James Traub: America Isn't Very Good at Nation-Building
[James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. His new column for ForeignPolicy.com runs weekly.]
The United States' first "civilian surge" took place in August 1901, when 500 teachers disembarked from the USS Thomas, a converted cattle ship, in Manila Bay -- "the men wearing straw boaters and blazers," according to journalist and historian Stanley Karnow, "the women in long skirts and large flowery hats. Like vacationers, they carried baseball bats, tennis rackets, musical instruments, cameras and binoculars." America's colonial enterprise was new: Only a few months had passed since the Army had subdued a fierce insurgency and commenced governing the Philippines. The Thomasites, as this proto-Peace Corps came to be known, had responded to an advertisement placed in newspapers across the United States.
The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) no longer have to put ads in the papers to assemble a civilian force for the state-building effort now under way in Afghanistan, but it's remarkable how haphazard, and almost frantic, the system remains. "It's a numbers game," a USAID official told me, "a body game." Only a few of the 400-odd civilians USAID has hired so far have either language or technical skills; most are either eager youngsters or post-career officials from the military, State, or USAID. Jack Lew, the deputy secretary of state who is overseeing the process, says that "it's proved incredibly difficult to take on such an urgent challenge when you don't have a deep enough bench."
As an American, this is perplexing. Why do we not have a deep enough bench -- or any bench at all to speak of? We used to have one, even after we ceased to be a practicing colonial state. Tens of thousands of civilians -- most of them serving in the Army -- governed Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II and left behind effective democratic states. The "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam -- the core of the effort to win "hearts and minds" -- involved more than 1,000 civilians, most from USAID. But after the Vietnam War, both the military and the political leadership recoiled from the idea of counterinsurgency and "small wars." The Powell Doctrine stipulated that the United States would fight big wars or none at all, thus effectively eclipsing the space between "war" and "peace" where in the past it had deployed a civilian force.
The Powell Doctrine became received wisdom at precisely the moment it was being superseded by events, for the end of the Cold War produced a set of "complex emergencies" in Somalia, Haiti, Kurdistan, and the Balkans that required a combination of force and large-scale civilian presence. In 1997, Bill Clinton's administration issued a presidential directive designed to systematize the civilian-military response to such emergencies. The reserve civilian force envisioned by the plan was never brought into being. And George W. Bush's administration arrived in office ideologically opposed to state-building; Bush's first national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, sneeringly declared, "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."...
The searing experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has made many Americans doubt the U.S. capacity to do much good at all abroad. That skepticism is a necessary corrective to the airy fantasies of a few years ago, but it's also a new kind of hyperbole. The Thomasites, four-fifths of whom, by the way, had prior teaching experience and thus more or less knew what they were doing, not only established a national school system in the Philippines, but offered the most benevolent possible face to America's colonial enterprise. They didn't leave a working democracy in their wake, but that's not what we're asking of the "civilian surge" in Afghanistan either. We are hoping they will help tip the scales of Afghan public opinion toward the government rather than the Taliban. Even that might be too much to ask. But it would be a shame if we failed because we hadn't taken the responsibility seriously.
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
The United States' first "civilian surge" took place in August 1901, when 500 teachers disembarked from the USS Thomas, a converted cattle ship, in Manila Bay -- "the men wearing straw boaters and blazers," according to journalist and historian Stanley Karnow, "the women in long skirts and large flowery hats. Like vacationers, they carried baseball bats, tennis rackets, musical instruments, cameras and binoculars." America's colonial enterprise was new: Only a few months had passed since the Army had subdued a fierce insurgency and commenced governing the Philippines. The Thomasites, as this proto-Peace Corps came to be known, had responded to an advertisement placed in newspapers across the United States.
The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) no longer have to put ads in the papers to assemble a civilian force for the state-building effort now under way in Afghanistan, but it's remarkable how haphazard, and almost frantic, the system remains. "It's a numbers game," a USAID official told me, "a body game." Only a few of the 400-odd civilians USAID has hired so far have either language or technical skills; most are either eager youngsters or post-career officials from the military, State, or USAID. Jack Lew, the deputy secretary of state who is overseeing the process, says that "it's proved incredibly difficult to take on such an urgent challenge when you don't have a deep enough bench."
As an American, this is perplexing. Why do we not have a deep enough bench -- or any bench at all to speak of? We used to have one, even after we ceased to be a practicing colonial state. Tens of thousands of civilians -- most of them serving in the Army -- governed Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II and left behind effective democratic states. The "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam -- the core of the effort to win "hearts and minds" -- involved more than 1,000 civilians, most from USAID. But after the Vietnam War, both the military and the political leadership recoiled from the idea of counterinsurgency and "small wars." The Powell Doctrine stipulated that the United States would fight big wars or none at all, thus effectively eclipsing the space between "war" and "peace" where in the past it had deployed a civilian force.
The Powell Doctrine became received wisdom at precisely the moment it was being superseded by events, for the end of the Cold War produced a set of "complex emergencies" in Somalia, Haiti, Kurdistan, and the Balkans that required a combination of force and large-scale civilian presence. In 1997, Bill Clinton's administration issued a presidential directive designed to systematize the civilian-military response to such emergencies. The reserve civilian force envisioned by the plan was never brought into being. And George W. Bush's administration arrived in office ideologically opposed to state-building; Bush's first national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, sneeringly declared, "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."...
The searing experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has made many Americans doubt the U.S. capacity to do much good at all abroad. That skepticism is a necessary corrective to the airy fantasies of a few years ago, but it's also a new kind of hyperbole. The Thomasites, four-fifths of whom, by the way, had prior teaching experience and thus more or less knew what they were doing, not only established a national school system in the Philippines, but offered the most benevolent possible face to America's colonial enterprise. They didn't leave a working democracy in their wake, but that's not what we're asking of the "civilian surge" in Afghanistan either. We are hoping they will help tip the scales of Afghan public opinion toward the government rather than the Taliban. Even that might be too much to ask. But it would be a shame if we failed because we hadn't taken the responsibility seriously.