Fixing failed states: a cure worse than the disease?

It is this categorical error that is at the heart of the trouble with obsessing over state failure. To the extent that a threat has ever emanated from a failed state--and Afghanistan is essentially the only example of this--addressing the failure is different from attacking the threat. At best, the attempt to correlate state failure with terrorism relies on a dubious interpretation of terrorism: that terrorism is, at its root, a result of poverty that can be eradicated by an aggressive development effort. As Alan B. Krueger and others have demonstrated, however, terrorism is a response to political grievances, not a consequence of poverty. Accordingly, using the threat of terrorism to justify nation building in failed states is inappropriate.

Fixing Failed States--An Unreasonable Proposal

Suppose the reader is unpersuaded by our argument that most failed states pose little if any threat to US national security. The skeptic, unconcerned with tugging at threads hanging from the sweater of sovereignty, must then confront the fact that a serious commitment to successful nation building would require a fundamental reordering of the entire national security bureaucracy in the United States. What might such a reordering look like? What might it cost?

The short answer is "a lot." The first requisite for success in addressing state failure is providing security for the nation builders in the affected areas. (While literature frequently refers to "post-conflict" environments, the distinction between "conflict" and "post-conflict" is not always so neat). Many studies have been done since the 1990s on the military requirements for stabilization and reconstruction (S & R) operations, and the figures are astonishing.

In 2004, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board (DSB) authored a study examining the troop requirements to support S & R missions. It concluded, after surveying S & R operations throughout history since Roman times, that "stabilization operations can be very labor intensive ... The United States will sometimes have ambitious goals for transforming a society in a conflicted environment. Those goals may well demand 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants ... working for five to eight years."

Extrapolating from the DSB's numbers to particular countries paints an alarming picture. Achieving "ambitious goals" in Iraq, for example, under the DSB framework would have required roughly 500,000 troops in Iraq for 5 to 8 years. Less populous countries such as Haiti, by the DSB's rule of thumb, would call for roughly 162,000 American troops. Even "less ambitious" goals are extremely burdensome: they require 5 foreign troops per 1,000 indigents. Thus, less ambitious goals in Iraq would call for roughly 125,000 US troops for 5 to 8 years; in Haiti they would call for 40,500 troops. The joint Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, largely agrees with the more demanding figure in the DSB report: "Most density recommendations fall within a range of 20-25 counterinsurgents for every 1000 residents in an [area of operations]."

The US public is unlikely to support missions requiring such deployments over long periods of time, particularly in the types of strategic backwaters that crop up perennially on lists of failed states. It is important to remember that the troop requirements above are by no means a guarantee of success; they are a rule of thumb developed from the most comprehensive study of S & R operations to date. While every mission to repair a failed state would not necessarily take place amid a full-blown insurgency, it is important to recognize the potential for violence and unrest to emerge at any moment, and to be prepared for it. Indeed, the attempts at S & R in Iraq offer useful lessons for any potential future operations.

A fundamental and unanswered question lies at the heart of the efforts of the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq: are they comprised of civilians or military personnel? While the skills demanded clearly call for civilians--"agronomists, engineers, police officers [and] technicians" as described in one Washington Post profile--the demands that are made on them call for a military man's time commitment and willingness to deploy into war zones. In truth the demand is for a near superhuman breadth of capacity: Arabic language speaker, war-fighter, diplomat, and possessor of disparate technical skills as described above. A July 2007 White House fact sheet characterized their duties as including "bolstering moderates, promoting reconciliation, fostering economic development, building provincial capacity." This list of responsibilities better befits Superman than the US government.

Uncle Sam Wants You!

The PRTs are beset by a myriad of obstacles, the most important of which is the unlikely prospect of being able to staff at levels that would portend success. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly lamented when describing the type of people that are needed to staff the PRTs, "No foreign service in the world has those people."

Neither, it seems, do any government agencies--or at least, the people in them do not volunteer to work in Iraq. As of February 2007, the US Department of Agriculture was struggling to find 6--of 100,000 employees--who wanted to work in Iraq. In May, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez sent an "all hands on deck" email to the entire Commerce Department to request they volunteer for deployment to Iraq to work in a PRT. Just 40 of Commerce's 39,000 employees replied to the email, and the agency refused to reveal how many of them replied "yes."

US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has complained about the security regulations that limit deployment--even for US State Department employees serving in the embassy itself. Crocker suggested that military standards "should be good enough for [the State Department]." Meanwhile, over 20 percent of US Foreign Service officers have already served in Iraq, and a recent report indicated that at least 40 percent of FSOs who have served in war zones have suffered from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Deployments currently last just one year, but this has significant drawbacks in terms of continuity of operations and the ability to develop enduring relationships with Iraqis who must govern the country.

Indeed, the work of the PRTs is a tragicomic story. It involves heroic individuals--both civilian and military--working within a system that is absurdly inadequate to the mission. The environment is one in which the political conditions are nearly hopeless, and the PRTs' training and skill-building are entirely out of sync with the demands being made on them. As described by the outgoing head of the Office of Provincial Affairs in Iraq, Ambassador Henry Clarke, PRTs must "make their own assessments of parties, ethnic groups, the whole society ... Then they have to decide, from the many resources we can make available to them, which ones they need, and what to do first." As a result of staffing shortfalls, many of the PRT positions have been filled by military personnel who simply have taken off their official war-fighter hat and put on a PRT hat, without possessing the skills that the position necessitates.

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As Ginger Cruz, Deputy Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, testified in September 2007, only 5 percent of PRT team members speak Arabic. Cruz also pointed out that due to the unfavorable security environment, "movements at many PRTs are limited to one or two per day--and some to as few as one trip a week." Slightly more than 600 positions in the 25 PRTs currently operating in Iraq have been filled, slated to reach 800 by December 2007--all in a country of 25 million people. PRT training is composed of one week of security training and five days of additional training, which US Institute of Peace scholar Robert Perito described as "a series of lectures--an hour or two-hour lecture on Iraq, or an hour or two-hour lecture on Islam, or a description of what PRTs are in an hour and a half."

The Wrong Answer to the Wrong Question

This experience should demonstrate that if "fixing failed states" is to be a national security priority, we need not bolster PRTs, but rather fundamentally overhaul the entire national security bureaucracy. As Cruz puts it, "the federal government, as it is currently structured, is not well suited to perform complex interagency missions in foreign lands." As a result, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has called for an architecture called "Beyond Goldwater Nichols" to transform the agencies involved in post-conflict operations.

But what would be more appropriate--and far less costly--than this move would be a dramatic step in a different direction: a fundamental rethinking of the role of nation building and the relevance of state failure to US national security planning. Given that state failure, (to the extent it means anything), is not particularly useful for determining threats to US national security, nation building should not be a focus for the US military or civilian agencies.

But if we, as a nation, decide this is something we must do anyway, what we need is not more bureaucrats or even more Arabic speakers. We would instead need to transform the national security bureaucracy by recruiting people who speak multiple foreign languages, who can fight, politically crack heads in both theater and in Washington, and who are willing to be deployed indefinitely.