From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Jun 22 2010 - 17:34:40 EDT
In the Beginning, There Was Somalia
Two decades later, the U.S. still has no plan.
BY JAMES TRAUB | <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issues/180/contents/>
JULY/AUGUST 2010
In the waning days of his presidency, with very little planning or even
forethought, George H.W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops to support a
humanitarian mission in a hapless country of no strategic significance to
the United States. That noble endeavor ended, of course, with the fiasco
known as Black Hawk Down. Somalia was scarcely history's first failed state,
but it was the first one whose failure U.S. policy sought consciously to
address. Today, three U.S. administrations, two U.N. secretaries-general,
and 18 years later, Somalia has a raging Islamist insurgency, a government
that controls a few city blocks, and African Union peacekeepers with no
peace to keep. And once again this year, Somalia stands atop the Foreign
Policy/Fund for Peace Failed States Index -- a testament to the persistence
of state pathology and the weakness of the powers the world community can
bring to bear.
Barack Obama came into office acutely, perhaps uniquely, aware of the
problem of failed states, but his administration has yet to develop an
explicit policy on the subject, let alone increase the U.S. government's
capacity to heal these profoundly sick patients. Obama has an intuitive
grasp of the transnational problems of the post-Cold War world -- nuclear
proliferation, global warming, pandemic disease. The same is true of failing
states. In an
<http://www.barackobama.com/2007/08/01/remarks_of_senator_obama_the_w_1.php>
August 2007 speech, during the first months of his presidential campaign,
Obama asserted that the "nearly 60 countries" that "cannot control their
borders or territory, or meet the basic needs of their people" constituted
not only a moral dilemma but also a security challenge to the West.
Candidate Obama vowed to "roll back the tide of hopelessness that gives rise
to hate" by helping failed states establish good governance and the rule of
law, doubling foreign assistance to attack entrenched poverty, establishing
a $2 billion education fund "to counter the radical madrasas . that have
filled young minds with messages of hate," and opening "America Houses"
across the Islamic world.
Vacationing in the world's most failed state.
The premise that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had made weak states not just a
moral problem but a matter of national security was scarcely new; it was a
central axiom of President George W. Bush's foreign policy after the attacks
(and even President Bill Clinton, in the pre-9/11 era, had seen failing
states as a threat to the emerging, democratic, free market world order).
But Obama's emphasis on economic and social development was very different
from the bellicosity of regime change and the grandiose hopes of Bush's
Freedom Agenda. As president, Obama has indeed sought more funding for
development assistance, though the economic crisis and ballooning budget
deficit have made Congress wary of authorizing his aid budgets and the
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have absorbed much of his attention. Most
of his other promises remain on the drawing board -- if they're anywhere.
At the most basic intellectual level, there is an unacknowledged tension in
the Obama administration's thinking about this issue. Obama has persistently
argued that addressing the poverty and misery of people in remote places is
a U.S. national interest. But the case he has made is, like Bush's, limited
to the threat of terrorism and does not have much to say about, for example,
the threat that collapsing states pose to more stable neighbors. And that's
true of others in the administration as well. In the May/June issue of
<http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66224/robert-m-gates/helping-others-
defend-themselves> Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argues
that because terrorist attacks are most likely to emanate from weak states,
"Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main
security challenge of our time." Where, however, does that leave the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (No. 5 on FP's list), or Ivory Coast (12),
or Burma (16), whose doomed and despairing citizens are not likely to take
up arms against the West?
If no explicit policy exists, an implicit one has begun to emerge.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at the State Department,
told me that Afghanistan is "the petri dish" for the administration's
strategy on weak and failing states. And by that she means the Obama team's
embrace of a nation-building plan that puts development in a place equal to
security. Development must be understood less as providing aid than as
building government capacity. "That's the shift," she says. "There's a big
emphasis not just on delivering services, which happens through contractors
and NGOs, but enabling the government to provide the services."
There is an evident logic to seeing Afghanistan as the new template for U.S.
policy toward failing states. Afghanistan is not only the most serious such
problem this administration is facing but also the laboratory in which it
has done by far the most experimenting. Afghanistan is also, of course, the
one failed state into which the United States has poured a torrent of money,
with authorized funds since the inception of the war totaling $300 billion.
The United States is tripling the civilian head count in Afghanistan and
just as importantly, dispersing civilians out of Kabul and into provincial
and district capitals. The emphasis, Slaughter says, is very much on
persuading ordinary Afghans that their government is worth defending. But
Afghanistan makes for a very tough paradigm. Nation-building is almost
impossible to do amid a raging insurgency, as the United States learned in
Iraq. Doing so at warp speed, with a troop pullout looming, is yet harder.
Afghanistan is invariably one of those places where the tide of hopelessness
gives rise to hatred. But Slaughter says that Haiti should also be seen as a
model of administration policy. Slaughter says that in the aftermath of the
country's Jan. 12 earthquake, the Obama administration recognized that Haiti
needed help with security and development -- and that the investment in
development had to bolster the country's own capacity. And the United States
must work with existing partners, especially the Brazilians, who have formed
the core of the U.N. peacekeeping force there. In Haiti, as in Yemen, where
the United States must work with neighbors (read: Saudi Arabia), other
donors, and regional and multinational bodies, diplomacy is an indispensable
element of the response to failed and fragile states. Indeed, Yemen, now
seen as an incubator of terrorism, might well become the administration's
next petri dish.
So that's the policy, at least in its current inchoate form. On this issue,
as on others, Obama administration officials tend to brandish their
intellectual bona fides in a bid for forbearance: They've thought hard about
these questions. They care deeply about them. They're getting to the right
place. It's still early days. All true -- U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations Susan Rice, for instance, led a Brookings Institution project on
failed states, and White House advisor Samantha Power literally wrote the
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061120146?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as
2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0061120146> book on genocide -- but
faith begins to wear thin. One senior figure at an NGO that deals with
fragile states says, "I do think this group comes in with a much different
vision of the issues at play, but I don't see that there has been much of a
change in policy that reflects the change in mindset."
Fixing failed states requires not just a coherent plan, but very large
commitments of money, people, and time. There must be boots on the ground --
but who will fill them? When the White House decided on the civilian
"uplift" in Afghanistan, as it is known, there was no pool of available
civilian experts from which the State Department or the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) could draw. They just went out and started
hiring people willing and able to go for a year and then slotted them into
job openings.
There was supposed to be such a pool. In 2004, the Bush administration
overcame its ideological disapproval of nation-building and agreed to
establish the <http://www.crs.state.gov/> Office of the Coordinator for
Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), housed at the State Department.
The idea, as U.S. Institute of Peace expert Robert Perito recalls, was to
create a single "command-and-control group" for the government, so the
civilian response to a natural disaster or political crisis could be as
rapid and effectively coordinated as the military one. It didn't work out
that way. S/CRS became a bureaucratic orphan; its first chief, Carlos
Pascual, now the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, quit in disgust. The office got
emergency funding from the Pentagon, but had no budget of its own until the
2008-2009 fiscal year. Its current director, John Herbst, operates largely
at the whim of the department's powerful regional bureau chiefs.
Despite its lower status on the org chart, S/CRS has now become operational.
The office runs the
<http://www.crs.state.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=public.display&shortcut=4QRB>
Civilian Response Corps, which consists of an active force, ready to be
dispatched abroad within 48 hours, and a standby force, employed elsewhere
in the federal government and available to S/CRS for one year out of four.
The office now has more than 100 of the former and about 800 of the latter,
though its authorized strength is 260 and 2,000, respectively. Todd
Calongne, the office's spokesman, describes S/CRS as "the Special Forces of
the civilian U.S. government." In a warehouse in Springfield, Virginia, the
office has established what Calongne calls "an embassy in a suitcase," with
satellite-linked communications equipment, armored vehicles, tents, and so
on.
But the response corps is not ready for prime time. Herbst says that Richard
Holbrooke asked to meet with him the day Holbrooke was sworn in as special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. "He wanted to know what we
could do," recalls Herbst, who had to explain that "we could not be a major
part of staffing the operation." The office just didn't have the manpower.
It did, however, draw up the plans that govern ties between civilians and
the military in Afghanistan's regional commands and on provincial
reconstruction teams; Calongne says that it has sent to Afghanistan and
Pakistan more than 75 experts in communications, planning, conflict
assessment, and the rule of law. A member of Holbrooke's team told me,
"They've played a substantial role, but within the guidance and policy
articulated by this office." Officials speak of Sudan, which might split in
half after a referendum next January, as the first crisis S/CRS will address
from the outset. The office now has five officials in the country and four
more working with special envoy Scott Gration in Washington.
Given its modest size and political position, S/CRS can constitute only one
part of a potential response. The obvious candidate for properly taking
responsibility is USAID. But the agency today, halved to just 8,000 staff
members worldwide from its Vietnam War peak, does little beyond administer
contracts carried out by private firms. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, acknowledging the need for an operational civilian force, have
vowed to revitalize the agency. USAID's new administrator, Rajiv Shah, will
be authorized to hire 1,000 new employees and might even get an occasional
seat at National Security Council meetings. Still, the agency is widely
viewed as a cautious and lumbering relic, ill-fitted to the turbulent world
of failing states; USAID's culture might take a lot longer to change than
its structure. And, as Perito says, "It's very hard to have a policy towards
fragile states if you don't have a development entity which functions."
Failed states matter. That is perhaps the most decisive change since the
first George Bush sent the Marines to Somalia or Bill Clinton agonized over
acting in the Balkans, where, as former Secretary of State James Baker
famously said, "We have no dog in that fight." U.S. interests can no longer
be extricated from those of faraway countries. But America's stake in the
well-being of Somalia does not make Somalia's problems any easier to cure.
The remarkable fixity of the Failed States Index stands as a reproach to
America's nonchalant faith in progress and its own capacity to solve the
world's woes. The Obama administration, which specializes in thinking hard
about hard problems, is still a long way from getting its arms around this
one.
Related
_____
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/vacationdishu97795338b.jpg
Mogadishu Was a Blast
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/mogadishu_was_a_blast>
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