Castles in the sky: the failure to rebuild Afghanistan

The United States is very good at making war. It is awful at state building. No matter how often Washington has tried over the years to pour its human and material resources into what is currently and euphemistically termed "reconstruction and stabilization," it has fallen short at least as often as it succeeds. In places where it has succeeded — in Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea — the recipient country put as much, if not more, effort into rebuilding its polity and economy as did the United States. Where Washington has failed — the Philippines, Haiti (several times), Somalia, and now Afghanistan — the country in question simply was on the take.

The United States has defeated al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It is hammering the Taliban. But, as the recently issued Senate Foreign Relations Committee report has made abundantly clear, it has utterly failed to construct a viable political and economic structure that can be expected to outlast the departure of most U.S. forces from that country in 2014. It has not been for want of trying: Washington has poured some $19 billion into Afghanistan in the past decade. Rather, it is due to policy-makers’ indifference to the implementation of their plans, lack of timing, and inability to deploy sufficient numbers of civilians to that war-torn country. Equally, it is due to the nature of the country itself: a collection of fiercely independent tribes and ethnic groups that, as they have for centuries, are often at war with one another when not united in warring with outsiders. 

As I point out in my recently published A Vulcan’s Tale, Washington missed the boat when it came to Afghan reconstruction. From 2002 to 2004, Afghanistan was quiet, and the Taliban (and al Qaeda) had gone into hiding. The country was suffused with optimism; the U.S. was popular. That was the time to move significant resources, and civilian personnel, into the country — to forestall reliance on the poppy crop, to build up small business, to train the military and police. Instead, Afghanistan became yesterday’s news as Iraq moved to the forefront of policymakers’ concerns, while the Office of Management and Budget stubbornly ignored pleas from the State Department and the USAID for more resources. At the same time, few civilians volunteered to serve in the country, and contractors took the lead in "reconstruction" — and in reaping the profits thereof. Add to that the United States’ overreaction to that indifference that resulted in a flood of money into Afghanistan beginning in the latter part of the past decade, as well as a cultural tone-deafness that persists to this day, and it should come as no surprise that the majority of Afghans have not benefited from U.S. largesse.

The State Department has, as might be expected, issued a rebuttal to the Senate report. But the statistics it cites regarding economic growth mask the fact that Afghan governance is riddled with corruption, while its economy (excluding revenues from narcotics crops) is not much more than $8 billion, despite all the funds that have poured into it since 2002. Civilians still are chary about serving in Afghanistan — the civilian surge of about 1100 personnel not only is dwarfed by the U.S. military presence, but is also almost invisible in a country the size of Texas with a population of some 30 million.

There remains a strong case for providing training assistance to Afghanistan’s security forces, though it is nothing short of amazing that, until three or four years ago, virtually nothing was done to provide trainees with even a modicum of literacy proficiency. Likewise, there is a case for a significantly reduced but still potent military presence to ensure that the Taliban, and, in particular, al Qaeda, cannot return to the pre-September 11 status quo ante. But it makes no sense for the United States to pour billions into reconstruction assistance when the current effort to reform USAID is in its infant stages, when civilians can still refuse to serve in Afghanistan, and when contractors will continue to dominate U.S. assistance activities. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the United States’ allies, many of whom have had far more success in implementing state-building projects, sit on their hands and withhold their money. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was right to castigate the United States’ NATO allies for their blithe refusal to pull their weight in Afghanistan and, for that matter, Libya. At a minimum, the Europeans and other putative members of the coalition in Afghanistan should take the lead in providing the human and material resources for the non-military aspects of that country’s reconstruction. It is the least that they can do — and they happen to be better at the job than we are, or are likely to be for some time.