thedrifter
09-08-03, 02:51 PM
HOW AMERICA HAS CHANGED
FOREIGN POLICY
Engaging failing states
By Chester A. Crocker
Crocker is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. This commentary is reprinted from Foreign Affairs Magazine.
September 7, 2003
Two years have passed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes roused the United States from its post-Cold War strategic slumber. The attacks spurred Washington to action and offered an opportunity for fresh thinking in foreign policy.
But there is something wrong with the big picture. The administration may be hitting its immediate targets but it is only paying lip service to the broader objective of achieving a safer and better world order.
Forcing U.S. global policies into the simplifying framework of a "war on terrorism" creates the illusion that there is one enemy. By concentrating on worst-case scenarios of immediate vulnerability, the Bush administration overlooks the failed-state crucible in which many threats to U.S. interests are forged.
Now that the United States has carried out several bold military campaigns to unseat odious rulers, it must face the reality that these are only the first steps in building global security. Acknowledging this truth openly is the only way to mobilize U.S. and international attention, resources and staying power.
It is time, therefore, for a fresh articulation of Washington's purposes, centered on sustaining regional security, leading coalitions and institutions to help failing and threatened states, and winning the struggle after wars end and regimes change.
The Bush administration's National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, quietly but explicitly identified the importance of dealing with the problem of failed and failing states. American policy-makers have been underestimating this challenge for years.
State failure directly affects a broad range of U.S. interests, including the promotion of human rights, good governance, the rule of law, religious tolerance, environmental preservation and opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters. It contributes to regional insecurity, weapons proliferation, narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Yet since the strategy was sent to Congress a year ago, the administration has made helping failing and failed states a secondary priority.
The reasoning behind this lapse, presumably, is that rogues seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction constitute a more pressing threat. But putting the problem of state failure on a back burner means that turbulence continues to spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, the Andean nations, South and Central Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.
Regime change may be more satisfying than long-term statecraft; it is certainly more telegenic. But unless the United States and its principal partners engage proactively to prevent and contain state failure, rogue regimes may seize power in additional failed or failing states, raising the specter of fresh adversaries that seek weapons of mass destruction and harbor terrorists. Moreover, the United States must learn to rebuild states after overturning their regimes or the whole enterprise will backfire.
State failure is a gradual process. Self-interested rulers might progressively corrupt the central organs of government, as in Myanmar or in Nigeria during Sani Abacha's regime. Corrupt elites might ally themselves with criminal networks to divide the spoils, as in Liberia and parts of the former Yugoslavia. State authority might be undermined and replaced in particular regions, paving the way for illegal trading operations, as in parts of Georgia and Colombia.
During transitions away from authoritarianism, state security services might lose their monopoly on the instruments of violence, leading to a downward spiral of lawlessness, as in several Central American states since the early 1990s. The complete collapse of state power in large sections of a country, as in Congo for much of the past five years, is only the most extreme version of the phenomenon.
States with shallow domestic legitimacy tend to fail when they lose foreign support, as often happened in the former colonial domains of European empires. Failure is accelerated when the major actors in the international system abandon local regimes no longer deemed acceptable or convenient partners.
Afghanistan exemplifies how an already war-torn polity failed after the strategic disengagement of Moscow and Washington in the early 1990s, ending up as a haven for terrorists. States may also fail due to regional contagion exported by rogues and warlords, as has occurred in central and west Africa.
State failure, inextricably linked with internal strife and humanitarian crisis, can spread from localized unrest to national collapse and then regional destabilization. And unattractive entities – some hostile to U.S. security interests, others hostile to Washington's humanitarian and political goals – may rise to fill the political vacuum.
Washington needs to look closely at the relationship between conflict, regime change and state failure. According to a biennial report published by the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management, armed conflict has decreased by 50 percent since its peak in the mid-1980s and is now at the lowest level since the early 1960s.
Still, at the end of 2002, there remained 25 countries engaged in ongoing or sporadic violence, the great majority due to civil strife over the control of government, people or resources. The report identifies 33 societies emerging from recent wars and nearly 50 regimes located somewhere between autocracy and democracy.
New regimes – whether emerging from wars, negotiated transitions and first-ever elections, or foreign-or domestic-led regime change – tend to be fragile. They may require decades to become institutionalized states operating under the rule of law. In the meantime, the societies around them are ripe for exploitation by ambitious and greedy factions.
But the challenge is not only to address state failure in the handful of states where regimes get overthrown. It is also to stop and contain the process of failure before it produces worst-case scenarios.
When state failure sets in, the balance of power shifts ominously against ordinary civilians and in favor of armed entities operating outside the law. Those who lead the cells and networks that hollow out failing states focus with a laserlike intensity on exploiting opportunity and creating facts on the ground.
Whether loosely arrayed in symbiotic relations or more closely coordinated by a central brain, they find space to operate in the vacuums left by a declining or transitional state – and they eat what they kill.
The United States and other leading powers need to plan and coordinate their strategies for dealing with failed states more coherently, fund key programs more generously and speak more openly and directly about how to strengthen states and why it matters to do so.
The most urgent task is to create the political and organizational capacity to swing into action effectively when existing state structures are failing or about to collapse. The concept of military readiness is well understood, but readiness for what happens after the fighting stops is just as important.
Washington does not have the capacity for political follow-through across a broad spectrum of post-conflict or post-intervention requirements. As Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate, the U.S. government lacks the interagency mechanisms, institutional memory, doctrine and committed personnel and budget resources necessary for rebuilding failed states and collapsed regimes.
Senior executive branch officials have resisted attempts to bring coherence to post-conflict reconstruction and state-building efforts. A recent bipartisan commission report sought to address this inexcusable situation and called on the president to designate a senior interagency leader for reconstruction tasks and to create dedicated staffs addressing the issue within the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and NATO.
It also urged creation of a governmentwide center for coordination and training in the major dimensions of post-conflict policy. These recommendations form the basis for the Winning the Peace Act of 2003 recently introduced in the Senate.
continued.......
FOREIGN POLICY
Engaging failing states
By Chester A. Crocker
Crocker is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. This commentary is reprinted from Foreign Affairs Magazine.
September 7, 2003
Two years have passed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes roused the United States from its post-Cold War strategic slumber. The attacks spurred Washington to action and offered an opportunity for fresh thinking in foreign policy.
But there is something wrong with the big picture. The administration may be hitting its immediate targets but it is only paying lip service to the broader objective of achieving a safer and better world order.
Forcing U.S. global policies into the simplifying framework of a "war on terrorism" creates the illusion that there is one enemy. By concentrating on worst-case scenarios of immediate vulnerability, the Bush administration overlooks the failed-state crucible in which many threats to U.S. interests are forged.
Now that the United States has carried out several bold military campaigns to unseat odious rulers, it must face the reality that these are only the first steps in building global security. Acknowledging this truth openly is the only way to mobilize U.S. and international attention, resources and staying power.
It is time, therefore, for a fresh articulation of Washington's purposes, centered on sustaining regional security, leading coalitions and institutions to help failing and threatened states, and winning the struggle after wars end and regimes change.
The Bush administration's National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, quietly but explicitly identified the importance of dealing with the problem of failed and failing states. American policy-makers have been underestimating this challenge for years.
State failure directly affects a broad range of U.S. interests, including the promotion of human rights, good governance, the rule of law, religious tolerance, environmental preservation and opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters. It contributes to regional insecurity, weapons proliferation, narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Yet since the strategy was sent to Congress a year ago, the administration has made helping failing and failed states a secondary priority.
The reasoning behind this lapse, presumably, is that rogues seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction constitute a more pressing threat. But putting the problem of state failure on a back burner means that turbulence continues to spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, the Andean nations, South and Central Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.
Regime change may be more satisfying than long-term statecraft; it is certainly more telegenic. But unless the United States and its principal partners engage proactively to prevent and contain state failure, rogue regimes may seize power in additional failed or failing states, raising the specter of fresh adversaries that seek weapons of mass destruction and harbor terrorists. Moreover, the United States must learn to rebuild states after overturning their regimes or the whole enterprise will backfire.
State failure is a gradual process. Self-interested rulers might progressively corrupt the central organs of government, as in Myanmar or in Nigeria during Sani Abacha's regime. Corrupt elites might ally themselves with criminal networks to divide the spoils, as in Liberia and parts of the former Yugoslavia. State authority might be undermined and replaced in particular regions, paving the way for illegal trading operations, as in parts of Georgia and Colombia.
During transitions away from authoritarianism, state security services might lose their monopoly on the instruments of violence, leading to a downward spiral of lawlessness, as in several Central American states since the early 1990s. The complete collapse of state power in large sections of a country, as in Congo for much of the past five years, is only the most extreme version of the phenomenon.
States with shallow domestic legitimacy tend to fail when they lose foreign support, as often happened in the former colonial domains of European empires. Failure is accelerated when the major actors in the international system abandon local regimes no longer deemed acceptable or convenient partners.
Afghanistan exemplifies how an already war-torn polity failed after the strategic disengagement of Moscow and Washington in the early 1990s, ending up as a haven for terrorists. States may also fail due to regional contagion exported by rogues and warlords, as has occurred in central and west Africa.
State failure, inextricably linked with internal strife and humanitarian crisis, can spread from localized unrest to national collapse and then regional destabilization. And unattractive entities – some hostile to U.S. security interests, others hostile to Washington's humanitarian and political goals – may rise to fill the political vacuum.
Washington needs to look closely at the relationship between conflict, regime change and state failure. According to a biennial report published by the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management, armed conflict has decreased by 50 percent since its peak in the mid-1980s and is now at the lowest level since the early 1960s.
Still, at the end of 2002, there remained 25 countries engaged in ongoing or sporadic violence, the great majority due to civil strife over the control of government, people or resources. The report identifies 33 societies emerging from recent wars and nearly 50 regimes located somewhere between autocracy and democracy.
New regimes – whether emerging from wars, negotiated transitions and first-ever elections, or foreign-or domestic-led regime change – tend to be fragile. They may require decades to become institutionalized states operating under the rule of law. In the meantime, the societies around them are ripe for exploitation by ambitious and greedy factions.
But the challenge is not only to address state failure in the handful of states where regimes get overthrown. It is also to stop and contain the process of failure before it produces worst-case scenarios.
When state failure sets in, the balance of power shifts ominously against ordinary civilians and in favor of armed entities operating outside the law. Those who lead the cells and networks that hollow out failing states focus with a laserlike intensity on exploiting opportunity and creating facts on the ground.
Whether loosely arrayed in symbiotic relations or more closely coordinated by a central brain, they find space to operate in the vacuums left by a declining or transitional state – and they eat what they kill.
The United States and other leading powers need to plan and coordinate their strategies for dealing with failed states more coherently, fund key programs more generously and speak more openly and directly about how to strengthen states and why it matters to do so.
The most urgent task is to create the political and organizational capacity to swing into action effectively when existing state structures are failing or about to collapse. The concept of military readiness is well understood, but readiness for what happens after the fighting stops is just as important.
Washington does not have the capacity for political follow-through across a broad spectrum of post-conflict or post-intervention requirements. As Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate, the U.S. government lacks the interagency mechanisms, institutional memory, doctrine and committed personnel and budget resources necessary for rebuilding failed states and collapsed regimes.
Senior executive branch officials have resisted attempts to bring coherence to post-conflict reconstruction and state-building efforts. A recent bipartisan commission report sought to address this inexcusable situation and called on the president to designate a senior interagency leader for reconstruction tasks and to create dedicated staffs addressing the issue within the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and NATO.
It also urged creation of a governmentwide center for coordination and training in the major dimensions of post-conflict policy. These recommendations form the basis for the Winning the Peace Act of 2003 recently introduced in the Senate.
continued.......