the most intense kind because
of the ongoing conflicts and fears of terrorism. In this instance,
the United States has become deeply involved, but not merely
for the sake of Afghanistan. Instability in countries such
as Afghanistan threatens not only a nation’s own existence
but also the regions around them and, at times, other parts
of the world. “The United States has rightly set itself
the mission of ensuring that Afghanistan is not a safe haven
in which Islamic extremists can locate academies for anti-American
terrorists,” said Ashton Carter in an interview. He is
Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs
and co-director, with former Secretary of Defense William
J. Perry, of the Harvard-Stanford Defense Project. “It
is another matter altogether to take on the mission of turning
Afghanistan into a civil society.”
Carter added, “The United States is ill-equipped in
its governmental structures to take on the nation-building
mission, even when and where that is appropriate, since it
does not have an operational arm proficient in nation building
in the way that it has a Department of Defense proficient
in projecting military power.” Carter served as assistant
secretary of defense for international security policy from
1993 to 1996.
Ready or not, U.S. officials have had to enter “nation-building
mode” hastily — and reluctantly. Before September
11, the Bush administration wasn’t in favor of nation
building, even when war was not in the picture.
Beyond Isolationism
President Bush expressed his desire to pursue a policy of
isolationism when he declared his opposition to nation building
during his election campaign in 2000. Such leanings toward
isolationism have developed over the years, the Kennedy School’s
Robert Rotberg and other experts believe, and have caused
the United States to lose its global legitimacy. Rotberg is
director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention,
and Conflict at the Kennedy School and president of the World
Peace Foundation. An expert in U.S. foreign policy in Africa,
Haiti, Burma, and Sri Lanka, he oversees a
project examining why states failed.
Before the terrorist attacks, economist Jeffrey Sachs, director
of the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development,
stated that the Bush administration’s position on isolationism
was unwise. “[P]oor economic performance abroad has the
potential to translate into state failure that, in turn, jeopardizes
significant U.S. interests,” Sachs wrote in an article
titled “The Strategic Significance of Global Inequality,”
which appeared in the Washington Quarterly, Summer
2001. “If the United States wants to spend less time
responding to failed states, as the Bush administration has
stated, it will have to spend more time helping them achieve
economic success to avert state failure.” Sachs also
serves as advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern
Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa and was
recently appointed special advisor to the UN on its campaign
for the Millennium Development Goals.
The mixed results from prior nation-building ventures have
played a role in the U.S. retreat from its global neighbors.
In the last two decades, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and East
Timor became the focus of nation-building efforts. Endeavors
in Somalia failed, and the United States withdrew. Kosovo
held peaceful elections in November — a tiny step toward
a democratic government — but United Nations officials
still run the country while NATO forces keep the peace. Bosnia
is a shaky work in progress. East Timor seems near the end
of its gestation period. That country gained independence
from Indonesia in 2000, and elections are scheduled for next
May.
The attack on U.S. soil — not some distant shore —
on the morning of 9/11 yanked the country out of isolationism.
When the United States began bombing Afghanistan, many here
and abroad asked, “What happens after the war?”
“We’re not into nation building,” Bush told
reporters within days after bombing began. “We’re
into justice.” Soon after he had made that statement,
the Bush administration started shifting gears. They understood
that the threat to the United States would remain if a defeated
Afghanistan seeks help from its neighbors — countries
that support and harbor the same terrorist groups responsible
for 9/11.
Setting Up House
Preparations for rebuilding Afghanistan began while the United
States was waging war and trying to keep up with the day-to-day
changes in this conflict. After many all-night sessions to
work out the details, a transitional government stepped in
on December 22, 2001, in Kabul. This interim government backed
by an international peacekeeping force is barely a start.
In the months and years to come, every bit of reconstruction
and rehabilitation will depend on another and must be done
simultaneously. “The odds are long for all of this coming
together,” said Jonathan Moore MPA 1957 during a panel
discussion on nation building in November. The session was
part of a press briefing on terrorism that was sponsored by
the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy and held at the National Press
Club in Washington, DC. A senior advisor to the UN Development
Programme and an associate of the Shorenstein Center, Moore
had recently returned from Somalia, now a collapsed state.
The quest for stability in Afghanistan required up front
the delivery of emergency humanitarian aid by the United States
as well as the International Red Cross and other NGOs at the
start of what is usually a harsh Afghan winter. Aid, which
on the surface seems benign, can be a source of problems that
could have repercussions for the country’s future. Michael
Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
at the Kennedy School, warns of the damage of what he calls
the “international aid bazaar” could inflict on
struggling nations in transition, especially a country where
local factions want to regain power.
During an interview in his office on the day the pact for
the Afghan interim government was signed, he said, “Afghanistan
is the biggest funding opportunity for aid agencies. There
is an enormous risk that aid agencies will flood in, the UN
will lose control of them, and they will subvert the political
process.” To gain access to the victims, the aid agencies
might make deals with local warlords. “Not all aid is
good,” he said. “It can disempower rather than empower.”
Ignatieff, whose book Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
was published in the fall of 2001, also implored that power
and responsibility be taken away from “the guys with
guns.”
The chance of fighting starting up again is very great in
post-conflict countries. Some outside group has to make sure
the embers aren’t stoked and erupt into another conflagration.
While negotiations about the makeup of the interim Afghan
government were going on in Bonn, the United Nations, the
United States, and other countries were determining which
countries would be part of the peacekeeping forces and when
the right time would be for their deployment.
Afghanistan has been compared with Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo,
where the populations are made up of rival clans or ethnic
groups. Convincing factions to cooperate has been and, in
some cases, still is futile in Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo.
Anger and hatred remain; conflict has become the norm for
a generation. Demobilization is not an easy task with soldiers
whose only “career” has been combat. Multinational
peacekeeping forces have been shot at — including 18
U.S. soldiers in Somalia, which prompted the United States
to pull out. Efforts to unite warring tribes in Somalia where
a unified government never existed have floundered. That Kosovo
held peaceful elections in the fall of 2001 was a feat.
At the Shorenstein press briefing, panelist Monica Toft,
an assistant professor of public policy and assistant director
of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies offered
this advice: In order to avoid the power struggles among the
factions in Afghanistan, “we have to help them develop
a sense that each of the groups…do have a stake in this
government.” Toft’s research interests include nationalism,
territory, and ethnic conflict; civil and interstate wars;
and the relationship between demography and national security.
The question remains as to how to set up the institutional
structures so that each group feels like a fully invested
partner.
More Afghanistans Await
Experts hope that, now roused, the Bush administration
will seek to re-establish its global presence and participate
in other nation-building efforts. The resulting democratic
countries are considered more likely to be good international
citizens and experience long-term economic growth while being
less likely to resort to war. “What I’m calling
for is a redefinition of U.S. national interest, which should
be the security of people everywhere, not just Americans,”
Rotberg said. “When there’s a gross human rights
violation anywhere in the world, that’s a threat to the
U.S.”
Potential trouble is brewing elsewhere. According to Rotberg,
there are 20 to 30 civil wars annually and millions of refugees
around the world, and 10 to 12 millions of civilians were
killed in the last decade. “We have a group of possibly
30 states in the world out of 191 UN members that are at some
stage or another along the road to possible failure. Those
are weak states,” he said at the Shorenstein press briefing
on terrorism in Washington, DC. Among the regions of the world
where weak states exist is Africa. Rotberg discusses transitions
to democracy in Africa in his latest book, Ending Autocracy,
Enabling Democracy: The Tribulations of Southern Africa.
Whether the United States intends to make nation building
a one-time-only proposition or a standard policy may depend
on its experience in Afghanistan. Whatever degree of involvement
Bush pursues, KSG experts all asserted that the administration
would be making a mistake if it doesn’t get involved
enough or commit for the long haul. The United States has
walked away from its previous forays into nation building
in several countries too soon, Rotberg said. He singled out
Rwanda as the “best example of U.S. failure” to
become involved and prevent “the single greatest number
of deaths since the Holocaust.”
The commitment to Afghanistan may have to last as much as
a decade before the country can function independently. “Unless
real social and economic growth is accomplished, the society
will slip back into a crisis and chaos, which breeds the problems
and dangers we are now contending with,” said Moore at
the Shorenstein press briefing on terrorism.
Working against economic development in Afghanistan is geography.
“This is surely one of the toughest places in the world
to do anything,” Sachs said. “That doesn’t
mean it’s impossible, but it’s not going to be easy.”
Noting that the country is utterly destroyed and ethnically
fragmented, Sachs, who has a research interest in economic
geography, thinks the country’s remoteness from world
markets does not bode well for its economic prospects —
in the short and medium term.
With each decision, more questions about how to protect Afghanistan’s
future will surface. The answers to those will depend on whether
international assistance, monetary and otherwise, remains
in place for years. There is a rough sequence of what has
to be done in the initial phases of nation building, Sachs
said, but after that, there’s “a lot of improvisation
along the way.”
Delia K. Cabe is a freelance writer and a writer/editor
for the Radcliffe Quarterly at Harvard’s Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study.
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