Over the past decade, the United States has become more deeply involved in nation building than at any point since the Marshall Plan. Iraq was the turning point. Confronted with the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the early occupation, the military rediscovered the principles of population-centric counterinsurgency, an approach that translated in practice to armed social work. But the military establishment overcompensated. As the Pentagon took on a greater share of diplomatic and development work, foreign policy became dangerously out of balance.
This approach had its successes. This notion of a better war probably saved the United States from outright defeat, and helped contain Iraq’s sectarian violence. But the dominant reading of the Iraq surge—that we somehow managed to “get it right” by applying enough resources and ingenuity to the problem—not only overlooks the larger question of whether we should have intervened in the first place, but also raises the question of whether we could be successful in the long term. This relentless focus on fixing two failed states also meant we were less prepared to handle another foreign policy crisis elsewhere on the globe: an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, a localized conflict in Central Asia that threatens to become a regional conflagration.
That was the fatal flaw in the whole enterprise. The nation-building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were too big to fail. Both involvements became so large and so costly that they edged out all other priorities in national security. The cost of keeping a large troop contingent in Afghanistan was the perfect case in point: The mountainous, landlocked country is at the end of a long and difficult supply route. It has no ports, abysmal infrastructure, and difficult neighbors. Factoring in the astronomical cost of transporting fuel, it currently costs around a million dollars a year to keep a single U.S. soldier stationed there.1 And that number doesn’t include the intangibles: U.S. officials expend countless hours negotiating complex overflight and supply deals with countries in the region to keep the hellishly complex supply lines open, sometimes cutting deals with very unsavory regimes. Yet they have to persist, because U.S. lives are at stake and because the commitment is so enormous.
This approach shares another flaw with many other imperial adventures: a sort of hubris, a belief we can remake the world in our image. This was the operating assumption behind “shock and awe,” the idea that regime change in Baghdad or Kabul would automatically create functioning democracies friendly to U.S. interests and inhospitable to global terrorists. Nation building is based on a similarly utopian idea: that development work and poverty alleviation in combination with military action can get at the underlying causes of political violence.
The nation builders were some of the best and the brightest: smart, soul-searching people who sought answers to why the United States was failing so miserably to secure the peace in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama administration was packed with true believers in this cause. The Center for a New American Security, the think tank that emerged as a feeder for the new administration’s national security team, was the intellectual home to a military reform movement that fully embraced the idea of using military force not just to defeat armies but also to transform societies.
That belief in the power of nation building ignores many of the broader lessons of the postcolonial era. Advocates of counterinsurgency point to many historical precedents for military success: the British campaigns in Kenya or in Malaya; the French victory over the Algerian National Liberation Front in the Battle of Algiers; the U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the early 1970s. But they often overlook the end result, the withdrawal of foreign forces and the establishment of independent states. And proponents of this idea often skirt around what should be the fundamental question: when to intervene, not how to intervene. If the United States props up a government that is illegitimate, kleptocratic or unwilling to reform, then no amount of U.S. blood or treasure can save the situation.
After nine years of war in Afghanistan, the United States is only belatedly coming to this realization. In July 2010, after replacing General Stanley McChrystal as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus issued new guidance to his troops that underscored how much of a problem corruption had become in Afghanistan. “Money is ammunition; don’t put it in the wrong hands,” the guidance states. “Pay close attention to the impact of your spending and understand who benefits from it. And remember, you are who you fund. How you spend is often more important than how much you spend.”2 Coming from the man who was an enthusiastic early convert to using cash as a weapon in Iraq, it was a remarkable admission that U.S. military assistance can, inadvertently, help fund an insurgency.
The manpower-intensive approach of the nation builders also shows how throwing more resources at the problem can undermine our long-term goals. The successful campaign to unseat the Taliban in 2001 was led by a relatively small force of Special Operations troops and CIA operatives whose low-key operating style and almost invisible presence ensured there would be little friction with ordinary Afghans. But even before the Obama administration announced a surge of forces to Afghanistan in late 2009, the mission there had quietly and steadily expanded. When the military establishes an airfield, it requires a “force protection” element to protect it and contractors to sustain it. That in turn requires a larger logistics tail to support all those boots on the ground. As the base grows, it requires more convoys to keep the place supplied. Dangerous supply lines must be avoided, which means more aircraft are needed to ferry people and equipment around. Before you know it, you are expanding the airfield. The military has a marvelous phrase used to describe this phenomenon: the “self-licking ice cream cone,” something that exists to serve itself.
The greater the military presence, the more potential for deadly encounters between the military and the population they are supposed to protect. Today, the presence of U.S. military convoys on the roads is a constant source of tension in Afghanistan. Even Kabul, once a hospitable base for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, has seen a backlash against foreign troops. A deadly July 2010 traffic incident involving State Department contractors led to violent street protests not far from the U.S. embassy in Kabul; every accidental shooting at a checkpoint or misdirected air strike further inflames the population and gives insurgents more fodder for propaganda. Supersizing our commitment only serves to undermine the mission in the long run.
And there’s the question about whether we really even understand the long-term mission. A rich literature exists about the European colonial experience, but Americans seem to lack the same gift for self-scrutiny. In his 1936 autobiographical short story, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell described his moment of awakening when he was serving as an imperial policeman in Burma. Standing in front of the elephant, rifle in hand, he realized the hollowness and futility of the European presence and of his role as an enforcer of colonial law. The colonial policeman seems to be the lead actor in the scene, but it’s all charade, an illusion of mastery and control. Larger local forces are at work.
Compared with the characters of Orwell’s Burmese days, we make pretty poor imperialists. As a nation, we’re relatively incurious about other cultures, terrible at acquiring foreign languages, and generally focused on our own shrill domestic politics. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves us poorly equipped for this kind of work.
Not for lack of trying. The embrace of cultural knowledge, the investment in development projects, and the experiments in fusing civilian and military functions were all worthwhile experiments. But at their core, they were a way to attack a single problem: the twenty-first-century insurgent armed with the improvised explosive device. To begin tackling that threat, the military needed to understand the communities the insurgents operated in, win friends among the local population, and make sure that development funds were spent wisely. Insurgent violence, however, is a symptom of underlying political conflict. All too often, we ignored the politics driving the insurgencies.
In Iraq, we unseated a regime that had favored the Sunni Arab minority. By upending the established political order, we helped kick off a latent sectarian conflict. In Afghanistan, the Kabul government’s conflict with the largely Pashtun Taliban drew us into a regional power struggle. Rather than aiming for a realistic end-state, our ambitions of creating functioning democracies and refashioning tribal societies meant we doubled down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And the more resources the U.S. government threw at the client state (or to use today’s euphemism, a “host nation”), the more it created the potential for waste and the growth of kleptocracy. It created a corrosive aid dependency that in the long run can undermine the legitimacy of the government the United States was trying to prop up.
Afghanistan is the textbook example of a country that has become a charity case. For fiscal year 2010, Congress appropriated $6.6 billion for the Afghan Security Forces Fund—money to train, equip, and sustain the operations of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and other security agencies. Afghanistan’s total annual budget revenue, according to the CIA World Factbook, is $890 million. Not surprisingly, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted in December 2009 that Afghanistan did not expect to be able to sustain its own security forces for another fifteen to twenty years. Not being able to sustain its own forces means the Afghan government may in a few short years be faced with a large pool of unemployed men with guns. And all the money we pour into training and advising those men could have unintended—and possibly quite violent—consequences.
Despite those flaws, the armed humanitarians were motivated by a desire to do the right thing. Rebuilding Iraq, for instance, was better than invading and walking away. But while acknowledging the flaws, it’s absolutely essential that we do not discard lessons acquired at such extraordinary cost in blood and treasure. We need to be able to do these kinds of things but do them intelligently, and well. And in the coming years, we may also have to do them on a much more modest scale. Scaling back may actually improve outcomes.
In July 1972, Colonel Edward Chamberlain, the senior advisor for the Forty-fourth Special Tactical Zone, Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, wrote a confidential debriefing report. The conventional U.S. involvement in South Vietnam was winding down, and U.S. combat troops were being withdrawn. Chamberlain sketched out some of the main lessons he had drawn from the advisory mission. His advice was prescient:
In any future involvements, we must never allow ourselves to become so emotionally involved that we lose our freedom of action. In short, we must be able to quickly extricate ourselves the minute it becomes apparent that the government we are assisting either cannot or will not institute the reforms or actions we deem essential to success. This is of course a political decision but the Army has an important role to play by insuring that we do not oversubscribe ourselves by requesting too much manpower or material for our client … This is the hardest thing of all to practice, because caught up in the enthusiasm and challenges posed by such a conflict, most Army officers at every level are going to be aggressive and determined to succeed regardless of cost. Therefore, any officer or commander who advocates less than an all-out effort is quickly going to be in trouble with his peers, his bosses, and his subordinates, unless we make it perfectly clear from the outset that involvement is limited and will stay limited regardless of success or failure. Easy to say, virtually impossible to practice. Yet somehow we must. There will be another Vietnam whether we like it or not, and the factors which insured our involvement here, even though currently disputed, will arise again and continue to arise so long as we are a global power.
Less is more in nation building, Chamberlain is saying. Involvements must be limited, because the more resources you throw at the problem, the less likely the nation you are assisting will ever be self-sufficient. If a government relies completely on outside assistance, it will be incapable of defending itself when the United States eventually turns off the money taps.
In the future, modest commitments may be the only available course of action. Diminishing budgets, rising deficits, and economic pressure may force a much-needed correction, and compel policymakers to try to do more with less resources. There will be new Afghanistans, and new Iraqs. But committing fifty billion dollars and one hundred thousand troops to rebuilding another country seems unthinkable. In Haiti, after the earthquake in January 2010, the U.S. military staged a rapid and astonishing drawdown, avoiding the temptations of “mission creep.” At the beginning of February 2010, around twenty thousand U.S. troops were on the ground or in the waters just off Haiti. By June 1, 2010, that presence had been reduced to a liaison office of about eight uniformed personnel. That was an example of getting it right. The U.S. military was the only organization that was equipped to respond to a disaster of that scale. But it didn’t end up owning the problem. Rebuilding Haiti would be a task for the international community, aid agencies, the private sector, and Haitians themselves.
That less-is-more approach is key to restoring balance within the military. Critics of the “cult of counterinsurgency” have pointed out that a focus on nation building neglects the basics of defense, by creating a military primarily trained and equipped to staff occupations, not fight and win wars. The United States needs a Navy that maintains a global presence to protect trade, commerce, and shipping; an Air Force that protects U.S. airspace and can project power anywhere in the world; an Army and Marine Corps that can win decisively on land; and real alliances—not “coalitions of the billing”—to join the United States in future contingencies. One can look to the Israeli experience in Lebanon in its 2006 war against Hezbollah for a lesson in the dangers of neglecting conventional military might. After years of constabulary duty in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military’s conventional warfighting skills were rusty, and Israeli military planners were not prepared for high-intensity conflict against an adversary armed with some of the latest anti-armor weapons.
Even as counterinsurgency came into fashion, some generals were beginning to fret about the military’s readiness for high-end warfare. In January 2007, General William Wallace, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command, aired concerns about the Army’s readiness for high-end warfare, suggesting that some combat skills may have atrophied because of the overemphasis on counterinsurgency. As an example, Wallace noted that a significant number of captains in an advanced armor course—10 to 15 percent—had never fired a tank gun. “It’s not a huge number,” he said, “but it’s enough to cause us to think about whether there are some things institutionally we ought to do to maintain a hedge against the potential for high-intensity, combined-arms operations.”
A renewed focus on conventional military power does not, however, mean discarding the costly lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever strategic threats the United States might face in the future, the military will still be involved in internal wars, humanitarian crises, and stability operations. Training and equipping for those missions will continue to be an important task for the military, but it must not be the primary goal.
Building effective states can take decades, and requires a class of people who are committed to it. It’s not a task that can be accomplished primarily by the military. But as experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, civilian agencies simply lack the personnel—and the expeditionary capability—to handle nation building in the world’s most violent neighborhoods.
This is more than an issue of manpower and money. Again, it’s a question of balance. The military has been asked to do double duty as armed humanitarians. We need to begin a national conversation about returning this mission to its rightful place within the civilian agencies of government. If this is going to be a long-term mission for the U.S. government, it needs to be on an affordable scale, because the American public has limited patience for supporting expensive military operations involving the deployment of tens or hundreds of thousands of troops.
But we are still a long way from developing a real cadre of people who can handle this job. With the Marshall Plan, the State Department had the lead, but the contemporary U.S. diplomatic corps lacks the manpower—and the organizational culture—for this new era of armed development work. If we hope to succeed at this mission, the government needs to have real nation builders on call with real-world skills, not an army of contractors. And Congress needs to fund them.
In practice, that means fully funding a civilian nation-building reserve, not just creating a standby group of federal bureaucrats who provide the civilian window-dressing for military operations. It would give Americans outside of government the chance to volunteer for humanitarian relief missions or stability operations not as contractors, but as temporary government hires, available on short notice to go overseas. At the end of his term, George W. Bush requested $248.6 million to begin funding a reserve (i.e., non-government civilian) component of the Civilian Response Corps for fiscal year 2009, but that request was not funded by Congress. And that was tragically shortsighted: While that amount is significant, it is only a fraction of what the U.S. taxpayer spends each year on contractors to support nation-building missions. It would cost less than buying a pair of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
During the 2008 election, in fact, the Obama-Biden campaign expanded upon Bush’s concept of a civilian nation-building reserve, calling for the creation of a twenty-five-thousand-strong Civilian Assistance Corps, something described in a campaign fact sheet as a “corps of civilian volunteers with special skill sets (doctors, lawyers, engineers, city planners, agriculture specialists, police, etc.) … organized to provide each federal agency with a pool of volunteer experts willing to deploy in times of need at home and abroad.” The document suggests how deeply the ideas of nation building had taken hold in Washington, but it also showed how efforts to create a proper civilian nation-building force have fallen short in practice. Within the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), efforts to stand up the Civilian Response Corps with an active, standby and reserve component have moved ahead only haltingly. Two years after Bush called for the creation of a civilian reserve in early 2007, the active (i.e., full-time) component of the corps had only ten full-time employees. As of mid-2009, some money was supposed to be available to begin hiring the first of around 250 federal employees who would help staff the active component of the Civilian Response Corps more fully, and the Foreign Service Institute was preparing a four-week-long training curriculum for standby (federal reserve) members of the CRC. Funding for the real civilian reserve pool—which would draw on social workers, police officers, lawyers, doctors and engineers—had not materialized.
Not surprisingly, institutional resistance to the nation-building mission is strong. Within some segments of the Foreign Service, hope persisted that the business of nation building and the unending cycle of war-zone assignment would go away once Bush left office. They viewed the war in Iraq as a one-time foreign policy adventure, an experiment that would not be repeated. The Iraq mission had required the State Department to staff the most massive embassy in the world and establish outposts throughout Iraq’s provinces. Leaving Iraq might obviate the need for a permanent cadre of professional nation builders. After all, Barack Obama, the victor in the 2008 election, campaigned on a promise to end the war there.
At Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first “town hall” meeting with State Department employees on February 4, 2009, Steve Kashkett, who represented the American Foreign Service Association, the Foreign Service’s union, asked if diplomats could expect a return to the status quo ante. “As you know, over the past six years, thousands of our colleagues have volunteered to serve in the two war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan—Iraq in particular, where we’ve created the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history,” he said. “But the cost of doing this has been to take people away from all of our other diplomatic missions around the world, which have been left understaffed and with staffing gaps.”
Kashkett then asked, “Have you had any discussions yet about reducing the size of our diplomatic mission in Iraq down to that of a normal diplomatic mission?” Clinton evaded giving a direct answer. But the diplomats who hoped for a drawdown should have given the Obama campaign platform a closer read. The new Democratic administration embraced the nation-building mission as well, and there would be no return to “normal” diplomatic affairs. This mission is not going away for the foreseeable future.
For the United States to succeed at this, however, we need more than just manpower. We need a different mindset. For starters, we need a serious rethink of diplomatic security, which has been the Achilles’ heel of the nation-building mission. The world can be a dangerous place, and U.S. embassies and diplomatic installations are a terrorist target. But the relentless focus on protecting U.S. diplomats and officials had created a situation that seemed to make diplomacy and development work impossible. Restoring some balance to the mission means there must be some acceptance of risk.
Contracted security has been a disaster both in terms of oversight and effectiveness. In February 2009, in a belated attempt at reform, the State Department began a recruiting drive to find people to supervise their protective details in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other dangerous places. The idea was to boost oversight of its contracted guard force, whose deployment had proven a public-relations disaster for the U.S. government and angered so many Iraqis and Afghans. As part of the plan, the department created a new position, Security Protective Specialists, or SPSs, who would serve on renewable one-year contracts with the Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. This crop of new hires would augment its fifteen-hundred-strong force of Diplomatic Security agents, who had been stretched thin by the requirements for post-9/11 security and the push for more muddy-boots diplomacy. The SPSs were supposed to provide an important new layer of accountability. Security Protective Specialists would essentially work as shift supervisors for contract security guards. The new position was deliberately designed to lure private security contractors away from firms like DynCorp, Blackwater, and Triple Canopy.
So how many stepped forward for the job? According to government auditors, exactly four. Diplomatic Security officials reported having difficulty filling the positions because they compete with private security contractors for new hires and, at the end of September 2009, only ten positions had been filled. The proposed base pay for a Security Protective Specialist was $52,221 per year. Even when factoring in overseas allowances and danger pay, that salary would be a pittance compared to the six-figure pay a U.S. operator for a private firm would expect to earn working on contract for the State Department. Outsourcing had once again confounded oversight.
But rather than focusing on improved oversight of its contracted guard force, the U.S. government needs to part with the Fortress America mindset. The United States does require a cadre of dedicated nation builders who are prepared to work in dangerous and difficult places, and they need the training and the mind-set to be responsible for their own security. The military has taken hesitant first steps toward shedding the “force protection” mind-set that once kept troops sequestered inside large forward-operating bases, commuting to the war. The State Department needs to shift its focus from staffing giant fortified compounds in conflict zones. Paying lip service to being “population centric” is no substitute for living outside the wire, sharing the same risks and standards of living as the populations we are supposed to defend. When diplomatic personnel are sequestered inside costly fortresses, they can’t succeed at the tasks of traditional diplomacy or conflict prevention. They need to be trained, and prepared, to work in dangerous places without the military or an army of hired guns.
We are still a long way from getting the scale and the balance right in nation building. The rise of the armed humanitarians was in part a rebellion by rank-and-file members of the government and the military who felt the institutions they belonged to were ill equipped for the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The failures of postwar planning spurred a grassroots movement to reform the military and the national security establishment from within, a phenomenon enabled by the tools of social networking and online communication. Crucially, this movement had the backing of senior leaders such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who believed that the Defense Department needed to shift in a “different strategic direction,” toward fighting and winning irregular war. His decision to stay on in the Obama administration helped ensure that those concepts would take root within the national-security establishment.
Iraq and Afghanistan offered the United States a laboratory for something new and remarkable: a sort of enlightened militarism. But although the U.S. military has in some respects begun to master “soft power,” this approach is still the wrong instrument for nation building. Development and diplomatic agencies are the proper tools for nation building, but so long as agencies like USAID and the Foreign Service lack the personnel or the in-house expertise to run ambitious development programs, and the ability to work independently in conflict zones, much of the actual work will be outsourced to the Beltway bandits, private-sector and not-for-profit aid contractors. In the end, diplomacy and development is supposed to be a job for public servants, not for the private sector, much as national defense is the job of the uniformed military, not contractors.
When nation building becomes an attractive line of business for contractors, it’s more likely to become a permanent feature of foreign policy, thanks to the revolving door between government service and private-sector contracting. Companies like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, which made their names building ships and fighter aircraft, opened business lines dedicated to supporting “soft power” missions around the globe, such as training foreign security forces and logistics and technical support. Thomas Barnett, the Pentagon theorist who was one of the earliest people to recognize this shift, capitalized on the move himself: He left government and joined a corporate and government consulting firm called Enterra Solutions, which offered “strategic advisory services” like “nation-state building” and “development-in-a-box.”
One tempting solution seems to be “insourcing”—taking jobs that have been contracted out to the private sector and returning them to their “rightful place” in the federal bureaucracy. After a two-decade experiment in outsourcing, a reassertion of essential government functions would resolve some problems of accountability. But the idea that we will become more effective nation builders by creating more jobs within dysfunctional, risk-averse bureaucracies is magical thinking, and the idea that the complex problems of Afghanistan can be solved by applying a bureaucratic fix—“harmonizing the interagency,” “breaking down stovepipes,” “bridging the civil-military divide,” and so on—is an illusion. And it ignores the fact that nation-building missions such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so large, and so unwieldy, that they begin to undermine our intentions.
As of this writing, several initiatives are under way to better reorganize and realign the agencies of defense, diplomacy, and development for the tasks of nation building. In November 2009, Stuart Bowen, the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, floated a detailed proposal for a “U.S. Office for Contingency Operations” that would be charged with leading the federal government’s armed nation-building efforts. The concept would be to create a hybrid civil-military organization within the federal government that reports to both the State Department and the Pentagon. Bowen likened it to a sort of “international FEMA” that would create a “permanent, fully accountable, empowered interagency management office” with “full responsibility for managing the relief and reconstruction component” of future military contingencies.3 Such proposals, while well-intentioned, are merely bureaucratic fine-tuning. They ignore the real cost and consequences of these kinds of interventions.
The new doctrine of armed humanitarianism, and the reorganization of government around the tasks of nation building, creates more, not less, temptation to intervene in failed states. If we take at face value the assertion by Defense Secretary Gates—that the best approach is the “indirect” one of building the institutions of partner governments and their security forces—the question becomes this: How do we avoid costly, ultimately self-defeating commitments?
Over the past decade, and with little fanfare, we have managed do this kind of mission without a massive U.S. military presence. In the Philippines, for example, U.S. Special Operations forces have been running a low-key advisory mission since 2002. Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines has only around six hundred personnel, and they are limited to training missions and Civil Affairs projects. It’s the traditional foreign internal defense approach: The military of the Philippines has to take the initiative, with behind-the-scenes support from U.S. advisors. It demonstrates that there are ways to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign without a large foreign force and in a way that is mindful of nationalist sensitivities. In Pakistan, we are waging a covert war using drones and a handful of advisors to take on al-Qaeda and its allies. The heavy presence of foreign troops and advisors might only destabilize the situation, which is something to be avoided in a country armed with nuclear weapons.
In El Salvador, veterans of the Vietnam conflict made a similarly wise effort to avoid a massive U.S. presence that would ultimately have undermined the self-reliance of the local government. The same has been true for Georgia, which has also been an important recipient of U.S. military assistance and training since 2002. U.S. military assistance to Georgia had its downside: It gave Georgia’s government overconfidence about its military capabilities, its ability to take back the secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by force, and the U.S. willingness to intervene on its behalf during its brief, ruinous war with Russia in 2008. But U.S. assistance also helped build functioning security institutions, reinforced the rule of law, and helped move Georgia out from the bottom of the transparency index. While Georgia suffered a serious defeat in 2008, it has better prospects in the longer term for becoming a functioning market economy and democracy than many of its neighbors.
Reorganizing government around the ambitious goals of “global counterinsurgency” or “stability operations” currently demands a massive, quasi-colonial bureaucracy, a large constabulary army, and long-term occupation of failed states. As President Obama weighed a troop increase in Afghanistan, an anonymous Pentagon official complained to Slate: “Counterinsurgency has become synonymous with nation building … We have to change that.”4 How, exactly, can that be achieved? It would be ludicrous to believe that the United States can simply step away, avoid nation building altogether, and somehow free ourselves from foreign entanglements. The U.S. military maintains a global force that protects global shipping lanes, guards strategic airspace, and enables free trade. And in limited instances, it can provide that crucial margin of security that allows aid and development to flourish.
But the real mission of living and working with populations that are vulnerable to extremists requires a degree of cultural sophistication that we are not even close to attaining. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, the United States began a crash effort to fund engineering and science. If the main existential threat to the United States does come from militant extremism in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia, then we need a decades-long investment in real social science research, language studies, and higher education, not cheap solutions delivered by contractors. Long term, continuing the kinds of nation-building projects we are involved in today without contractors would require a massive realignment of our foreign policy objectives, or a reinstatement of the draft.
The real locus of U.S. ingenuity is in places like Silicon Valley and New York, not Washington. Mobilizing capital to invest in developing countries is far superior to exporting aid workers with guns. Some of the most innovative thinkers in aid and development are now broadly skeptical of the ability of state institutions and multilateral organizations to foster effective development. As Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, put it: “A dollar in private investment is equal to twenty dollars of aid.”5 Rebuilding broken states is not purely a task for the military or for government consultants.
The American public has, in the end, been divorced from the reality of nation building. While boots were on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans were at the mall. When a small fraction of the population was engaged in the bloody business of repairing war-torn, failed states, the class of nation builders had become estranged from the American people, widening the divide between civilian and military. We have failed to have a national conversation about the real cost of this commitment, the limits of what nation building can and cannot achieve, and what place nation building plays within the larger national interest.