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Editor's
note: This piece appeared in Sunday's New York Post.
 he
first speed bump in the war on terrorism has its source in an intellectual
mistake, a particularly conservative one.
American air
strikes had been leaving Taliban front-line troops intact —
although this finally has changed — because the Bush administration
didn't know what political entity should replace the Taliban government.
And that's
partly because the Bush administration, like conservatives generally,
learned the wrong lessons from America's humanitarian interventions
in the 1990s and its war in Vietnam 30 years ago.
Conservatives
concluded from Haiti and Somalia that "nation building"
is always a woolly-headed misadventure, and from Vietnam that military
operations, if they aren't to be disastrously compromised, must
be sealed away from politics.
As Bush put
it in his press conference last week, in the "quagmire of Vietnam
. . . politics made decisions more than the military sometimes."
So, the Bush administration actively avoided having a vision of
the post-Taliban future before it began bombing, lest its war get
bogged down in politics and nation building.
But war is
the ultimate political instrument, and to begin a bombing campaign
without a clear political strategy in mind is to risk incoherence,
a whiff of which can be detected in Afghanistan.
In Vietnam,
the problem wasn't politics per se, but bad politics, a foolish
policy of incrementalism that never aimed to deal the enemy a decisive
blow.
In a similar
way, conservatives drew too broad a lesson from Haiti, Somalia,
and the Balkans, none of which should have discredited the very
idea of nation building.
Haiti and Somalia
represented acts of international do-goodism so far removed from
the national interest that no one was willing to make the sacrifices
of blood, treasure, and sheer effort to set up and support decent
governments in those places.
Bosnia and
Kosovo, in contrast, arguably involved the national interest. Conservatives,
and candidate George Bush, still hated to see troops from an under-funded
and over-committed American military tied down by Balkans civics
work.
In general,
nation building hasn't always had such a poor reputation. The premier
example of its success is the American effort to rebuild Germany
and Japan after World War II, a boon not just to the citizens of
those two countries, but to the world.
Rarely will
the U.S. have the opportunity to remake societies so completely,
but the Cold War featured a similarly successful, if smaller-scale,
nation building. In the late 1980s, for instance, El Salvador was
a bloody basket case, riven by a civil war and saddled with a corrupt
and nasty government.
The United
States, together with the United Nations, brokered the end of the
fighting, and in so doing dictated in very specific terms the shape
of the country's future political-civil life, from elections, to
the composition of the police force, to the working of its judiciary.
El Salvador
is now a successful Latin American country, a result that should
hearten not just human-rights advocates, but the fiercest Cold Warriors.
Which demonstrates
how nation building, properly applied, is not just an idealist enterprise,
but can be a crucial element of a hardheaded, interest-based foreign
policy. Take Iraq.
The hardline
position in the intramural battle over the course of the war on
terrorism is that the U.S. should work to topple the Baathist regime
of Saddam Hussein.
One option
to that end is to activate the centrifugal forces of Iraq, aiding
opposition Kurds and Shiites enough so that they pull down the regime.
But this scenario means courting uncertainty about the ultimate
political result in Iraq, and perhaps letting chaos reign there.
The alternative
is for the U.S. to invade, and with the assistance of the United
Nations, forge a post-Saddam regime. This would both ensure that
American interests would be protected in the political endgame,
and give the Iraqi people the great gift of a decent government.
This raises
what should be another attraction of nation building for conservatives:
it operates on the idea that the hoariest of Wilsonian ideals, self-determination,
has its limits in the Third World, and that the West — at least
when it comes to political organization and values — knows
best.
There are,
of course, limits to nation building, which is probably too grandiose
a phrase for the policy the U.S. should generally be pursuing. Government
building would be more accurate.
The world is
not putty in our hands. We can't create national identities, civil
societies and democratic cultures where they don't exist. In places
like Afghanistan, the goal should merely be installing a benign,
but not necessarily even democratic, government.
Also, strategic
distinctions still must be made. Burundi, a dot of a country in
Central Africa, will never be worth the energy and attention of
Iraq, with its crucial position in the Persian Gulf and extensive
oil fields.
But the blanket
hostility to undertaking any political spadework in countries to
which we send B-52s and the 101st Airborne is clearly a mistake.
Conservative
hearts should quicken not just when President Bush vows, with a
gleam in his eye, to "take out" the Taliban, but when
he talks of putting something better in its place.
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