The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

40 SEPTEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The literature on stabilization is now extensive. It is not my purpose to try to summarize it all in a short article. Rather, I would like to reflect on a few large lessons that seem to me criti- cal, drawn primarily from the post-9/11 years but reaching back also to my first experience of war in Vietnam and fairly extensive reading and study over the half-century that I have lived with, watched and sometimes tried to grapple with these issues. Out of many lessons worth discussing, four stand out to me. One is the lack of tours of duty sufficient to master problems. Second is the confusion of policy with implementation. Third is the intellectual arrogance that Americans bring to critical policy- making. And fourth is the need for the State Department to find a dependable mechanism for surging staff in a crisis. Tour Lengths: Undermining Effectiveness The problems of tour lengths bedeviled both the military and the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. I arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2005. Within months, most of the U.S. Embassy Kabul staff had turned over: It was the equivalent of an institu- tional frontal lobotomy that was repeated yearly. That this was scarcely a new problem is illustrated by the scathing comment attributed to John Paul Vann, the USAID deputy for Civil Opera- tions and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) in Vietnam: that we didn’t have 12 years’ experience, we had one year’s experience 12 times. Some people do extend or return for additional tours, but the overall result of our practice is that few are knowledgeable or effective until well into their tours, by which time they are starting to think about an onward assignment. In UN Peacekeep- ing in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Professor Lise Morjé Howard identifies the lessons that made for effective United Nations missions. One of her fundamental points is the need to develop a “learning culture”—a deep understanding of the political and social factors that need to be taken into account to make progress in complex interventions. Developing such a learning culture takes time. It is not compatible with the rapid replacement of staff. The few who do develop deep knowledge find themselves repeatedly fighting uphill battles to explain, particularly to Washington, how what they have learned needs to be considered in the formulation of new policies. This problem is exacerbated by the difficulty of using failure as a basis for learning. In the United States, some 30 percent of startups fail within two years, and the rate is higher in the first year. In business, there is a rich body of study about why businesses fail and what can be learned from failure. But in our bureaucratic culture, failure is usually condemned, and failed projects are abandoned rather than studied to learn how to improve. The fear of failure and the resulting criticism, especially from Congress, leads particularly to two unfortunate results. One is the adoption of extensive provisions for design and oversight to try to prevent failure, which in turn make it slow and difficult to experiment. Yet when we plunge into chaotic situa- tions, as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is little time to sit back and study issues before making decisions. Something must be done. Decisions must be made, and it is inevitable that some of the decisions will turn out poorly. The need is often for rapid experimentation and adjustment as lessons are learned; but that is not the way we operate. Second, the fear of criticism creates a bureaucratic reflex to defend projects and policies rather than to identify problems and make adjustments. Confusing Policy with Implementation These problems are reinforced by our propensity to confuse policy with implementation. Of course, sometimes policy does need changing. But often the policy isn’t the problem; it’s how we’re trying to implement it. Consider a hypothetical example. One could have a policy of using local tribesmen to secure roads. One could pick good leaders, reinforce themwhen attacked, and the result would be more secure roads and better trust between the tribal leaders and the government that supports them. Or one could find that the leaders were corrupt, money was stolen, and arms were used to repress rivals. Little security would be achieved, and the result would be failure. Yet the policy was the same. All too often, however, our reaction to failure is to throw out the policy without studying whether the problem lies there, or in implementation. The result is a great deal of wasted time and little learning. One real-world example comes from the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s decision to redo the justice program in Afghanistan. Without a doubt, the program had problems. Holbrooke’s answer was to stop the program cold so that it could be redesigned. The executing contractor demo- bilized, let go of staff, got rid of equipment and gave up office space. It took about a year until USAID, after several efforts, got Holbrooke to approve a new concept and was able to rebid new contracts, one of which was won by the same contractor who had previously demobilized. During that year, nothing was accomplished. I believe that focusing on and fixing specific problems would have been far more effective than the stop-and- start process we followed. This is but a micro example of the cost of not understanding that the hard work is often in policy execution.