In the wake of war: getting serious about nation-building.

• Author: Scowcroft, Brent
• Position: Iraq

EARLIER THIS summer, Bagdhad's mayor, Alaa Mahmoud al-Timimi, threatened to resign over shortfalls in funding for infrastructure rehabilitation, especially for the city's unreliable water supply. Recent rebuilding efforts were set back when insurgents damaged a key water main, leaving two million Baghdad residents without water during a week when average temperatures topped 100 degrees.

Iraq's economy and infrastructure rehabilitation remain shaky, as do the security situation and political transition. More than two years after a stunning three-week march to Baghdad, the United States still struggles to consolidate its battlefield victory.

Warfighting has two important dimensions: winning wars and winning the peace. The United States excels in the first, but without an equal commitment to stability and reconstruction, combat victories can be lost. Just as initial combat operations require advance planning and substantial commitment of money and manpower to succeed, so does the second phase of victory, commonly called "nation-building"--known inside the Pentagon as "stabilization and reconstruction" activities. We echo Zalmay Khalilzad's point in the previous issue that we must "move forward quickly on the twin tracks of reconstruction ... building up local capacity for the long term." (1)

We can no longer treat "nation-building" as an occasional emergency rather than an ongoing reality of the post-Cold War world. Since 1993, from Mogadishu to Mosul, the United States has undertaken six such operations around the world. Currently, 135,000 U.S. troops remain on the ground in Iraq, at an approximate cost of $50 billion a year. In Afghanistan, three years after the Taliban fled, 9,000 NATO forces and 17,000 U.S. troops are left to secure the capital and countryside and to continue the hunt for Al-Qaeda. The pace of peacekeeping activities by the United Nations and regional organizations also continues to surge; the UN deploys 66,000 peacekeepers in 17 operations.

Yet "nation-building" remains a controversial proposition. The term still carries negative connotations, conjuring up memories of the interventions of the 1990s and the contentious debate about the merits of responding to conflict in weak and failing states.

The parameters of the discussion changed dramatically following 9/11. No longer were the problems presented by failing states and conflict simply a humanitarian concern. The Bush Administration understands this reality. The September 2002 National Security Strategy notes:

The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders. Thus, action to stabilize and rebuild states emerging from conflict is not "foreign policy as social work", a favorite quip of the 1990s. It is equally a national security priority. And the challenges of failed states and nations emerging from conflict will remain a significant feature of the international landscape for the foreseeable future.

Yet, while the decade-long argument about the importance of stability operations to U.S. national security--which began over the first President Bush's effort to prevent mass starvation in Somalia--seems to be resolved at the level of stated policy, there remains no consensus on questions related to implementation.

DESPITE SOME welcome initial moves, the stark reality is that the United States today does not possess the right mix of skills and capabilities to stabilize and rebuild nations. Stabilization and...