Discussion Papers

The United States and Nation-building: Path to Democracy or Hegemony?

By Amb Bob Barry

September 5, 2003

This discussion paper is an updated version of a lecture given by Ambassador Barry at the Amos Fortune Forum in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States on August 22. It is being published as a follow-on piece to his Discussion Paper ‘Why we are not prepared to win the peace in Iraq’ published on March 7, 2003 (see www.iraqconflict.org).

As long ago as last fall, I strongly suspected that the Bush Administration would decide to invade Iraq and would be ill prepared for victory. In this paper I want to discuss the US experience in nation-building, and why the United States has been so successful at waging war in the past decade and so ill prepared to follow up on military victory with actions which would validate the sacrifices made in war.

It is surely not because the United States lacks experience with nation-building in recent years, or because there have not been clear lessons learned from these experiences. In the past decade, the United States has been involved in nation-building eleven times, investing tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American personnel, military and civilian. The list includes Somalia, Haiti, Panama, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and now Iraq. And, of course, half a century ago we rebuilt Germany and Japan in a major effort lasting several years.

The resultant record is at best mixed. According to a former colleague, Ambassador James Dobbins, who was involved in all of these efforts in the past ten years, “Nation-building was disastrous in Somalia, bad in Haiti, better in Bosnia and better still in Kosovo.”. He went on to say that in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have regressed significantly.

My personal interest in the topic stems largely from the three and a half years my wife and I spent in Sarajevo from January 1998 to June of 2001. I was head of mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional security organization including 55 countries of Europe and North America. The OSCE is the successor to the Helsinki Final Act, the structure created in the 1970s to deal with security, economic and human rights issues in Europe. The OSCE is more than a debating society - it has field missions in 19 countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and is deeply involved in nation-building. The Bosnia Mission, which was over 1,000-strong was responsible for the administration of elections, the development of political parties and representative institutions, the protection of human rights and the restructuring of the military.

The Bosnian experience is instructive, because it illustrates the difference between peacekeeping and nation-building. The UN Security Council fielded a peacekeeping force at the outset of the war in Bosnia, in 1992. Like most such missions, the goal was to facilitate humanitarian assistance and if possible to constrain hostilities. The initial mandate was defensive and reactive, and UN peacekeepers found themselves taken hostage and forced to bargain with war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. They were there to keep a non-existent peace.

As the situation deteriorated, the force was strengthened to 33,000 and the mandate became more assertive, changing to a UN Protective Force (UNPROFOR) with the role of protecting civilian populations in “safe areas”. The massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica while Dutch peacekeepers looked on set the stage for NATO involvement and the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995.

Under Dayton, 60,000 troops were deployed to provide security and demobilize the 400,000 men under arms. These troops were under the command of a US NATO commander and a US armoured force was at their core. Civilian nation-building was coordinated by a High Representative, appointed by the international sponsors of the Dayton Agreement. The UN re-trained the police, the OSCE rebuilt the political system, the World Bank and the EU handled economic reconstruction and reform. Judicial reform, regulation of the media, educational reform and the creation of a new unified military were among the tasks that the international coalition took on.

Eight years and tens of billions of dollars later, Bosnia is no liberal democracy;12,000 international peacekeepers remain, 10 per cent of them Americans, and hundreds of international officials maintain a virtual protectorate, with the right to impose legislation and remove any elected officials who are obstructing the peace process. Yet Bosnia is a relative success story among nation-building efforts involving the US, and there is little doubt that sceptics who believed that there was no possibility of recreating a multi-ethnic Bosnia will be proved wrong.

Other relatively successful nation-building efforts involving the US include Kosovo and East Timor, both of which were managed by the UN. In Kosovo, after four years of UN civil administration and a European-led peacekeeping and police training force, local government has been turned over to elected local officials. The large UN bureaucracy will remain in Kosovo for several more years, until a consensus is reached on whether the future Kosovo will be independent or autonomous. In East Timor, the UN successfully acted as a midwife to the transition to independence from Indonesia over a period of four years. (Sergio de Mello, the UN Representative tragically killed in the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad last week, led the nation-building effort in East Timor, and began the UN mission in Kosovo.)

The UN acknowledged that it had little prior experience of setting up a civil administration, and it adapted slowly to a number of predictable challenges, such as the breakdown of the justice system. But the lessons of the past were eventually learned. One such lesson, counter-intuitive for Americans, is that early elections do not necessarily produce democracy:

In the first place electoral competition often brings out the worst in society, as candidates appeal to extremists.
In failed states, the nature of governing bodies is more important than who is elected to them. The first step should be the adoption of a constitution, which sets the ground rules for pluralistic government.
In former totalitarian states, much work has to be done to create political parties and foster a peaceful dialogue.

In Bosnia, the international community moved too soon and held elections that legitimised those nationalist politicians who led the country into war. We should not make the same mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq.

US experience with unilateral efforts at nation building has been largely unsuccessful, primarily because it has been unwilling to stay the course and devote the necessary resources and manpower. In Somalia, the US withdrew after very tentative efforts to create a secure environment for humanitarian aid workers. In Haiti, the US Administration declared victory long before a self-sustaining secure environment existed. A US unilateral effort in Panama was more successful, perhaps because the removal of Manuel Noriega was in itself a sufficient condition for the resurgence of civil society there.

It is hard to say which came first - our spotty record of nation-building (going back to Vietnam), or the general distaste that most US Administrations have for the task The Bush Administration is not the first to shy away from the task of nation building. We tend to forget how hard it was for the Clinton Administration to create a consensus in favour of intervention in Bosnia. It was not the UN, but the US and other permanent members of the Security Council that devised a series of half measures that left the Blue Helmets with a mandate they could not enforce. Colin Powell's autobiography relates that he almost had a stroke when Madeleine Albright asked him what the use was of the world's best military if it was never to be used in situations like Bosnia.

In fact the military despises peacekeeping and nation-building as a tasks that interferes with their primary goal of fighting wars. When Bosnia was in the headlines, military planners claimed that assigning brigades to peacekeeping duties interfered with the training cycle, discouraged re-enlistment and in general hollowed out the Army. Reflecting their experience with pacification efforts in Vietnam, they shied away from “mission creep”, which they defined as any effort to involve them in civilian-led nation -building activities. Citing mission creep, the US-led NATO force in Bosnia stood by while Bosnian Serbs destroyed large sections of Sarajevo in 1996 and forced Serb Orthodox families to leave and burn their apartments behind them.

In order to persuade the military to sign on to the Dayton agreement, US negotiators included a provision that elections be held within a year, promising that this would constitute a viable exit strategy. In fact, premature elections simply hardened the political situation, postponing the exit of US forces. Nevertheless, in Kosovo and later in Afghanistan and Iraq the Joint Chiefs of Staff consistently called for early elections, believing this would constitute their ticket home.

Thinking to drive a stake through the heart of US participation in peacekeeping, the Pentagon decreed in 2002 the closing of the US Army Peacekeeping Institute, a program attached to the Army War College designed to teach mid-level officers the lessons of nation-building. This was described as an economy move, which was less than convincing as it saved less than a million dollars at a time when defence spending was increasing by tens of billions. As a result of Congressional pressure and public complaints by US soldiers that they had not been trained for peacekeeping functions in Iraq, that decision was reversed earlier this year.

George W. Bush campaigned on a promise to end US involvement in nation-building, which conservatives rejected as an ineffective and expensive form of international social work, often carried out through the despised United Nations. Bush promised to pull American troops out of Bosnia and Kosovo, and Condi Rice argued that the 82nd Airborne should never be used to escort children to school. Once in power, and faced with the threat that NATO allies would pull out of the Balkans if the United States did, the Administration mantra became “in together, out together”. And the 82nd Airborne has been guarding children's hospitals in Iraq, and is very unhappy about it.

But the real turnaround on nation-building has been among neo-conservative ideologues, mostly following 9/11. Their argument is that in the age of terror, the US can only defend its interests by eliminating hostile regimes before they can threaten the United States and its allies. Robert D. Kaplan, a prolific writer specializing in failed and failing states, argues that we must use the hard edge of American power to maintain US pre-eminence, thus enabling the creation of a kind of world-wide civil society. His argument reminds one of Winston Churchill's 1896 dictum that the purpose of the British Empire “was to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to plant the seeds of commerce and learning”. As a recent critic pointed out, “there was an awful lot of hanging around in the club, pending the accomplishment of these great goals”.

Shortly after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Bush issued a Churchillian, or Trumanesque, policy declaration. He promised to make the rebuilding of Afghanistan a top US priority. Speaking at Marshall's alma mater, he promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. But a lot of ‘hanging around the club’ followed.

At US insistence, the international security force for Afghanistan, ISAF, was limited to 5,000 and assigned responsibility only for the immediate vicinity of Kabul. The US did not participate in the security force, but used its 10,000 troops to pursue combat operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Otherwise, security was to be provided by the fledgling Afghan Army and the local warlords whose interests infrequently coincided with President Karzai's. As for international aid, the US helped organize a donor's conference which pledged $4.5billion, but then led the pack in failing to honour the pledges by asking the Congress for no money for Afghanistan in FY 2003. To date, the US has appropriated $300 million for Afghan assistance, most of which is for humanitarian aid. That is one -third of what is spent each month to maintain US troops carrying out combat operations. Recently the Pentagon recognized the imbalance here, and proposed that the US Government needs to spend at least 10 per cent of the $10 billion dollars spent annually to maintain US combat forces, on aid to the civil sector. Because of tight budget ceilings imposed to compensate for tax cuts, the Pentagon is talking about providing the $1 billion from discretionary funds made available for the Iraq campaign. This would seem to suggest that the assistance will be administered by the Defense Department, not USAID which has been responsible to date.

NATO has now assumed command of ISAF, and Karzai and his ministers have been pleading for an increase in the size of the security force and its expansion outside Kabul. But no more troops are forthcoming from the US, which is stretched thinly over Iraq, and no one else is stepping forward, even though the US has said it is no longer opposed to ISAF expansion. Meanwhile, the Taliban is reasserting itself in the Southern provinces as the country prepares for some kind of election next year. I say some kind of election because there is as yet no constitutional structure to which people can be elected, and there is no guarantee that elections will not simply legitimise the warlords and opium growers.

As it became apparent that the US would invade Iraq, many observers were looking at how the Administration was planning for victory. This is the old story of the dog that chases cars, finally catches one, and wonders what to do with it.

As military plans advanced, President Bush assigned responsibility for planning for humanitarian aid and reconstruction to the Pentagon, rather than USAID or the State Department. The theory was that the military is very good at planning, and that its thousands of planners could do as thorough a job of preparing for peace as for war.

What was lost sight of was the military's distaste for peacekeeping operations and mission creep, and the fact that civilian ideologues would be using their own assumptions rather than those of the military or the intelligence community to shape the plan. In fact, a small office of special plans reporting to Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith, a convinced unilateralist, put together a plan, which was not widely shared with Congress or the public. An underlying assumption was that US forces would be welcomed, especially in the Shiia areas, and that the liberated Iraqis would step forward to take charge of their own fate.

An example of the way in which optimistic assumptions affected plans is the question of how many US troops would have to stay on to maintain security after Saddam was toppled. Outgoing Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who commanded the NATO stabilization force in Bosnia, won a sharp rebuke from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for telling Congress that “hundreds of thousands” would be required. Press accounts now say military planners were estimating 400,000 and the National Security Council 500,000. If one considers that Bosnia has one-tenth the population of Iraq and that the international community deployed 60,000 in Bosnia initially to keep the peace, the comparable number in Iraq would have been 600,000. But apparently the plan approved by the Pentagon called for an initial force of 45,000-60,000. Today there are about 160,000 troops there, including about 20,000 from “coalition partners” and most commentators think this is too few. Following the bombing of the UN headquarters last week, former Bush nation-builder James Dobbins said that the numbers of peacekeepers should be in the 300-500,000 range, but Secretary Rumsfeld said that the current force size is about right. In fact, if we are counting on US forces to make up by far the largest contingent, the current force size has to be right, because the United States cannot maintain a larger force in Iraq, proceed with plans to rotate that force every year and maintain its world wide commitments without increasing the size of its regular army significantly. In his farewell address, General Shinseki warned that the United States had a 10-division army and a 12-division strategy.

But the size of the force was only one element of the victory plan which did not look right to many of us who had experience with nation-building in the past. Like many other critics, I wrote last February:

“The increasingly ambitious agenda for post-Saddam Iraq now includes disarmament, regime change, democracy in Iraq and a safer world for all. What is missing is any realistic discussion of the sacrifices that will be required to produce this kind of rosy scenario. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair seem determined to avoid discussing the costs and burden of defeating Saddam Hussein and rebuilding the country until after a decision to go to war has been made. This creates a serious risk that our publics and parliaments will decline to shoulder the burdens of victory. Losing the peace in Iraq may carry greater risks than attempting to contain Saddam Hussein. We need to look carefully at plans for peace before the die is cast for war.”

Before the United States went to war, despite intense questioning by the Congress, the Administration dodged the question of how much the war and its aftermath would cost. The official line was that this was unknowable, because we were in terra incognita. White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey broke ranks by estimating the total cost at $100 billion. Shortly thereafter he was dismissed, while Administration hawks claimed that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction from its oil revenues and unblocked international accounts.

Post-victory it is almost equally hard to get any cost estimates out of the Pentagon. As a result of strong Congressional pressure, an estimate for purely military costs of over $60 billion for the first year has surfaced, including the cost of replacing and maintaining equipment. Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq, is estimating reconstruction costs of “up to $100 billion”. This looks low to many outside observers, who estimate reconstruction costs at $300-600 billion or higher. Oil revenues will not even pay for current government operations, particularly if sabotage of oil pipelines and other production facilities continues.

Before the bombing of the UN building in Baghdad, US officials were talking about the importance of burden sharing and the need to recruit more peacekeepers and bill payers from the international community. But a few days ago the US Administration dropped the idea of a UN resolution which might have enticed others into the "coalition of the willing" because the price would have been a dilution of US military and civilian control. The Security Council resolution which was approved last week "welcomed" the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council but did not "endorse" it or recognize it as a legitimate voice of the Iraqi people. The Administration apparently also rejected language that would have given the French and Russians, among others, more to say about who would get contracts for rebuilding Iraq’s the infrastructure. Thus it is most unlikely that the donors' conference the US Administration has called for October will produce much real new money.

Since the bombing of the UN building in Baghdad, the US Administration has gone back to the UN, looking for a new Security Council resolution that would attract others to supply troops. But, given US insistence that all peacekeepers serve under US command, this is unlikely to bring India, France or other major contributors around. Also, Rumsfeld's insistence that the size of the force is right would lead to the conclusion that new contingents would substitute for, not add to, the US force.

Another suggestion that has arisen since the UN bombing is that the Iraqi Governing Council step up and take a greater public role in governance. Ambassador Bremer is said to have urged members to step out of the shadows the day after the bombing, but so far most of them have resisted, arguing that as US appointees they lack authority and legitimacy. They also lack the ability to overcome the insecurity that agitates Iraqis of all stripes.

The question then remains as to who will foot the bill, not only for reconstruction but also for ongoing government operations. USAID Administrator Natsios used the dreaded M-word during a speech at a World Economic Forum meeting in June, speaking of a new Marshall Plan and an enormous US commitment, but to date there is no indication of a new budget request along these lines. In fact, Administration spokesmen continue to say that the US taxpayer will be the source of last resort for funding, and the Coalition Provisional Authority operating budget for 2003 is already in deficit, meaning that we are not sure where the money will come from, for example, to pay several hundred thousand demobilized soldiers, or the police, or the garbage collectors who have at last begun to work again in Baghdad. One suggestion is that the CPA, or the Iraqi interim authority borrow against future oil revenues to raise money for reconstruction and current operations, but this is bound to raise violent objections from Iraqis as well as Iraq's current creditors, such as France and Russia. Such mortgaging for the future would have been an exercise in taxation without representation that would have shocked King George III.

As the Administration and its neo-conservative allies in the think-tank community prepared public opinion for war in Iraq, the precedent of nation building in Germany and Japan after World War II was often cited. Of course fragile Iraq looked much more like post-Tito Yugoslavia than homogeneous Japan or Germany. But what was also lost sight of was that the US Administration planned for three years before deploying US military government in 1945, and maintained nation building for seven years thereafter. Each soldier assigned occupation duty had a handbook telling him how to handle situations, and our commitment to stay the course was widely believed.

In contrast, the office set up by the Pentagon in January 2003 to administer post-Saddam Iraq, the Office of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction under retired LTGEN Jay Garner, had less than three months to prepare and arrived on the ground in April with no real plan and hardly any capability to act. Within weeks, Garner and his crew were superseded by Paul Bremer, a former State Department officer and Kissinger protege and a new team, but during the first few critical weeks the Garner operation seemed clueless. This opened a credibility gap that has been difficult to close. The August 8 White House report on the successes of the first hundred days since the conclusion of major combat operations did little to close that gap. The New York Times was perhaps too harsh in dismissing the report as “White House Fantasies on Iraq” in a lead editorial, but indeed the Iraq painted in the White House report resembled a campaign document more than a realistic appraisal designed to win the support of the American people for further sacrifices ahead.

Let me be clear about where I stand. Although I marched against the war in Iraq, I was not against using force to topple Saddam. I was sceptical about selectively released intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda, but I have had plenty of experience in the past with hyped intelligence. For decades, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA had an institutional bias to believe the worst about Soviet military capabilities, and their reports encouraged Congress to appropriate more for new generations of American weapons. As a sometime analyst of intelligence myself, I usually erred on the side of exaggerating a threat, because the consequences of tilting the other way were too serious. I believed that Brezhnev might invade Poland to stop Solidarity, though the evidence was thin. So, I think we are overly fixated on the WMD issue.

I opposed invading Iraq because I did not believe we were really prepared to stay the course after victory. I believed, and still believe, that the Administration's unwillingness to wait a few weeks or months for UN Security Council support to evolve meant that the United States was taking on a burden it was incapable of bearing. I think potential Presidential candidate Wesley Clark, who commanded US Forces in Europe during the Bosnia and Kosovo operations, is right when he said that the US decision to go it alone in Iraq was the most serious strategic mistake the US has made in recent years.

My daughter, who has recently returned from a tour as Boston Globe correspondent in Baghdad, takes a more optimistic view of the situation. She believes that the story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has not yet been written. After having spent time watching people like the late Sergio de Mello and others work in Iraq, and after having met many victims of the Saddam regime, she believes that ultimately the good will balance out the bad in Iraq. She certainly respects those who are trying, and so do I. We owe it to them not to cut and run, because if the United States was to leave a vacuum in Iraq to be filled by al Qaeda and Islamic militants, it will have violated the Hippocratic oath of foreign policy - first of all, do no harm.

The US and the UK are at a crossroads now, as they attempt to define the road ahead. Some, such as neoconservative guru Richard Perle, favor turning the problem over to the Iraqis and getting out. So far, few Iraqis have volunteered for the role of scapegoat. The Bush Administration is seriously proposing a larger role for the UN, but it seems unlikely that even if the Security Council endorses a larger role for the organization that this will provide the key to increased security or reconstruction aid that some US politicians believe. So the bottom line is that the Bush Administration needs to accept that it must bear the major part of the burden of the occupation, both in lives and money. It is time for the President to make this clear to the US Congress and people.

Regardless of what unfolds in Iraq, the United States needs to get its act together on nation-building. Whether one believes in humanitarian intervention, and thus in the need to rebuild the failed state of Liberia, or the role of the benign hegemon, which could lead to regime change in North Korea or Iran, we need to know what to do with the car when we catch it. There is no shortage of "lessons learned" from previous experience, or of people who have learned them, often the hard way.

To give one concrete example, public order inevitably breaks down when states fail or regimes are changed, and the military - ours or others - are not trained or equipped to carry out a police function. As military commanders point out, we can shoot looters but we can't arrest them and try them. In Bosnia, for example, we saw the need for a robust paramilitary police force, and called on Italy, Spain and France to provide units of their gendarmerie - Italian Carabineri, Spanish Guardia Civil and the like. US think -tanks have suggested that the EU form a rapid reaction police force, made up of such paramilitary units, rather than duplicating NATO plans for a rapid reaction combat force.

This is but one example of elements of a nation-building doctrine which the US should begin urgently to develop. The key element in such a doctrine must be that we extend the nation's attention span, and prepare our public for the fact that it takes much longer to secure the peace than to win a war.

George Marshall, no fan of the rosy scenario, would approve of this.

Robert Barry, a retired US foreign service officer and Ambassador, had experience in nation-building as head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina and as coordinator of US assistance to Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism.

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