April 30, 2007
Pentagon, State struggle to define nation-building roles
By Corine Hegland, National Journal
chegland@nationaljournal.com

For just $23.10, you can purchase a book from Amazon that will guide you through the invasion and occupation of a small country.
If countries such as Haiti, Liberia, or Sierra Leone, with about 5 million people and per capita incomes of approximately $500, were on your To Do list, The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building estimates that you would need 65,000 international troops, at an annual cost of $13 billion.

In addition, you should plan for 8,000 international police officers ($1.25 billion) and lots of advisers to help establish the rule of law, provide humanitarian services, assist in governance, stabilize the economy, teach democratization, and support development and infrastructure work, for a total cost of some $15.6 billion a year.

The chief author of the recently released book, former U.S. Ambassador James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand think tank, said he wrote it, in part, so that "nobody could ever again go up to Congress and say we could do this on the cheap."

"This," of course, is nation building, which candidate George W. Bush in 2000 said that U.S. troops should not do. They should only, he said, fight and win the nation's wars. But as president, Bush launched two of the biggest reconstruction and stabilization missions that the United States has undertaken since World War II.

As a sign of the shifting political winds, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was once as eager as any conservative to lob grenades at the striped pants in Foggy Bottom and at President Clinton's nation-building efforts in the Balkans, now says that America cannot avoid the job. Indeed, he is stumping for a bigger, better State Department to be ready for the nation building ahead.

Bush, meanwhile, in this year's State of the Union address, called on Congress to build a Civilian Reserve Corps within State, similar to the Pentagon's military Reserve, to "ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills."

Nation building is back. And it's bigger than ever.

The formulas in The Beginner's Guide, by the way, are based upon a country's population and gross domestic product, and on the costs of past nation-building exercises, many of them headed by Dobbins himself. He was the Clinton administration's special envoy to Somalia (year of intervention: 1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), and Kosovo (1999), and he was the Bush administration's first special envoy to Afghanistan.

If there is a maestro of nation building, he is it. And the maestro is, frankly, worried.

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