Nail Down Justice, but Don’t Abandon Afghans to Sure Chaos

“We’re not into nation-building,” said President Bush on Tuesday. For the past decade, nation-building has been the foreign policy concept that Republicans loved to hate.

The fiasco of U.S. intervention in Somalia--first launched, interestingly enough, by the elder President Bush in late 1992--was a failed exercise in nation-building; the creation of civil institutions was also attempted by the Clinton administration in Haiti and the Balkans.

In response to Republican attacks, Democrats wondered why it was OK to help people avoid slaughter and starvation but not OK to help those same people establish stable political systems. After all, functioning countries are less likely to need such help in the future.

Yet now that the United States is poised to unbuild the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, we ought not to be foreclosing constructive solutions for rebuilding Afghanistan into a civilized country, a place where terrorists are not welcome.

In the 2000 presidential debates, George W. Bush repeatedly ripped the Clinton-Gore foreign policy record. In Boston on Oct. 3, he declared that he and Al Gore “have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation-building.” And what was Bush for instead? “I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.” And so, he continued, his focus wouldn’t be nation-building but rather “rebuilding the military power.”

Without a doubt, a strong defense acts as a deterrent against other militaries, but on Sept. 11, U.S. might didn’t stop an “asymmetric” attack from Osama bin Laden’s irregular terror network, lurking in the wilds of Afghanistan.

Soon, the Americans will go and get Bin Laden. As Bush said, “We’re focused on justice.” But what happens after that? Does the U.S. simply collect Bin Laden, “dead or alive,” as Bush said on Sept. 17, and come home?

If ever a nation needed building, it’s Afghanistan. Its 26 million people--literacy rate, 32%--eke out a subsistence living; a country the size of Texas has just 1,700 miles of paved roads. And that’s not just a humanitarian problem for Afghans; it’s a national security problem for Americans because even after Bin Laden is gone, the same chaotic countryside could yet again serve as an enterprise zone for mass murderers.

If the U.S. takes military action against Afghanistan and then comes home, it would be making the same mistake it made after World War I. In 1918, the U.S. spearheaded the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany at a cost of 116,516 American lives. But we stopped at the Rhine frontier, told the Germans not to do it again and retreated back across the Atlantic. Fifteen years later, the Germans elected Hitler.

By contrast, in 1945, the U.S. won a second, more costly war against Germany, but this time, instead of stopping at the Rhine and telling the Germans to get rid of Hitler, the Allies occupied much of the country. As Secretary of State George C. Marshall warned, “Europe’s requirements are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

Resolved to see no repeat of political deterioration, the U.S. combined justice--that is, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials--with nation-building and rebuilding; the Marshall Plan poured $13.3 billion into devastated Europe, about 1.3% of U.S. output during those years. If that level of commitment were converted into today’s dollars, the total expenditure would be about $150 billion.

But the ultimate reward, of course, has been a mostly democratic and prosperous Europe that is now partnered with the U.S. in the fight against terrorism.

After Bin Laden, the U.S. confronts the opportunity--really, the necessity--of building stable institutions in Afghanistan. Will it be expensive? Yes. But will it be less costly than another Sept. 11? Yes again.

Today, Bush is more than a partisan, or even a president. He’s a war leader, and so he needn’t feel bound by the shortsightedly opportunistic rhetoric recently uttered by Republicans--even if he was once the one doing some of the uttering.

If this commander in chief comes to realize that justice and nation-building aren’t either-or concepts but rather ideas that should be twinned, he will have done the whole world a service and a greater common good will yet come from this tragedy.