NATION-BUILDING
The Inescapable Responsibility of the World's Only Superpower

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/JEROME DELAY U.S. Marine Corporal Roy Edinton, from Midway, Ky., sits in a gun turret atop a truck delivering food to a CARE warehouse in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Dec. 12, 1992. The convoy of three trucks was the first to be escorted through the war-ravaged town by U.S. Marines.

By James Dobbins

James Dobbins served as U.S. special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He now directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND.

We at the RAND Corporation have compiled what we have found to be the most important lessons learned by the United States in its nation-building efforts since World War II. Not all these hard-won lessons have yet been fully applied to America's most recent nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We define nation-building as "the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy." We have compared the levels of progress toward this goal among seven historical cases: Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. These are the most important instances in which American military power has been used in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin democratization elsewhere around the world since World War II.

From our review of the historical cases, we at RAND have derived a number of overarching conclusions:

• Many factors—such as prior democratic experience, level of economic development, and social homogeneity—can influence the ease or difficulty of nation-building, but the single most important controllable determinant seems to be the level of effort, as measured in troops, money, and time.
• Multilateral nation-building is more complex and time-consuming than a unilateral approach. But the multilateral approach is considerably less expensive for individual participants.
• Multilateral nation-building can produce more thorough transformations and greater regional reconciliation than can unilateral efforts.
• Unity of command is as essential in peace operations as it is in war. This unity of command can be achieved even in operations with broad multilateral participation when the major participants share a common vision and tailor the response of international institutions accordingly.
• There appears to be an inverse correlation between the size of the military stabilization force and the level of casualties. The higher the proportion of troops relative to the resident population, the lower the number of casualties suffered and inflicted. Indeed, most of the post-conflict operations that were generously manned suffered no casualties at all.
• Neighboring states can exert significant influence, for good or bad. It is nearly impossible to put together a fragmented nation if its neighbors try to tear it apart. Every effort should be made to secure their support.
• Accountability for past injustices can be a powerful component of democratization. Such accountability can be among the most difficult and controversial aspects of any nation-building endeavor, however, and therefore should be attempted only if there is a deep and long-term commitment to the overall operation.
• There is no quick fix for nation-building. None of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years.

These lessons are drawn from the "best practices" of nation-building over the past 60 years. We explain the lessons in greater detail below and then suggest how they might be applied to future operations and, in particular, to Iraq. Although the combat phase of the war against Iraq went very well and the regime collapsed much faster than many had expected, the United States has been left with the unenviable task of seeking to build a democratic, economically vibrant Iraqi nation.

From Germany to Afghanistan

The cases of Germany and Japan set a standard for postconflict nation-building that has not been matched since. Both were comprehensive efforts at social, political, and economic reconstruction. These successes demonstrated that democracy was transferable, that societies could be encouraged to transform themselves, and that major transformations could endure.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/HENRY BURROUGHS A German schoolgirl writes on the blackboard during an English lesson at her school in Berlin, Germany, on Sept. 29, 1945, at one of more than 200 schools that were maintained by the allied occupational government in the American sector of the divided German capital.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/CHARLES P. GORRY U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur reviews more than 15,000 troops of the occupation forces from all over Japan at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on the Fourth of July, 1949.

For the next 40 years, there were few attempts to replicate these early successes. During the cold war with the Soviet Union, America employed its military power to preserve the status quo, not to alter it; to manage crises, not to resolve the underlying problems; to overthrow unfriendly regimes and reinstall friendly ones, not to bring about fundamental societal change.

After 1989, a policy of global containment of the Soviet Union no longer impelled the United States to preserve the status quo. Washington was now free to overlook regional instability in places like Yugoslavia and Afghanistan as long as the instability did not directly threaten American interests. At the same time, though, the United States had the unprecedented opportunity of using its unrivaled power to resolve, not just to manage or to contain, international problems of strategic importance. In addition, the United States could secure broader international support for such efforts than ever before.

Throughout the 1990s, each successive post-cold war effort became wider in scope and more ambitious in intent than its predecessor had been. In Somalia, the original objective was purely humanitarian but was subsequently expanded to democratization. In Haiti, the objective was to reinstall a president and to conduct elections according to an existing constitution. In Bosnia, the objective was to create a multiethnic state out of a former Yugoslav republic. In Kosovo, the objective was to establish a democratic polity and market economy virtually from scratch.

From Somalia in 1992 to Kosovo in 1999, each nation-building effort was somewhat better managed than the previous one (see table at end of story). Somalia was the nadir. Everything that could go wrong did. The operation culminated in the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1994 after a sharp tactical setback that had resulted in 18 American deaths in October 1993. This reverse, which became memorialized in the book and film "Black Hawk Down," was largely the result of an unnecessarily complicated U.S. and United Nations command structure that had three distinct forces operating with three distinct chains of command. Despite its failure, the Somalia mission taught America crucial lessons for the future. One was the importance of unity of command in peace operations as well as in war. Second was the need to scale mission objectives to available resources in troops, money, and staying power. A third lesson was the importance of deploying significant numbers of international police alongside international military forces to places where the local law enforcement institutions had disappeared or become illegitimate.

America applied these lessons to Haiti in the mid-1990s. We had unity of command throughout the operation. We did not have parallel American and allied forces. We had a single force under a single command with a clear hierarchy of decisionmaking. We deployed a large number of police within weeks of the military deployment, and the police were armed with both weapons and arrest authority. Unfortunately, we were obsessed with exit strategies and exit deadlines in the wake of the Somalia debacle. So we pulled out of Haiti with the job at best half done.

The Bosnia experience of the late 1990s was more successful. We set an exit deadline but wisely ignored it when the time came. On the negative side, there was a lack of coordination between the military stabilization efforts of NATO and those organizations responsible for civilian reconstruction. Consequently, the authority for implementing the civilian reconstruction projects became fragmented among numerous competing institutions. To complicate the situation further, the international police who had been deployed were armed with neither weapons nor arrest authority.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/JOHN MCCONNICO Haitian poll workers crowd around marked ballots minutes after the polls closed on presidential elections in Cite Soleil, a slum of Port-au- Prince, Haiti, on Dec. 17, 1995. Voter turnout was low throughout the country.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/SANTIAGO LYON U.S. Navy Construction Mechanic Dennis Conrie from Esko, Minn., clears snow from the top of a communications truck as the U.S. flag waves behind him amid the destroyed roof of the Zetra stadium in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on Dec. 29, 1995. His navy unit broadcast a daily radio program, called "Balkan Rock," from the stadium.

By the time of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, we and our allies had absorbed most of these lessons. We then made smarter choices in Kosovo. We achieved unity of command on both the civil and military sides. As in Bosnia, NATO was responsible for military operations. On the civil side, we established a clear hierarchical structure under a United Nations representative. Leadership was shared effectively between Europe and the United States. Working together, we deployed nearly 5,000 well-armed police alongside military peacekeepers. Although far from perfect, the arrangement was more successful than it had been in Bosnia.

During his presidential campaign in 2000, George W. Bush criticized the Clinton administration for this expansive nation-building agenda. As president, Bush adopted a more modest set of objectives when faced with a comparable challenge in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the attempt to reverse the trend toward ever larger and more ambitious U.S.-led nation-building operations has proven short-lived. In Iraq, the United States has taken on a task comparable in its vast scope to the transformational efforts still under way in Bosnia and Kosovo and comparable in its enormous scale to the earlier American occupations of Germany and Japan. Nation-building, it appears, is the inescapable responsibility of the world's only superpower.

Quantitative Comparisons of Cases

For each of the seven historical cases of nation-building, we at RAND compared quantitative data on the "inputs" (troops, money, and time) and "outputs." The outputs included casualties (or lack thereof ), democratic elections, and increases in per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

Troop levels varied widely across the cases. The levels ranged from 1.6 million U.S. troops in the American sector in Germany at the end of World War II to 14,000 U.S. and international troops currently in Afghanistan. Gross numbers, however, are not the most useful numbers for comparison, because the size and populations of the nations being built have been so disparate. We chose instead to compare the numbers of U.S. and foreign soldiers per thousand inhabitants in each occupied territory. We then compared the proportional force levels at specified times after the conflict ended (or after the U.S. rebuilding efforts began).

Figure 1 shows the number of international troops (or in the German and Japanese cases, U.S. troops) per thousand inhabitants in each territory at the outset of the intervention and at various intervals thereafter. As the data illustrate, even the proportional force levels vary immensely across the operations. (The levels vary so tremendously that they require a logarithmic, or exponential, scale for manageable illustration.)

Bosnia, Kosovo, and particularly the U.S.-occupied sector of Germany started with substantial proportions of military forces, whereas the initial levels in Japan, Somalia, Haiti, and especially Afghanistan were much more modest. The levels generally decreased over time. In Germany, the level then rose again for reasons having to do with the cold war. Overall, the differences in force levels across the cases had significant implications for other aspects of the operations.

Figure 2 compares the amount of foreign economic aid per capita (in constant 2001 U.S. dollars) provided to six of the territories during the first two years. Although Germany received the most aid in raw dollar terms ($12 billion), the country did not rank high on a per capita basis. Per capita assistance there ran a little over $200. Kosovo, which ranked fourth in terms of total assistance, received over $800 per resident. With the second-highest level of economic assistance per capita, Kosovo enjoyed the most rapid recovery in levels of per capita GDP. In contrast, Haiti, which received much less per capita than Kosovo, has experienced little growth in per capita GDP.

Germany and Japan both stand out as unequaled success stories. One of the most important questions is why both operations fared so well compared with the others. The easiest answer is that Germany and Japan were already highly developed and economically advanced societies. This certainly explains why it was easier to reconstruct their economies than it was to reconstruct those in the other territories. But economics is not a sufficient answer to explain the transition to democracy. The spread of democracy to poor countries in Latin America, Asia, and parts of Africa suggests that this form of government is not unique to advanced industrial economies. Indeed, democracy can take root in countries where neither Western culture nor significant economic development exists. Nation-building is not principally about economic reconstruction, but rather about political transformation.

Because Germany and Japan were also ethnically homogeneous societies, some people might argue that homogeneity is the key to success. We believe that homogeneity helps greatly but that it is not essential, either. It is true that Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan are divided ethnically, socioeconomically, or tribally in ways that Germany and Japan were not. However, the kinds of communal hatred that mark Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan are even more pronounced in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the process of democratization has nevertheless made some progress.

What principally distinguishes Germany, Japan, Bosnia, and Kosovo from Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan is not their levels of Western culture, democratic history, economic development, or ethnic homogeneity. Rather, the principal distinction is the level of effort that the United States and the international community have put into the democratic transformations. Among the recent operations, the United States and its allies have put 25 times more money and 50 times more troops on a per capita basis into post-conflict Kosovo than into post-conflict Afghanistan. These higher levels of input account in significant measure for the higher levels of output in terms of democratic institutionbuilding and economic growth.

Japan, one of the two undoubted successes, fully meets the criterion regarding the duration of time devoted to its transformation. In the first two years, Japan received considerably less external economic assistance per capita than did Germany, Bosnia, or Kosovo, indeed less than Haiti and about the same amount as Afghanistan. Japan's correspondingly low post-conflict economic growth rates reflect this fact. Japan's subsequent growth of the 1950s, spurred by American spending linked to the Korean War, helped to consolidate public support for the democratic reforms that had been put in place in the immediate postwar years. As with the German economic miracle of the 1950s, the experience in Japan suggests that rising economic prosperity is not so much a necessary precursor to political reform as a highly desirable successor and legitimizing factor.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/SGT. DYLAN J. MONTGOMERY, U.S. ARMY Polish, Ukrainian, and American soldiers in the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping mission unload boxes of clothing from a U.S. Army helicopter in a field near the village of Drenova Glava, Kosovo, on Feb. 19, 2001. The army flew the clothing to the isolated village because of the impassable roads.

In proportion to its population, Japan also had a smaller military stabilization force (or, as it was then termed, occupation force) than did Germany, Bosnia, or Kosovo, although the force was larger than those in Haiti and Afghanistan. The ability to secure Japan with a comparatively small force relates to both the willing collaboration of the Japanese power structures and the homogeneity of the population. A third important factor was the unprecedented scale of Japan's defeat—the devastation and consequent intimidation wrought by years of total war, culminating in the fire bombing of its cities and finally two nuclear attacks. In situations where the conflict has been terminated less conclusively and destructively (or not terminated at all), such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and most recently Iraq, we have seen more difficult post-conflict security challenges. Indeed, it seems that the more swift and bloodless the military victory, the more difficult can be the task of post-conflict stabilization.

The seven historical cases have differed in terms of duration. The record suggests that although staying long does not guarantee success, leaving early assures failure. To date, no effort at enforced democratization has been brought to a successful conclusion in less than seven years.

Unity of Command

Throughout the 1990s, the United States wrestled with the challenge of gaining wider participation in its nation-building endeavors while also preserving adequate unity of command. In Somalia and Haiti, the United States experimented with sequential arrangements in which it initially managed and funded the operations but then quickly turned responsibility over to the United Nations. In Bosnia, the United States succeeded in achieving both broad participation and unity of command on the military side of the operation through NATO. But in Bosnia the United States resisted the logic of achieving a comparable and cohesive arrangement on the civil side. In Kosovo, the United States achieved broad participation and unity of command on both the military and civil sides by working through NATO and the United Nations.

None of these models proved entirely satisfactory. However, the arrangements in Kosovo seem to have provided the best amalgam to date of American leadership, European and other participation, financial burdensharing, and unity of command. Every international official in Kosovo works ultimately for either the NATO commander or the Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General. Neither of these is an American. But by virtue of America's credibility in the region and America's influence in NATO and on the U.N. Security Council, the United States has been able to maintain a satisfactory leadership role while fielding only 16 percent of the peacekeeping troops and paying only 16 percent of the reconstruction costs.

The efficacy of the Bosnia and Kosovo models has depended on the ability of the United States and its principal allies to attain a common vision of the objectives and then to coordinate the relevant institutions— principally NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, and the United Nations—to meet the objectives. These two models offer a viable fusion of burden-sharing and unity of command.

In Afghanistan, in contrast, the United States opted for parallel arrangements on the military side and even greater divergence on the civil side. An international force—with no U.S. participation—operates in the capital of Kabul, while a national and mostly U.S. force operates everywhere else. The United Nations has responsibility for promoting political transformation, while individual donors coordinate economic reconstruction—or, more often, fail to do so.

The arrangement in Afghanistan is a marginal improvement over that in Somalia, because the separate U.S. and international forces are at least not operating in the same physical space. But the arrangement represents a clear regression from what we achieved in Haiti, Bosnia, or, in particular, Kosovo. It is therefore not surprising that the overall results achieved to date in Afghanistan are better than in Somalia, not yet better than in Haiti, and not as good as in Bosnia or Kosovo. The operation in Afghanistan, though, is a good deal less expensive than those in Bosnia or Kosovo.

Applying the Lessons to Iraq

The challenges facing the United States in Iraq today are formidable. Still, it is possible to draw valuable lessons from America's previous experiences with nation-building. There are four main lessons to be learned for Iraq.

The first lesson is that democratic nation-building can work given sufficient inputs of resources. These inputs, however, can be very high. Regarding military forces, Figure 3 takes the numbers of troops used in the previous cases of nation-building and projects, for each, a proportionally equivalent force for the Iraqi population over the next decade. For example, if Kosovo levels of troop commitments were deployed to Iraq, the number would be some 500,000 U.S. and coalition troops through 2005. (There are roughly 150,000 coalition troops stationed in Iraq today.) To provide troop coverage at Bosnia levels, the requisite troop figures would be 460,000 initially, falling to 258,000 by 2005 and 145,000 by 2008.

In addition to military forces, it is often important to deploy a significant number of international civil police. To achieve a level comparable to the nearly 5,000 police deployed in Kosovo, Iraq would need an infusion of 53,000 international civil police officers through 2005 (in addition to the forces represented in Figure 3).

It is too early to predict with accuracy the required levels of foreign aid, but we can draw comparisons with the previous historical cases. Figure 4 takes the amount of foreign aid provided in six of the seven previous cases of nation-building and projects proportionally equivalent figures for the Iraqi population over the next two years. If Bosnia levels of foreign aid per capita were provided to Iraq, the country would require some $36 billion in aid from now through 2005. Conversely, aid at the same level as Afghanistan would total $1 billion over the next two years.

We at RAND believe that Iraq will require substantial external funds for humanitarian assistance and budgetary support. It is highly unlikely that taxes on the Iraqi oil sector will be adequate to fund the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy in the near future. Judging by the experiences of Bosnia and Kosovo, territories that have higher per capita incomes than Iraq, budgetary support will be necessary for quite some time. To manage immediate operating expenditures, we suggest that the post-conflict authorities in Iraq first establish a reasonable level of expenditures, then create a transparent tax system, and ask foreign donors to pick up the difference until the nation gets on its feet. We believe that this will be the most efficacious avenue to economic recovery.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/SERGEI GRITS Unidentified delegates to the loya jirga, or grand council, discuss the formation of a new legislative body for Afghanistan on June 16, 2002. The loya jirga was convened as part of a U.N.-guided process to move Afghanistan toward democracy after a generation of war.

At the same time, we suspect that Iraq will not receive the same per capita levels of foreign troops, police, or economic aid as did either Bosnia or Kosovo. Figures of 500,000 troops or $36 billion in aid are beyond the capacity of even the world's only superpower to generate or sustain. Even half those levels will require the United States to broaden participation in Iraq's post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction well beyond the comparatively narrow coalition that fought the war, thereby mounting a broader international effort on the Balkan models. According to the lessons learned, the ultimate consequences for Iraq of a failure to generate adequate international manpower and money are likely to be lower levels of security, higher casualties sustained and inflicted, lower economic growth rates, and slower, less thoroughgoing political transformation.

The second lesson for Iraq is that short departure deadlines are incompatible with nation-building. The United States will succeed only if it makes a long-term commitment to establishing strong democratic institutions and does not beat a hasty retreat tied to artificial deadlines. Moreover, setting premature dates for early national elections can be counterproductive.

Third, important hindrances to nation-building include both internal fragmentation (along political, ethnic, or sectarian lines) and a lack of external support from neighboring states. Germany and Japan had homogeneous societies. Bosnia and Kosovo had neighbors that, following the democratic transitions in Croatia and Serbia, collaborated with the international community. Iraq could combine the worst of both worlds, lacking both internal cohesion and regional support. The United States should consider putting a consultative mechanism in place, on the model of the Peace Implementation Council in the Balkans or the "Two Plus Six" group that involved Afghanistan's six neighbors plus Russia and the United States, as a means of consulting with the neighboring countries of Iraq.

Fourth, building a democracy, a strong economy, and long-term legitimacy depends in each case on striking the balance between international burden-sharing and unity of command. As noted above, the United States is unlikely to be able to generate adequate levels of troops, money, or endurance as long as it relies principally upon the limited coalition with which it fought the war. On the other hand, engaging a broader coalition, to include major countries that will expect to secure influence commensurate with their contributions, will require either new institutional arrangements or the extension of existing ones, such as NATO.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/ALI HAIDER With a map of Iraq in the background, some of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council gather for a news conference after their inaugural meeting in Baghdad, Iraq, on July 13, 2003. The council brought together prominent Iraqis of all political and religious persuasions in a crucial first step on the nation's path to democracy.

In its early months, the American-led stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq have not gone as smoothly as might be expected, given abundant, recent, and relevant American experience. This is, after all, the sixth major nation-building enterprise the United States has mounted in eleven years, and the fifth in a Muslim nation or province.

Many of the initial difficulties in Iraq have been encountered elsewhere. Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan also experienced the rapid and utter collapse of their prior regimes. In each of those instances, the local police, courts, penal services, and militaries were destroyed, disrupted, disbanded, and/or discredited. They were consequently unavailable to fill the postconflict security gap. In Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, extremist elements emerged to fill the resultant vacuum of power. In all five cases, organized crime quickly developed into a major challenge to the occupying authority.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, the external stabilization forces ultimately proved adequate to surmount these challenges. In Somalia and Afghanistan, they did not or have not yet, respectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the management of each major stabilization and reconstruction mission represented a marginal advance over its predecessor, but in the past several years this modestly positive learning curve has not been sustained. The Afghan mission cannot yet be deemed more successful than the one in Haiti. It is certainly too early to evaluate the success of the Iraqi nation-building mission, but its first few months do not raise it above those in Bosnia and Kosovo at a similar stage.

Over the past decade, the United States has made major investments in the combat efficiency of its forces. The return on investment has been evident in the dramatic improvements demonstrated from one campaign to the next, from Desert Storm to the Kosovo air campaign to Operation Iraqi Freedom. But there has been no comparable increase in the capacity of U.S. armed forces, or of U.S. civilian agencies for that matter, to conduct post-combat stabilization and reconstruction operations.

Nation-building has been a controversial mission over the past decade, and the extent of this controversy has undoubtedly curtailed the investments needed to do these tasks better. So has institutional resistance in both the state and defense departments, neither of which regards nation-building among its core missions. As a result, successive administrations tend to treat each new such mission as if it were the first and, more importantly, the last.

This expectation is unlikely to be realized any time soon. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration conducted a major nation-building intervention, on the average, every two years. The current administration, despite a strong disinclination to engage American armed forces in these activities, has launched two major such enterprises in a period of eighteen months.

Post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction with the objective of promoting a transition to democracy appear to be the inescapable responsibility of the world's only superpower. Therefore, in addition to securing the major resources that will be needed to carry through the current operation in Iraq to success, the United States ought to make the smaller long-term investments in its own institutional capacity to conduct such operations. In this way, the ongoing improvements in combat performance of American forces could be matched by improvements in the postconflict performance of our government as a whole.

Related Reading

America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel Swanger, Anga Timilsina, RAND/ MR-1753-RC, 2003, 280 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3460-X.

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