It Isn’t About Will or Resources
From Max Boot:
Commentary » Blog Archive » The Need for Getting Good at Nation Building
Problem is, the U.S. government still lacks the right resources and structures to tackle effectively the difficult task of state-building (or, as it is popularly known, “nation building”) in the Third World.
I find this sort of essay tremendously disheartening. Boot seems to feel the challenge is one of will and resources. And unfortunately, this sentiment is widely shared by many others, including numerous prominent supporters of our escalation in Afghanistan. But the reality is that I don’t think most people who propose this sort of thing have actually done much research on the issue. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the issue would acknowledge that the issue isn’t just of will and resources, it is more profoundly that we simply don’t know how to nation build. Some of the component issues include:
(1) There is no consensus on what constitutes an effective economic development program. The history of development assistance is pretty bleak, and while every few years a new fad emerges, none have panned out as a systematic answer to poverty and underdevelopment. We’ve gone through at least a half-dozen major cycles since the 1950s — we’ve focused in turn on capital formation, infrastructure development, educational improvements, good governance, public-private partnerships, the role of women, micro-finance initiatives. All with, at best, mixed success. In short, we simply don’t know how to do economic development in any consistent manner.
(2) We don’t know how to build responsive governance structures. We just don’t. The literature on this is even bleaker. What we do is largely negative. We know that democratization is likely counter-productive in the short-run, as it leads to political mobilization along religious, ethnic, tribal, clan lines. We do know that a strong civil society is an important impetus to good governance, by providing a “lobby” for good governance as well as an external check on government authority, but we have little idea of how to build civil society. Indeed, it isn’t even clear to me that our efforts to engage and encourage emergent civil society movements do any good. Yes, responsive, effective government seems like a great idea. Unfortunately, we don’t know how to get there.
(3) The history of anti-corruption initiatives is a history of almost 100% failure. There is simply put, no empirically validated model to support the notion that we can eliminate corruption.
(4) The history of counter-drug efforts is actually probably worse than anti-corruption initiatives.
That is the problem with Afghanistan and Yemen. The military elements of our counter-insurgency doctrine, as ahistorical and overly-optimistic as they are, are actually the most solid part of the plan. The notion that a “civilian surge” is either possible or that it would accomplish anything is a flight of fancy unfortunately. And it isn’t because of a lack of will or resources. The problem is that we just have no idea how to “build” a nation or a state. And the sooner we acknowledge this fact, the sooner we can move on to the development of sound mitigation strategies for places like Yemen.
Very good summary and it seems to me the same lessons apply for places like Haiti.
True, though in Haiti right now it is mostly just about providing food, shelter, and medicine to alleviate immediate suffering. That is something we can do quite effectively.
Yes, I totally agree on that score. Unfortunately, we can’t do it fast enough, no matter how much we’d like to.
Yikes. Is any of the data on places that did make the jump from “third world poorhouse” to “relatively well-off” (places like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Chile) of any use on this? Probably not, and it’s not like the US can openly encourage governments to practice authoritarianism even if it brings some degree of stability.
Interestingly enough, I’ve heard arguments that tackling corruption in a society with relatively poor and under-developed state infrastructure can actually be counter-productive in the short term, because corruption is one way for governments with weak institutional legitimacy to hold themselves together.
The problem is that each case is pretty close to sui generis. It is the reverse of Tolstoy’s observation about happy families. Each failure is alike — poverty, corruption, insecurity, etc. ruin prospects. Each success is unique. It isn’t that there are not plenty of cases of countries becoming developed, and yes, one commonality seems to be some sort enlightened authoritarianism — though recall that at the time, it wasn’t clear that is what we were seeing in either South Korea or Chile. But one of the major changes in the development literature from, say, the early 1960s, is that the notion of clear “stages” in development has been questioned. The result is that we have no particular reason to believe that any given sets of policies will lead to development, because even though they may have been present in some successes, they were absent in others, and may even have been present in many failures (e.g. authoritarianism).
While I think that this is a very good post and I generally agree with the point you’re making, we should keep in mind that the absence of an off-the-shelf, across-the-board solution to development is not the same thing as a guarantee of failure in all instances. (One could make the same point about counterinsurgency.) While each case may be “pretty close to sui generis,” we do have the capacity to occasionally devise a solution in that individual case.
Obviously this isn’t the same thing as the mindless application of overly prescriptive doctrine, a complaint that many have justifiably made about FM 3-24 dogmatism, for example.
>>we do have the capacity to occasionally devise a solution in that individual case.<<
Yes, but Afghanistan is a particularly hard case. Land-locked. Desperately poor. No significant export commodity other than drugs. Torn by a general of conflict. In the midst of a conflict today. Beset by a significant portion of the population that does not want development or good governance, but instead longs for a medieval theocracy.
My point isn’t that development is impossible, my point is that people like Max Boot who seem to think the problem is lack of will and resources are largely ignorant about the challenges.
Bernard — Completely agree with your last.