NATION-BUILDING

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

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.