BEYOND NATION BUILDING?

BEYOND NATION BUILDING?

Vice President Joe Biden recently stated, or re-stated, that nation building is no longer an objective of American foreign/military policy. Nation building as a national policy reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein and, as one goal, to implant a democracy in the middle of the Muslim Mideast. A similar impulse accompanied the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the repressive Taliban regime which was also hosting the al-Qaida terrorists who conceived and executed the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

The unending political and military frustrations of both Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the abandonment of nation building as a policy package for export. But we still hope to leave behind a viable political entity backed by security forces trained and equipped, up to a point, by the United States and its allies. The question is: can even this reduced goal be successfully accomplished?

There are many reasons to believe that our departure as military guarantors of regimes in these two countries will end up as the status quo ante our intervention. That is, in Iraq, there is a considerable likelihood that there will be a return to the old Sunni-Shia warfare, with the Kurds standing on the sidelines hoping just to be in control of their region and oil in the north. In Afghanistan, return to the status quo ante means a country divided up among warlords who reject any central control. Into this mix may be added the possible return of the Taliban and its record of brutalizing the population, particularly women.

National Security Advisor General James Jones was recently quoted as saying, "The Taliban generally as a group has never signed on to the global jihad business and doesn't seem to have ambitions beyond its region." If that is the one dimensional measure of acceptability for getting a segment of the Taliban to the bargaining table and having it participate in governing as a prelude to our exit, then we may indeed see a return to some horrific previous times. A very recent TIME magazine article serves to remind us of what that pre-2001 time was like with Taliban rule.

If this is an approximation of what may well lie ahead in Afghanistan, then perhaps a quote from Confucius may be in order: "Study the past, if you would divine the future". The use of analogies is always hazardous, but to gain a shadowy image of possible future scenarios in Afghanistan, an illustration might be useful.

The idea of finding an agreeable segment of the Taliban to share in governance has echoes from l933 Germany. The Weimar Republic was in a shambles with former Chancellors Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen intriguing, against each other, to return to power. The Nazi party was the single largest party in the Reichstag but it was unable to get its thuggery accepted by the electorate to give it a parliamentary majority and the Chancellorship. Von Papen, a long time political schemer and manipulator, had the idea of bringing Adolf Hitler into the government as Chancellor, with von Papen as Vice Chancellor, and surrounding Hitler with a cabinet and the major ministries dominated by anti-Nazis. In that way Hitler could be controlled while von Papen exercised the real power. President Hindenburg, who referred to Hitler as "that Austrian corporal" (Hitler's rank in World War I), reluctantly went along with the plan and appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Today no one has gotten so far as to define the nature of Taliban participation in any future Afghan governance, but it is not too difficult to imagine that in the back of some minds lurks a Hitler/von Papen model. And we all know how that turned out.

Unfortunately, the United States and its western allies have a "can do" engineering mentality and believe there is a solution to every problem, in political terms a solution based on western experience with democracy and values. All we have to do, like von Papen, is to engineer the right political architecture for a settlement. Then we can create and leave behind a government in which we have influence for guiding the future, but not responsibility for governance and/or military security. But it may turn out that we will have an opposite result. We will be perceived as responsible for whatever goes wrong but have little or no influence in the correcting the problems. The Taliban is part of the central problem, but even with proper manipulation, can it be a part of the engineered kind of solution we desire? It may indeed be part of a solution for shedding our burdens and getting out of Afghanistan, but if it is true that "what's past is prologue", it is not a long-term solution to the problem of western-defined stability in that country. Are we the von Papen and Hindenburg for Afghanistan? Going back to an earlier blog (July 19), "the existence of a problem does not presume the existence of a solution", or at least the kind of solution we have in mind.