Why Nation Building Matters: Political Consolidation, Building Security Forces, and Economic Development in Failed and Fragile States.

• Author: Earle, Renee M.

American Diplomacy

November 1, 2021

www.americandiplomacy.org

Title: Why Nation Building Matters

Author:Renee M Earle

Text:

Why Nation Building Matters: Political Consolidation, Building Security Forces, and Economic Development in Failed and Fragile States

By Keith W. Mines

Potomac Books, August 2020

402 pages

In the August 2021 issue of The American Diplomacy Journal, several authors took up the theme of challenges to the world of failed and failing states. In Why Nation-Building Matters, active-duty Foreign Service Officer Keith Mines returns to that theme, never more salient than in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Amid the crescendo of voices warning of the futility of nation-building efforts, Mines' superb book offers an opposing view based on decades of personal, on-the-ground experience, both in the military and the foreign service.

With compelling examples, Mines details eight U.S. attempts to rescue states in crisis on three continents over several decades: in Colombia, Grenada, El Salvador, Darfur, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was an eyewitness, indeed participant, in all eight projects. Despite obvious differences among the cases, Mines argues that general principles can be applied for achieving nation-building success, whether or not the circumstance include military intervention or where success came long after the U.S. had left. And despite the enormous challenges, Mines makes a good case that it is in the U.S. interest to engage in these efforts.

In the case of Afghanistan, the recent heart-wrenching images of an insufficiently planned withdrawal, horrific in human and political consequences, have led many pundits to conflate the withdrawal with the entire mission in Afghanistan. "Nation-building" became synonymous with the disastrous withdrawal. A PBS/Maris poll of early September 2021 showed that 61% of Americans believe Afghanistan should determine its own future without U.S. involvement. A second notion that has found seemingly broad acceptance equates the success of nation-building in general with the success of military intervention, judging that military failure in Afghanistan is the same as failure in the other areas of U.S. intervention there.

Mines wrote his book before the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but vivid descriptions of his work during two assignments there, in 2000 and again in 2012, offer a rare and much-needed deep dive into overall U.S. efforts in...