Establishing an International Contact Group and a Multi-National Authority.

The United States, working closely with Israel and Egypt, should establish a Multi-National Authority (MNA) to administer Gaza, which would report to an International Contact Group (ICG). These two entities would be created by an international charter drafted by the United States in consultation with Israel and Egypt and other key governments to give the MNA international legitimacy. ICG members should include, in addition to Israel and Egypt, the G-7, and some of the G-20 (e.g., Australia, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, and inviting the United Arab Emirates to join). The charter will include a consultation mechanism with the PA.

The Policing Force.

The United States would organize a multinational Policing Force, similar to what was set up for Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the counter-ISIS coalition. As described in more detail in section III B 4, the United States would contribute a small number of military personnel for command, logistics, intelligence, staff, and back-office functions, with other countries’ forces carrying out ‘presence patrols’ until a post-Hamas civil police and gendarmerie can be vetted and trained to take on policing responsibilities. Only if the United States commits personnel will other countries contribute personnel.

**Robert Silverman: When Nation Building Works:

Was Iraq’s democracy, fragile as it is, worth the destruction wrought and the lives lost? What I know is that there is no casualty-free, cost-free option for US foreign policy in the Middle East, including complete withdrawal. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky on war, you may not want the Middle East, but the Middle East wants you. That is not a justification for invading, occupying, and remaking Iraq. But it is a reason not to dismiss nation building as a policy option out of hand, without studying the recent US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

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More accurate terms would include “institution building” or “state building.” Nation building*** has become common usage, however, for the full range of security, political, social, and economic activities by one country in another, in the context of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction.  

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Each case is different. Some involve a military defeat and overthrow of the prior regime while others do not (an example of the latter is Colombia). Nevertheless, three conditions for success would seem to apply in all cases.

Commitment and resources of the intervening country

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Today, the US doesn’t dominate the world economy as it did after World War II and would need economic help from its European and other allies to sustain nation building. Europeans have supported the US-led efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo but less so elsewhere. Equally important, the American government, and by extension the American public, need to be committed to staying in the other country for the long period needed for successful nation building.  

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Also important are local leaders who will work with the intervening country in creating the new institutions and grow them organically in their societies.  

This practical view of nation building focuses on institutions and jettisons the “winning of hearts and minds”**** and ideological baggage associated with some prior efforts. We must not require that the intervened country become a liberal market democracy to begin nation building, even if we hope that is where it is eventually headed (as eventually happened in South Korea). We must be flexible in adapting the new national institutions to the society where the nation building must take root.

Finally, countries that have conducive conditions for nation building may still not be good candidates if they aren’t sufficiently central to the national interest of the intervening country and the intervention cannot be justified on international legal grounds such as UN Security Council resolutions. Otherwise, domestic discontent can erode the intervenor’s staying power. Nation building is risky policy, and a detailed assessment of the long-term prospects for success and strategic importance of the target country must be taken before jumping in.  

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A comparative look at Iraq and Afghanistan suggests a third condition for success: area experts needed to perform the assessments and carry out the nation building.

Iraq had conducive conditions for nation building: a long tradition of the centralized state, a relatively literate population, and national economic institutions. Its oil resources, large population, and strategic location make it important. Thanks to effective stewardship of its oil revenue for a ten-year period starting in the late 1940s, Iraq had a good school system and modern infrastructure that knitted the country together, despite ethnic differences. At its economic height in 1981, right before Saddam embarked on a series of disastrous wars, Iraq had a per capita income comparable to some southern Europe countries. Twenty years later, thanks to Saddam’s wars and resulting UN sanctions, Iraq was in ruins, with per capita income comparable to sub-Saharan Africa and a dictator still threatening to reinvade his neighbors. 

Afghanistan, by contrast, was never a good prospect for nation building. Its modernization efforts never went very far beyond the capital city of Kabul. Its central state always contended with regional power centers backed by their own militias, and its literacy rate, infrastructure, and per capita income were always among the world’s worst. Its sole strategic importance—denying a haven for Islamist terrorists—indicated a need for targeted military strikes and over-the-horizon monitoring, not nation building.

Nation building, just like other foreign policies, must be informed by a detailed understanding of the other country provided by area experts. This ingredient was lacking in the planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

US diplomats at the State Department, who had in their ranks the closest approximation to area experts in the US government, were kept out of the initial decision making on Iraq and Afghanistan by the Bush administration. Then, after the US had intervened in both Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, US diplomats were called upon to staff the occupations. Fortunately, we had a corps of Arab Middle East experts for Iraq but lacked a comparable bench for Afghanistan.

The US mainstream media promoted a view, which took hold in Washington, of Afghanistan as the “good” intervention because we were fighting al-Qaida; Iraq was the “bad” intervention because it was a war of choice imposed by neoconservative Republicans. Notice the focus was always on us, not the foreign country. Thus the Obama administration withdrew from Iraq (only to reinsert troops back in to help defeat ISIS, where they are still), while doubling down on nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, which ultimately failed. 

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In the short term, we should recognize the US experience with nation building is not over. Whether we like it or not, the US will be called on in the future to help stabilize and reconstruct post-conflict and failing states, perhaps in Haiti, Venezuela, Libya, or elsewhere. 

The next great test will be postwar Ukraine, and we should begin planning now. The Ukrainians will have to reimagine and reconstruct the country, ending the rule of the oligarchs and attacking the endemic corruption that defines the country. The US has invested billions to date, with many more billions needed for reconstruction (see Anders Åslund’s estimate); the Europeans must contribute their fair share. The Ukrainians will turn to the US and Western Europe. And that, in turn, requires the US government to have people with the necessary area expertise to ensure success.

***Nation-building is an oxymoron (PDF):

Four times since 1963, in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military has been sent to do what was literally impossible. A total of 64,969 American military personnel have died so far in these Quixotic misadventures. Adding to the tragedy of these failures is the sense of futility that the fundamental lesson has not been learned. Arguments continue about tactics in these wars, and debates go on about how success was possible if we had done this or that; if we had just sent in more troops, for example, or kept them there longer, or local corruption had been reduced, or there had been less restrictive rules of engagement (ROE). But the United States did not lose these wars because the tactics were wrong, though they were, but because in each case, the United States was attempting to do something impossible: build a nation.

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Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan are nations, and in both countries only a tiny handful of western-educated politicians claim otherwise, too often as a vehicle for pushing their personal agendas. Unfortunately, these citizen outliers are usually the only Iraqis and Afghans with whom US leaders ever come into contact, which can create a very erroneous sense of those countries.

***September 11 and the Debacle of ‘Nation-Building’ in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The American experiment in liberal democratic reconstruction dates back not to Vietnam in the mid-20th century but to the U.S. conquest of the Philippines in the last years of the 19th century. As in the case of Afghanistan, it was an afterthought following a brutal suppression of a nationalist movement, which in this case took the lives of an estimated 500,000 Filipinos.

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The U.S. succeeded in the liberal democratic reconstruction of the Philippines. But that success was predicated on two necessary conditions: total victory over the resistance and the cooptation and cooperation of credible local elites in the creation of the liberal democratic order.

The wholesale transplantation of formal political institutions began shortly after the conquest. American colonial authorities and Protestant missionaries served as instructors, and an indigenous upper class constituted a dutiful student body. By the time the country was granted formal independence in 1946, the Philippine political system was a mirror image of the American one, with a presidency balanced by an independent Congress and judiciary. A two-party system emerged in the next few years.

On the ground, however, reality belied democratic ideology. Formal democratic institutions became a convenient cloak for the continuing rule of feudal paternalism in the highly stratified agrarian society the Americans inherited from the Spanish empire.

Wealthy landowners, those whom the United States had detached from the national liberation struggle and formed into a ruling class, enthusiastically embraced electoral politics. But it was hardly a belief in representative government that turned the local elites into eager students. The reason they so easily adapted to the U.S. system of governance was that it allowed competition for power among themselves via elections at the same time that it united them as a ruling caste over the unorganized rural and urban lower classes.

****Hearts and Minds (Vietnam War):

Pacification is the more formal term for winning hearts and minds. 

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Komer attributed the ultimate failure of hearts and minds programs in South Vietnam to the bureaucratic culture of the United States in addition to the administrative and military shortcomings of the South Vietnamese government. A counter-insurgency strategy for Vietnam was proposed from the earliest days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, notably by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, but there was an “immense gap between policy and performance.” Early efforts to implement hearts and minds programs in Vietnam were small scale compared to the resources and manpower devoted to fighting a conventional war. Even after the creation of CORDS in 1967, “pacification remained a small tail to the very large conventional military dog. It was never tried on a large enough scale until too late.”