Tell me something I don’t know about pre-war planning

In the Financial Times, Stephanie Kirchgaessner report on a finding that will not surprise loyal readers of danieldrezner.com:

The US government had ?no comprehensive policy or regulatory guidelines? in place for staffing the management of postwar Iraq, according to the top government watchdog overseeing the country?s reconstruction. The lack of planning had plagued reconstruction since the US-led invasion, and been exacerbated by a ?general lack of co-ordination? between US government agencies charged with the rebuilding of Iraq, said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, in a report released on Sunday. His 110-page quarterly report, delivered to Congress at the weekend, has underscored how a ?reconstruction gap? is emerging that threatens to leave many projects planned by the US on the drawing board…. While the most successful post-conflict reconstruction effort in US history ? the reconstruction of Japan and Germany following the second world war ? began being planned in the months after the US entered the war, Mr Bowen found that ?systematic planning? for the post-hostilities period in Iraq was ?insufficient in both scope and implementation?.

Here’s a link to Bowen’s actual report. [C’mon, you’re not hiding behind the incompetence dodge, are you?–ed.] Rosenfeld and Yglesias make some provocative points but in the end are unpersuasive. As Fareed Zakaria points out in today’s NYT Book Review in his review of George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate:

Packer recounts the prewar discussions in the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project,” which produced an enormous document outlining the political challenges in governing Iraq. He describes Drew Erdmann’s memo, written for Colin Powell, analyzing previous postwar reconstructions in the 20th century. Erdmann’s conclusion was that success depended on two factors, establishing security and having international support. These internal documents were mirrored by several important think-tank studies that all made similar points, specifically on the need for large-scale forces to maintain security. One would think that this Hobbesian message – that order is the first requisite of civilization – would appeal to conservatives. In fact all of this careful planning and thinking was ignored or dismissed. Part of the problem was the brutal and debilitating struggle between the State Department and the Defense Department, producing an utterly dysfunctional policy process. The secretary of the Army, Thomas White, who was fired after the invasion, explained to Packer that with the Defense Department “the first issue was, we’ve got to control this thing – so everyone else was suspect.” The State Department was regarded as the enemy, so what chance was there of working with other countries? The larger problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (and probably Dick Cheney) doggedly believed nation-building was a bad idea, the Clinton administration has done too much of it, and the American military should stop doing it. Rumsfeld explained this view in a couple of speeches and op-ed articles that were short on facts and long on polemics. But how to square this outlook with invading Iraq? Assume away the need for nation-building. Again, White explains: “We had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation, and therefore reconstruction would be short-lived.” Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Larry Di Rita, went to Kuwait in April 2003 and told the American officials waiting there that the State Department had messed up Bosnia and Kosovo and that the Bush administration intended to hand over power to Iraqis and leave within three months. SO the Army’s original battle plan for 500,000 troops got whittled down to 160,000. If Gen. Tommy Franks “hadn’t offered some resistance, the number would have dropped well below 100,000,” Packer says…. Was all this inevitable? Did the United States take on something impossible? That seems to be the conventional wisdom today. If so, what to make of Afghanistan? That country is deeply divided. It has not had a functioning government in three decades, some would argue three centuries, and yet it is coming together under a progressive leader. Two million Afghan refugees have voted with their feet and returned to their country (unlike Iraq, where people are leaving every day). And the reasons? The United States allied itself with forces on the ground that could keep order. It handed over the political process to the international community, preventing any stigma of a neocolonial occupation (it was the United Nations that created the loya jirga, the national assembly, and produced Hamid Karzai). It partnered with NATO for much of the routine military work. In fact the Afghan National Army is being trained by the United States – and France. And it has accepted certain facts of Afghan life, like the power of its warlords, working slowly to change them. “The Iraq war was always winnable,” Packer writes, “it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is hard to forgive.”