Taking Exception: Nation-Building Office Is No Solution

By Justin Logan and Christopher Preble

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senator Richard Lugar argue that "some of the greatest threats to our national security" come from the "brittle institutions and failing economies of weak and poorly governed states." As a result, they argue, the creation of a nation-building office within the State Department is "essential for our national security." This proposal is based on a fundamental misreading of the predicament we face today, and threatens to compound our recent strategic errors.

The experience in Iraq has apparently taught us little. Rice and Lugar propose populating the nation-building office with 250 full-time staffers, who would then draw on a reserve corps of perhaps some 2,000 federal employees, plus another 500-person cadre of think-tankers and civilians.

But the Bush administration has been unable to recruit even a fraction of that number of people from the ranks of those already on the government payroll. As the Post reported in February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was struggling to find six—of 100,000 employees—who wanted to work in Iraq. In May, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez sent an "all hands on deck" email to his entire department, seeking volunteers for deployment to Iraq to work in a PRT. 40 of Commerce's 39,000 employees replied to the email, but the agency refused to reveal how many of them were "yesses." Neither the American public nor the U.S. civil service are committed to supporting foreign policies like those Lugar and Rice have had a hand in crafting.

In addition, the authors' assertion that some of the greatest threats to our national security emerge from failed states is indeed an article of faith in the foreign policy community. It's also wrong. Afghanistan in the late 1990s was both a failed state and a threat, but most failed states are not threats. Beyond the Afghanistan example, the advocates for focusing on failed states are hard-pressed to point to any additional cases in which failed states have actually posed threats to America. "Failedness" is a poor measure of threat.

To the extent that a failed state is threatening, addressing the "failure" does little to attack the danger. To have attacked the threat that resided in Afghanistan would have had basically no effect on the health of the Afghan state. Killing Osama bin Laden and his comrades in 1999 or 2000 would have substantially reduced the threat of an attack on the scale of 9/11; sending in American or international development people would have done nothing. Attacking a threat rarely involves paving roads or establishing new judicial standards.

It is strategic overreach, not the lack of a nation-building office, that has sapped our diplomatic corps and military. But if Secretary Rice and Senator Lugar are un—to reconsider American interventionism, the office they propose is ill-suited to the task they set out for it. The gulf between the office's proposed resources and its mission is enormous. Their proposal is akin to taping a band-aid across a severed limb.

If we really were serious about fixing failed states, we would need to massively expand not just the foreign service, but also U.S. ground forces, because, while most nation-building missions fail, the few successes have required massive numbers of troops —to stay in country for years. We even have a pretty good rule of thumb for how many troops are needed. In 2004, the Pentagon examined the historical experience with post-conflict operations from Roman times to the present. Their conclusion? That American goals "may well demand 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants...working for five to eight years." In Haiti, that would mean 160,000 troops. In Iraq, it would have meant 500,000 troops. The counterinsurgency manual overseen by Gen. David Petraeus agrees: "Most density recommendations fall within a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 residents in an [area of operations]."

In short, the idea that state failure is threatening is false, the number of people proposed to staff the office would be inadequate, and if we wanted, despite the evidence, to focus on failed states anyway, we would need more diplomats and more soldiers, and they'd need to be prepared for very long-term deployments. What's decidedly unhelpful is pretending that $50 million and a small office at the State Department could adequately take on this Herculean, unnecessary task.

Justin Logan is associate director and Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.