[sangkancil] Fw: [New Republic] Build Up: How to prevent the next Afghan

[M G G Pillai <pillai@mgg.pc.my>]

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Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 22:55:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Evolution <tamiliam@yahoo.com>
To: pahlawan@yahoogroups.com, indian-malaysian@yahoogroups.com,
     malaysians_onlline@yahoogroups.com, umno@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Fw: [New Republic] Build Up: How to prevent the next Afghanistan.


Archived at: http://www.tnr.com/102901/trb102901.html

TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Build Up
by Peter Beinart

Post date 10.11.01 | Issue date 10.22.01


Consider the following scenario: The United States overthrows the
Taliban. President Bush makes good on his pledge to reconstruct
Afghanistan, pouring in billions of dollars. In return, the new
government helps America cleanse the country of Al Qaeda.

The initial battle of the war on terrorism has been won;
Afghanistan is no longer a breeding ground for genocidal Islam.
But amidst the jubilation, Americans receive word that Osama bin
Laden and 200 of his followers have slipped out of the country
and taken refuge in Somalia.

Absurd? Not necessarily. Somalia today has a lot in common with
the Afghanistan that took in bin Laden in 1996. The Somali
government is broke and could well be bought, as Afghanistan's
was, by a man with millions of dollars to throw around. Central
authority is extremely weak--warlords dot the country and two
regions have virtually seceded. Civil society has collapsed, and
hard-line Islam is filling the void. According to The Economist,
90 percent of Somali children now attend Koranic schools. Women
must wear a chador. The country's courts increasingly enforce
sharia law. If bin Laden showed up, he would find a sympathetic
population, political factions willing to harbor him, and a
central authority perhaps unwilling and almost certainly unable
to do anything about it.

So the war on terrorism would move south. The Bush administration
would threaten the government in Mogadishu, perhaps send in
special forces, perhaps even bomb. American commentators--fresh
from tut-tutting that America's post-cold-war abandonment of
Afghanistan created the conditions for terrorism--would start
tut-tutting that America's post-cold-war abandonment of Somalia
created the conditions for terrorism. And weeks after admitting
that "nation-building" was necessary in Afghanistan, President
Bush might be forced to admit that, lo and behold, it was
necessary in Somalia as well.

In other words, Afghanistan is not unique. And, because it is not
unique, the lessons it is teaching cannot be segregated from
American foreign policy more generally. Which means that
President Bush's awkward admission last week that
"nation-building"--which he has been trashing for close to two
years--is necessary in Afghanistan constitutes a more fundamental
reversal than his advisers acknowledge. If the war on terrorism
requires nation-building in Afghanistan, it requires
nation-building all over the world. And if the war on terrorism
requires nation-building all over the world, one of the central
principles of post-1994 Republican foreign policy has been proven
hideously wrong.

In recent years liberals (myself included) have gleefully hurled
the epithet "isolationist"--deployed so devastatingly against
Democrats in the 1970s and '80s--back in the GOP's face. But the
truth is a little more complicated. When it comes to great power
threats (Taiwan) or clear economic interests (the Gulf),
Republicans have remained willing to expend American blood and
treasure.

What the GOP has vehemently turned against is what Michael
Mandelbaum acerbically called "foreign policy as social work."
When the Gingrichites took the House in 1995, they tried to cut
foreign aid by one-third. Republican leaders opposed economic
assistance for Haiti after the Clinton administration restored
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And with the exception of John McCain and
a few others, they denounced America's air war in Kosovo.

In his campaign for president, George W. Bush picked up the
baton. In his October 11, 2000, debate with Al Gore, he declared
his opposition to "nation-building" no fewer than five times. He
announced that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Haiti, and his
chief foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, declared that he
would eventually withdraw them from Bosnia and Kosovo as well. As
she put it, "We don't need to have the Eighty-Second Airborne
escorting kids to kindergarten."

Bush and the Republicans leveled several charges against
nation-building. First, they said it stretched our military too
thin. But when W. demanded the withdrawal of American troops from
Haiti, the United States only had 75 of them on the ground.
America's peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia
totaled around 1 percent of the annual defense budget and
involved fewer than 10 percent of the U.S. troops in Europe.
Second, the GOP insisted that nation-building never works. But in
the former Yugoslavia, nato troops and Western aid have not only
stopped the region's terrible wars, they have contributed to the
democratization of Serbia and Croatia-- virtually ensuring that
those wars will not start again. Even in Haiti, widely considered
a nation-building fiasco, the United States replaced a murderous
junta with a chaotic and hapless democracy--a limited but genuine
improvement.

Such evidence was largely beside the point, however, because the
GOP's true objection to nation-building was deeper. The party
simply didn't believe that the disintegration of far-off,
dirt-poor countries threatened American security. And so, even if
nation-building might do some good, it wasn't worth a modest
expense or a single casualty.

In the case of Afghanistan, even President Bush has now
implicitly admitted that this argument was disastrously wrong.
But if it was wrong in Afghanistan, it is wrong in lots of other
places as well. After all, the White House says there are Al
Qaeda cells in roughly 68 countries. The network thrives in
places beyond central government control--Pakistan's northwest
frontier; remote islands in the Philippines and Indonesia;
impoverished, lawless countries like Yemen, Tajikistan, and the
Sudan. And we now know that even the most backward states can
provide a platform for mass murder on the other side of the
globe. There are large Muslim populations in Congo, Guinea, and
Sierra Leone, failing states that America has essentially written
off. If Al Qaeda set up shop there, local governments would be
powerless to stop them.

This is not to suggest that the United States needs a Marshall
Plan for every unstable country on Earth. But September 11 does
go a long way toward answering the question that Republicans
asked every time the Clinton administration intervened in some
remote country: "Why should we care?" We should care because we
are fighting another global war. During the last one, Republicans
understood better than Democrats that far-off, dirt-poor
countries like Angola, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan could
threaten the United States if they fell prey to an enemy with
global ambitions and global reach. And, more than Democrats, they
were willing to send aid, expend diplomatic capital, and even
deploy troops to make sure that didn't happen. That is the lesson
the GOP needs to relearn today.

Eight years ago, when the United States lost 18 troops trying to
reconstruct Somalia, Clinton and the Republicans agreed that the
mission wasn't worth the loss of life. But imagine if America had
stayed--losing 18 lives a year and spending billions of
dollars--and as a result Somalia was today a functioning country
under unified, responsible control. In other words, a country Al
Qaeda couldn't call home. After September 11, can we really say
it wouldn't have been worth the cost?


PETER BEINART is the Editor of TNR.


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