Review: The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building

Abstract

THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO NATION-BUILDING James Dobbins, Sefh G. Jones, Keith Crane, and Beth Cole DeGrasse Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006. 275pp, US$35.00 paper (ISBN 978-0833039880)There is a certain bitter irony in the title of the RAND Corporation's The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building. Authored by a team led by James Dobbins, RAND's director of international security and defence policy and a noted nation-building expert, The Beginner's Guide goes to great lengths to explain that the United States should possess extensive experience in the field of stabilization and reconstruction operations. As Dobbins notes, military interventions and their related endeavours have emerged from the ashes of the Cold War as a major enterprise of both the United States and the United Nations. In the period from 1945 to 1989, the United States embarked on a military intervention on average once every 10 years, but it now conducts such roughly biannually. United Nations peacekeeping have accelerated even more dramatically since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The UN conducted an average of one new peacekeeping mission every four years during the Cold War. Today, that figure stands at one operation every six months.Not only have interventions increased in number since 1989, they have also grown in ambition. Cold War imperatives generally limited UN- and US-led ventures to relatively simple combatant separation and ceasefire monitoring. Unconstrained by the threat of superpower escalation, similar missions today seek to achieve the more challenging goals of reuniting divided countries, establishing the rule of law, and installing democratic institutions. What were once limited peacekeeping endeavours have graduated to full-blown nation-building exercises.Indeed, by the time its military invaded and occupied Iraq in the spring of 2003, the United States possessed more potential experience in nationbuilding than any other country in modern times. As Dobbins highlights, Iraq marked the US government's seventh attempt at rebuilding a fractured society since the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. From actions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, the United States should have learned, by the time of Iraq, a trove of lessons about the costs, burdens, responsibilities, and pitfalls of intervention and regime change.As recent history has shown, however, a political climate hostile to the realities of nation-building precluded the construction of such a repository. The Clinton administration, chastened by stumbles in Somalia and in dealing with the international community over the former Yugoslavia, turned away from early efforts to codify interagency nation-building processes. Condoleezza Rice's famous comment from the 2000 presidential campaign that we don't need to have the 82nd airborne escorting kids to kindergarten encapsulated the initial attitude of the Bush administration that began its tenure openly antagonistic to military other than large-scale, conventional wars.Only the mismanagement of postwar stabilization in Iraq and the growing insurgencies both there and in Afghanistan convinced large sectors of the US foreign and defence policy establishments of the need for a comprehensive blueprint for future nation-building operations. In late 2005, national security presidential directive 44, which explicitly outlined interagency coordination requirements in reconstruction and stabilization operations, reversed the White House's earlier course. The Department of Defense soon issued a complementary directive that gave stability, security, transition, and reconstruction operations equal priority with traditional war fighting. While more in line with the realities of ongoing US activities abroad, it remains to be seen whether these doctrinal changes will result in sustainable, long-term institutional transformations. …