Andrew Northrup lauds a "why we must engage in nation-building in Afghanistan" argument in The New Republic. And the idea of a stable, relatively prosperous state growing out of a tribe-riven rat-hole is indeed very pleasant. But these sorts of arguments tend to be long on explaining why politically unstable areas are a danger to us, and short on explaining how, short of unapologetic imperialist methods, one goes about building a nation out of a geographical abstraction inhabited by numerous hostile groups with no sense of common identity. In this case the author, Spencer Ackerman, does call for the increased use of American military "pressure" for the purpose of extending Karzai's writ beyond Kabul. But how far are we willing to go with this?
The invocation of the Marshall Plan is not helpful. Germany and Japan, in addition to being coherent, functioning political entities, were occupied and administered by foreign powers after the war. And what happens when you give aid to war-devastated Germans and Japanese? They rebuild, build, invest, and resume their place as prosperous, technologically advanced states with skilled, productive populations. What happens when you give aid to ill- (or non-) governed Third World rat-holes? "Money? What money?" How do you ensure that "nation-building" efforts, like humanitarian aid, do not become merely more blackmail opportunities for warlord prima donnas?
Or, in reality, is the best you can do something like this: "Look, you can join the 21st century, or maintain your attachment to your clans and your fly-blown eight-century culture. Your choice. But if you choose to succor those who wish harm on us, or if your disinclination to abjure tribalism (and the poverty and stagnation that are its concomitants) allows our enemies to strike at us from your territory, then you and your people will suffer for it." That's deliberately harsh. I'm looking for good counter-arguments, or source-referrals.
Only found in Science Fiction!
Try '1633' by Eric Flint & David Weber [free online at www. baen.com]. It is filled with the sort of original thinking that is not going to be found in the 'Stan [the troops already have a name for it!] , at leat not under any hat that isn't a green beanie.
Amazingly enough, the list of real-world successes in nation-building must include the US in RVN [that's South Vietnam]! In the space of 3 years [69-72], we totally rebuilt the economy and agriculture, reformed the education and civil service to unprecedented efficiency [mostly at the bottom tier] and totally destroyed the remants of the indigenous guerrilla movement. Then the NVA hit with 20+ divisions and wrecked everything, but that is another story.
Emery
Posted by: emery almasy on September 16, 2002
Your argument hinges on the theory that third-world ratholes can't reform themselves. I believe that with Marshal Plan-style assistance they can.
The key is that Afghanistan requires a prolonged American occupation to destroy the clan / warlord culture that exists there. Warlords have to be put down at all costs by the central government -- and the central government has to be backed by American muscle.
With rule of law comes industrialization and westernization -- and the roots that make a Marshal Plan possible. There need to be American troops in the streets of Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and that little eighty person village hidden in the mountains. Every warlord needs to fear the sound of American helicopter gunships. And the United States has to be willing to lose soldiers in the process.
Then, and only then, will billions of American dollars make a difference. But what a difference they'll make! Imagine what happens when the fabled natural gas pipeline can become a reality -- built with the help of Afghan companies. Imagine what happens when a middle class re-emerges in Kabul.
Remember, too, that previous to the Soviet-Afghan war Kabul was considered one of the most cosmopolitan locales in Central Asia and the Middle East. Immediately following the fall of the Taliban video tapes, Western music and satellite dishes appeared for sale on the streets. There's even a growing beauty industry in Kandahar.
Posted by: George Paine on September 16, 2002
Japan really isn't a bad example: the were catapulted from a feudal monarchy to an industrialized democracy in roughly no time flat.
Of course, part of the reason they were able to do that is the high regard they had for authority. The Americans had won, became authorities, and the japanese absorbed useful stuff (quality control, for example) like a sponge.
Afghanistan is different: they actually give pretty good signs of *liking* constant tribal conflict and having a distrust, distaste and dislike of authority which would make any regular western-style non-tribal anarchist proud.
I think we could, perhaps, pull off "nation building" in somewhere a little more together than Afghanistan - move in some industry, lower barriers to investment, build the middle class and help with the details of democracy (i.e. overseeing vote counting).
But in Afghanistan, there's no middle class. I think the best we could do is try and make sure they don't get too much ammunition imported.
Posted by: The Lefty Libertarian on September 16, 2002
There is a primer: it's Japan. The U.S. wrote its constitution and oversaw its entire restructuring. We undoubtedly got some stuff wrong but on the whole we got a whole hell of a lot of stuff right. What all these hell-hole places lack is basically a rule of law. You could almost say it doesn't matter what law, but some law, reliable, predictable, ongoing. Once that's in place, they muddle through. It's "imperialist" if you're mentally in thrall to such concepts, but otherwise it's a leap from the 8th century to the 21st without all the byways and highways the Western societies had to go through. From the most basic elements (elections) to the most fundamental daily events (traffic laws)developing, instituting and maintaining some predictability in life is the bedrock on which all else depends. Without that, you have incipient chaos. With it, you have the beginnings of a society. We did it in Japan; it is not demonstrated that we can't do it elsewhere. What is apparent is that we apparently don't realize we did it, and that we aren't actually prepared to do it again because so many of us have forgotten the importance of the basic bedrock idea of predictability.
Posted by: anita on September 16, 2002
how, short of unapologetic imperialist methods...
So what's wrong with unapologetic imperialist methods? (No, *I* can't believe I'm saying that either.)
And what happens when you give aid to war-devastated Germans and Japanese? They rebuild, build, invest, and resume their place as prosperous, technologically advanced states with skilled, productive populations. What happens when you give aid to ill- (or non-) governed Third World rat-holes? "Money? What money?"
But note the key difference in the two situations:
Japan and Germany: you're giving aid to a country under American occupation, with American administration distributing it and dealing with investment. If someone skims, the skimmer is either American (and therefore can be removed and jailed for corruption in office), or Japanese or German (can have the same thing happen, since the country's under American occupation, you control the horizontal, you control the vertical).
Ill-governed ratholes: you're giving free money to thugs, in countries where you don't control the distribution, you're not in charge, and you have no ability to impose the necessary preconditions for civil society, and you hope to God enough of it manages to slip through the thugs' fingers to keep too many people from dying of starvation or malaria this year.
I too would like a handbook for doing this. I use the WWII analogy myself, but I'm not sure it's adequate. But I do think we know the basics: they don't involve Bucks For Thugs (tm), and they do involve occupation, providing predictability as Anita says and enabling the people to rebuild civil society on that scaffolding, for some period of time. (Two years? Five years? Twenty? I'm not sure what the minimum is in different situations, and I'm not sure exactly what needs to be done to minimize the time.)
Posted by: jeanne a e devoto on September 16, 2002
I don't think there's any one place that has the best answers on nation-building. One area to look is the various constitutional studies think tanks, which have done a lot of the drudge work of tearing through all the hundreds of national constitutions (including historical ones) to find out how choices like a unicameral legislature work in practice. Some of these people are advising the Afghans right now. A lot of work along these lines was used in the XSSR courtesy of groups like the Soros Foundation, and has contributed to the progress there, however halting. The UN at a certain point thought that its efforts in Cambodia brokering an elections process had been a model, but that country fell into civil war again and is now run by a coalition including former Khmer Rouge elements. Somalia, too, was to have been a model of UN intervention in a failed state, but we all know how that turned out. Perhaps the experience in Kurdistan is the best model to consider here.
Oh, and sloppy generalizations about Japan above: Japan had industrialized and modernized in several fits and starts beginning in the 19th century. The military which attacked the US in 1941 was their "modern" military formed on European lines and supported by a contemporary industrial structure that indeed rivaled our own for a time. The Ottoman Empire "modernized" its military and government, copying European models, about once every century. These places weren't complete backwaters.
Posted by: Dan Hartung on September 17, 2002
I think the form of the aid is very important. .I'm in favor of not ever sending another dime of cash to a "rat-hole", to be stolen by the ruling autocrat, but sending, say, materiel for sustainable agriculture along with educating farmers in its use (especially in Africa).
Send tools and teachers, not dollars.
And think what the U.S. would be like if, instead of "blank check" cash agricultural subsidies, farmers had gotten biodiesel extraction equipment and alcohol distillation gear instead....we'd not be caring so much about middle eastern oil right now, and could save our oil reserves for plastics and other non-fuel uses, which stikes me as more ecomonically useful in the long term.
Any form of direct cash "aid" almost always gets used in ways other than the giver intended.
Posted by: David Mercer on September 17, 2002
George, you say:
Your argument hinges on the theory that third-world ratholes can't reform themselves. I believe that with Marshal Plan-style assistance they can.
You then go on to describe a scenario that bears no resemblence to your proposition. Massive monetary assistance, political reform at the end of american guns, these are not the elements of a nation "reforming itself." These are the halmarks of imposed, "imperialistic" reform.
And, frankly, I do not see a way we can seriously build a functional modern nation without such "imperialistic" heavy handed methods. The nations as they exist now are too corrupt, too backward, and too fundamentally broken to change without major outside pressure. The people who want serious nation building will simply have to live with that fact. Personally I don't consider it a bad thing.
Posted by: Robin Goodfellow on September 17, 2002
Try "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto. This is a must read in my view. The beauty of de Soto's approach is that he starts with the bottom up and builds up from the social consequence, which is necessary to sustain the law. A bad bottom up solution accepted by the people is better than the enlightened solution imposed from the top down.
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465016146/qid=1032265259/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/002-0284320-9836066?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
From their review:
In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
Posted by: Jabba the Tutt on September 17, 2002
I think that previous posters suggestion that Japan is a good example is not quite fair and neither are the Marshall planned countries of Europe. In all those instances, there was substantial, cohesive public, for lack of a better word, support.
The concepts of modern institutions and practices were not foreign. Neither was the concept of a non-authoritarian unified government. While, you could make the argument that these might be universal notions, they have not readily existed elsewhere, especially in patchwork post-colonial countries like Afghanistan.
Even if you want to dismiss this point, Japan as an example still might not work. If I'm not mistaken, for the better part of 50 years, Japan was a one-party, and for most, this hardly qualifies as democracy.
Nevertheless, this would probably not be the case in Afghanistan. Here, you're more likely to see 'feckless pluralism' which would divide the country along old cultural, tribal and ethnic lines. This is a common problem with many 'developing democracies' in African and South American countries.
However, having said all this, if we define our objective as: to install an American puppet government and then to pile military and economic support to justify the regime’s legitimacy. Then yes, simply sending tons of military and economic aid may work, but this may require decades of commitment, by which time American support at home would no doubt have dwindled. In addition, there would undoubtedly at some point, a crisis of conscious among leaders when they are forced to suppress the people's self-determination and break from the American installed regime.
Posted by: Mike on September 17, 2002
I think there is no primer suitable to the current situation. The US will have to write its own.
It should perhaps learn of the mistakes of nation building in Iran between 1943-1979 which has a lot of commonalities with Afghanistan.
Iran in the earlier part of 20th Century was a tribal / ethnically divided nation, less than a third spoke the main language of Farsi, it was technologically behind etc etc
It did have a growing intelligentsia and middle classes and it had plenty of natural resources, i.e. oil and copper.
US involvement was very good between 1943-1956 when aid and military assistance probably stopped Soviet intrusion.
However, in 1956 it lost its way when it removed a democratically elected prime minister, Mossadagh, because he wished to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil company.
After that the US found itself in a position having to maintain the regime of a compliant Shah, who was primarily interested in accruing wealth for himself and his family.
I think Iranian sympathy and love of America was exhausted when the CIA trained / sponsored SAVAK, secret police, became more and more repressive.
Additionally, the US sponsored economic / agricultural reforms of the "White Revolution" were Stalinist in its execution. This built up resentment.
So there are a lot of ways not to build a nation, very few examples of how to do it successfully.
Posted by: MonkeyX on September 17, 2002
Afghanistan already has a source of authority, tradition and a "common identity". It's called fundamentalist Islam, with shari'a law. We don't need to build a culture in Afghanistan, we need to destroy the aspects of the existing culture that threaten America. Supplanting Islamic theocracy with pluralist democracy may take a bit more doing than one may think, in a country where every village headman is also a mullah. I may prefer a chaotic, internally hostile Afghanistan to one united under Talibanism. As long as everyone is clear that support of terrorists who threaten America will not be tolerated, who cares what form their government takes?
Posted by: Robert Speirs on September 17, 2002
I would urge you to review the following article by Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters (USA, Ret.) (he was assigned, prior to his recent retirement, to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he was responsible for future warfare) as a begining in determining the foundations for a functioning nation. I'm attaching a brief excerpt to peak your interest.
Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States
RALPH PETERS
© 1998 Ralph Peters
The Seven Factors
These key "failure factors" are:
Restrictions on the free flow of information.
The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion.
A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/parameters/98spring/peters.htm
This is a really powerful analytical check sheet to use in determining where you're going whenever you're empowered to act Douglas McArthur or George Marshall.
Posted by: Ray Clutts on September 17, 2002
Robin,
You note that I call for a Marshal plan combined with a heavy-handed occupation:
You then go on to describe a scenario that bears no resemblence to your proposition. Massive monetary assistance, political reform at the end of american guns, these are not the elements of a nation "reforming itself." These are the halmarks of imposed, "imperialistic" reform.
The Marshal Plan was implemented during an occupation, albeit not one as heavy handed as I think would be necessary in Afghanistan. Even so, the military had to build the country back up and find and deal with undesirables. The military, most of all, had to serve a police function until a viable German / Japanese police force could be reconstructed.
The rebuilding of Afghanistan requires a touch of imperialism and a touch of the friendly helping hand. We need to destroy the warlords -- who, I believe, only have support because of their brute force -- while pumping huge sums of money into the local economy. This way the local economy can reform itself while we reform the local countryside to make that possible. We'll provide the police function that's necessary for successful capitalism.
Posted by: George Paine on September 17, 2002
Here's another vote for reviving imperialist methods! Not completely unapologetic, however--I would have greatly preferred Jerry Pournelle's republic (and Thomas Jefferson's, from which it derived) but that option, for better or worse, was already pretty distant even before 9/11. If the choice is Empire vs. constant depradations from barbarians, what reasonable person would choose the latter?
Posted by: Kirk Parker on September 17, 2002
For what it's worth, "nation building" in afghanistan is going to face all of the same problems, and worse, as "nation building" in somalia.
You can not take tribal anarchys and feudal peasants and turn them into citizens of a democracy overnight. The process of education, the foundations of common law, all of that stuff has to be slowly constructed in the general social contract of a society.
India, for example, was handed a raft of first world institutions by the British and proceeded to make them her own: by adding corruption to beaurocracy, and netpotism and fraud to democracy, until the new system functioned only a little better than the network of feuding kings had.
People make whatever you give them their own: even very sophisticated societies like India do not necessarily have the ability to make these institutions work the same way they do here because, basically, culture shapes the function of institutions.
We have a thousand years plus of democratization, and we're STILL learning. Were it me, though....
1> Create comprehensive registers for land and business ownership. Hernando de Soto has shown that this alone creates very rapid growth of wealth for the peasantry (he's a "field economist" from Peru).
2> Stabilize the currency situation: make sure that, for example, counterfeiting is controlled, or simply dollarize the buggers.
3> (VITAL) Do something, anything, about corruption in criminal cases. You're never going to get these tribal leaders under control if they can pressure or bribe judges and juries to get away with any imagineable offence. Rule of law.
I don't think it would help much, but it would be a start.
Posted by: The Lefty Libertarian on September 17, 2002
puppet government
Here I think is where we make mistakes. We take half measures, such as locating and installing an "American-friendly" regime which we hope is the least of available evils; then we give it money and military aid. And we get hated, not unreasonably, for all the sins of said puppet, even if the puppet was objectively speaking an improvement. We try for the benefits of occupation without the (political and moral) drawbacks. And I think half a century of Cold War policy showed how badly that works.
Such governments are still corrupt, repressive, and resistant to reform, only now we're so bound up with them that we ourselves resist improvement ("instability") and we're hated for their faults. Being to blame for something you're not in control of = bad.
No, setting up a puppet regime is the very last thing we should be doing. If we decide to intervene in another country's governance - if the situation is that dire - a short-as-possible occupation strikes me as more honest, more productive of a good life for the citizens, and less likely long-term to cause trouble for us than anointing a local tyrant and hoping to God he's not too horrible.
Posted by: jeanne a e devoto on September 17, 2002
Best book I've seen on nation building is "Fool's Errand," by Dempsey and Fontaine:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1930865074/qid=1032293889/sr=8-6/ref=sr_8_6/102-9672554-7114511?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
An excellent primer.
Posted by: Conor O'Brien on September 17, 2002
I think Japan and Germany would be a bad role model. Neither of these places were a step away from being uneducated tribe states.
Posted by: ErikZ on September 17, 2002
How about inter-clan team-building exercises? There are many experts in the area.
I'm not being totally facetious, here. Teams generate a team spirit by working together. Any (Afghan) government, or NGO, or foreign or local corporation, can help in "nation building" by creating teams from mixed tribes, and hopefully of both men and women, and sometimes foreigners as well as Afghans.
Posted by: Lisa Dusseault on September 17, 2002
How about inter-clan team-building exercises? There are many experts in the area.
I'm not being totally facetious, here. Teams generate a team spirit by working together. Any (Afghan) government, or NGO, or foreign or local corporation, can help in "nation building" by creating teams from mixed tribes, and hopefully of both men and women, and sometimes foreigners as well as Afghans.
Posted by: Lisa Dusseault on September 17, 2002
Funny, I was thinking of this a while back, and wrote an article, titled "The American Empire" about this. Short version for lazy linkers - first, an all-powerful governor, who sets up a government comprised of officials (legislators, judges, police chiefs) who are experienced at running a liberal (liberal as in "free") democracy. They each hand select native sucessors who will serve a term, under their supervision, followed ultimately by open elctions.
Posted by: marcus on September 17, 2002
Thanks one and all for taking the time to respond and make recommendations. Tomorrow I ought to have time to check out all the links (that Fool's Errand book looks like a worthwhile read) and expand on the questions. Grim topic, eh?
Posted by: Moira on September 17, 2002
Dear Ms. Breen:
I posted some longish, and mostly negative,
thoughts on the subject on my site, after reading your post. Sadly, there's an old light bulb joke that applies:
www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics is the URL.
Best,
Jim Miller
PS - Glad to see you are doing better.
Posted by: Jim Miller on September 18, 2002
British colonization of India is the best example. The Indians generally didn't want them there, and had no centralized government, different languages, etc. The British enforced rule of law and united the region.
D'Souza has a good piece on the advantages of British Imperialism that you rarely here in these politically correct days.
Posted by: ruprecht on September 18, 2002
"I'm looking for a nation-building primer."
Start with the first and best book on the subject: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli; then read his Discourses on Livy ...
Posted by: Robert Schwartz on September 18, 2002
The models in Afghanistan will be different from the models in Iraq. It may be impossible to maintain either nation as an integral whole for very long, the forces tending toward dissolution are so strong, that only absolute brutality has held them together so far.
You must create the "idea" of a unified Afghani or Iraqi nation, in the minds of prospective citizens. You must give them a stake in that idea, something to hold them to it. Then you must give them a piece of the responsibility of maintaining the "shared hallucination" of nationhood.
Since these are both Islamic nations, you must tie in powerful religious themes and images into your presentation, and ally yourself with religious leaders who are accepted by the people and agreeable to the aim of nationbuilding. They must be both accepted and agreeable--only one of those and you will fail.
If after doing your best, it is clearly an impossible task, the best pullout strategy must be devised, which will leave behind an entity which poses a minimal short to medium term risk to the US. Try to leave a lot of "friends" behind who are not considered compromised by their relationship with the US.
Posted by: R Buchard on September 22, 2002
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower. It won the Pulitzer.
Posted by: Eric Means on September 24, 2002
I realize you said essentially "no Marshall plan"... but I think, at least at first, that's what it's going to take to get a real, democratic regime in place in Iraq (Afghanistan, whatever nation we want to consider the "first domino" in the Arab world). We've spent the last 50 years standing on the outside throwing money (and bullets) at the problem and hoping it takes care of itself after that. In contrast, our only real successes were in Viet Nam (briefly), South Korea, Germany, Japan, and (possibly, hopefully) Afghanistan. What do all of these countries have in common? The U.S. essentially "occupied" all of them while rebuilding them.
I don't want to be the typical imperial arrogant fellow, but if these people knew how to run a real democracy and a real capitalist economy already, they'd be doing it. We've got some of the best experience on the planet -- I've heard it said that America is not a nation of conquerors, but a nation of managers, and it's very true. When Americans are the one controlling the money flows and making the decisions, things work (mostly, and when they don't we're generally good about putting someone else into place who can make them work, and then working through the problems until they're fixed). We need to do that until the indigenous government is ready to start taking over, and then gradually hand over the reins. You can't expect these people to pick up the equivalent of 1000 years of capitalism and democratic theory by reading the back of an American dollar. They need to be *taught*. That's what nation-building requires: you don't build a house by firing some artillery at a patch of ground (to dig the basement) and then dumping a pile of cash into the hole. You get in there and raise a frame yourself, until it's livable and the family who will be living there can move in their furniture, paint the rooms, etc.
It's going to be expensive as all hell, but it will be worth it -- and the fact that it's expensive as hell means we should do everything we can to do it right, the first time.
Posted by: Eric Means on September 24, 2002
"short on explaining how, short of unapologetic imperialist methods, one goes about building a nation..."
I guess we'll just have to lose that crippling qualification. As you've pointed out, Japan isn't a good example of "nation building" because they'd done so much of the job on their own. So I think the example we should be looking at is that of the English in India.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan on October 13, 2002
"short on explaining how, short of unapologetic imperialist methods, one goes about building a nation..."
I guess we'll just have to lose that crippling qualification. As you've pointed out, Japan isn't a good example of "nation building" because they'd done so much of the job on their own. So I think the example we should be looking at is that of the English in India.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan on October 13, 2002
Posted by: Peter Hamsen on November 21, 2003