The Foreign Service Journal, November 2006

ment. Those goals may well demand 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants ... working for five to eight years.” Extrapolating from the DSB’s numbers to particular countries paints an even darker picture. Achieving “ambi- tious goals” in Iraq, for example, under the DSB frame- work would have required roughly 500,000 troops in Iraq for five to eight years. Less populous countries such as Haiti, by this rule of thumb, would call for roughly 162,000 American troops. And what of the efficacy of nationbuilding operations? The historical record is hardly encouraging. The DSB concluded that “[t]he pattern suggests a less than impres- sive record — one that has not improved with time and historical experience.” Other advocates of nationbuilding agree. In 2003 Krasner admitted, “The simple fact is that we do not know how to do democracy-building.” Unless our knowledge has grown dramatically in three years, that is not exactly inspiring language coming from one of the top U.S. offi- cials in charge of democracy-building. If we intend to seriously embark on a plan to build nations, we must be prepared to bear heavy costs in time, money, and even in American lives — or we must be pre- pared to fail. As Johns Hopkins University’s Francis Fukuyama concedes, nationbuilding “has been most suc- cessful ... where U.S. forces have remained for genera- tions. We should not get involved to begin with if we are not willing to pay those high costs.” The problem, however, is actually twofold: the United States in recent years has been overly prone to interven- tion, but without a proper appreciation of the costs ahead of time. S/CRS exacerbates the former problem without addressing the latter. Sec. Rice confirmed during a town hall meeting at the State Department in June 2005 that S/CRS is “working, right now, on a plan for Sudan, because it is our hope that at some point, we’ll be in a post-conflict stabilization phase [there]. We know that we’re going to face this in Liberia. We’re doing it in Haiti.” She has never explained how to pay for these interventions. F O C U S N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55