The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

Biden bill, staffed with experienced Foreign Service personnel who rec- ognize that conventional relationships are often awkward during nation- building processes. Because host governments themselves are often incompletely integrated into their own societies and, in any case, are imperfectly structured to carry out their new functions, they are as like- ly to resent as they are to welcome offers of assistance. Indeed, both sides in these relationships suffer from the embarrassment of wartime defeat or from symptoms of under- development; the tender nerves of sovereignty are especially delicate during these times. The experience of dealing with new, or failed, or reconstructed states is therefore likely to be partic- ularly challenging to both sides, and to call for unusual degrees of inno- vation and improvisation. These uncertainties have led the field offices of nation-builders to concen- trate on static, fail-safe, all-purpose organizational remedies and physi- cal infrastructure and to avoid deal- ing with difficult social or political factors. A recurring issue in such interven- tions — Iraq being a prime case in point — is how best to navigate between the gentility of diplomatic relations and the brutality of military coercion. That balancing act requires an unusual degree of sensitivity to internal political, ethnic and regional conditions, yet there is little guidance in the handbooks of either the State Department or the Pentagon. Thus, both the United States government and international organizations need a cadre of military and civilian profes- sionals who devote their careers to peacekeeping and post-conflict re- construction and who can apply the lessons of nation-building flexibly, creatively and with sensitivity to local conditions. The conventions of diplomacy do not encourage the kinds of institu- tional innovation that nation-build- ing requires. The standard embassy, even if supplemented by a standard aid mission, rarely provides current local information in times of crisis and reconstruction. Whatever enti- ty serves as the “host government” cannot completely open its agencies and ministries to foreign eyes, and so it has to work at a protective arm’s length through overburdened for- eign offices or planning units. Because local bureaucracies are untrustworthy or depleted, donors often have to supplement local administrative funding in order to maintain adequate levels of service. In order to avoid reinforcing a dis- placed ideology, the very composi- tion of local bureaucracies may have to change. Unacceptable elements are purged, and new ones added to incorporate elements of the society that had been neglected or excluded from public service by the previous government. Explicit policies and specialized post-conflict reconstruction agencies that draw on both military and civil administrative expertise are essential because peacekeeping and nation- building are inextricably interdepen- dent, long-term activities. Regime- changing military incursions, no mat- ter how strong their moral justifica- tions, can no longer be seen as ends in themselves. George Kennan clearly understood this. At the dawn of a new era of American intervention to contain communism and shape world politics in American interests in the 1950s, he said: “Even the most glori- ous military victory would give us no right to face the future in any spirit other than one of sorrow and hum- bleness for what has happened and of the realization that the road ahead is long and hard — longer and harder, in fact, than it would have been had it been possible to avoid a military cata- clysm altogether.” 60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4