In announcing the escalation of the Afghanistan war last night, President Barack Obama made an interesting declaration. "Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended," he said. "Because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is playing the same tune. In testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said: "This approach is not open-ended 'nation-building.'"
The administration may excise the phrase "nation-building" from the talking points, but whether or not they choose to employ it, that's precisely what Afghanistan 3.0 involves.
Whether it's soldiers teaching better planting techniques to Afghan farmers, diplomats and aid consultants advising local leaders or provincial reconstruction teams building roads, bridges and schools, Afghanistan has become a major nation-building effort. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Congress has appropriated more than $39 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan since 2001. That figure is rapidly approaching the approximately $50 billion spent on rebuilding Iraq.
And the exit strategy -- building capable Afghan security institutions and transferring responsibility to them -- is, by definition, a nation-building project. And as long as the operating budget outstrips revenue, it looks like Afghanistan will remain a charity case.
In a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush outlined his vision of the U.S. military policy. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” he said. “ … what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not."
By the end of his presidency, Bush had embraced nation-building -- and even backed the creation of a "civilian reserve corps" that would be dedicated to rescuing failed states. During the election campaign, Obama outlined a goal for a 25,000-strong "civilian assistance corps" -- and faulted the Bush administration for failing to fully fund a nation-building cadre. That's a longer-term project, to be sure. But the effort to get around 1,000 civilian experts to Afghanistan has been extremely slow to get off the ground.
Note the administration: Some truth in advertising, please?
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
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