On July 23 the United States Institute of Peace -- which is funded by Congress and frequently advises the government -- rolled out a rulebook for relations between U.S. armed forces and non-governmental organizations in war zones. This rapprochement was a long time in coming. Robert Perito, a nation-building expert at the USIP, says NGOs have long been afraid of working with the military out of a fear that "we're all going to look like the enemy." NGOs tried to keep a bright line between themselves and armed forces in the hope of demonstrating their independence and fairness. And the military services have, of course, always seen combat as their primary mission, while viewing the kinds of assistance and work carried out by NGOs as outside their purview.
Since a November 2005 directive issued by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the military has been busily trying to prepare itself for future stabilization operations. That 2005 Pentagon directive elevated post-conflict "stability" operations to the status of "a core U.S. military mission." It declared that they "shall be given priority comparable to combat operations." This rhetoric has been followed up by attempts -- like the USIP-brokered rulebook -- to reach out to civilian agencies and non-governmental organizations. Unappealing as the thought of more stabilization operations may be in the wake of the Iraq debacle, the United States has engaged in them once every 18 to 24 months since the downfall of the Soviet Union.
Taken together, these efforts reflect a growing realization within the military that the armed forces are currently ill-equipped and under-trained to deal with preventing and quelling conflict in unstable areas. The Pentagon has even made the unorthodox move of asking for more money from its sometimes bureaucratic enemy, the State Department. With elected officials slow to recognize and facilitate these shifts by boosting funding to civilian entities like the State Department and USAID, the Defense Department has started to distribute aid money to other government agencies and needy foreign projects on its own.
Commanders in conflict zones once built schools and sewers as an emergency measure. Now it looks as if they will be given the permanent capability to pursue larger reconstruction and stabilization projects. Laudable as the Pentagon's increasing awareness of the importance of these functions is, there is a real danger of the Pentagon crowding civilian entities out of the very arena for which the latter are far better suited. The result may be a new style of diplomacy and foreign assistance that is even more militarized than today's -- a development that would seriously undermine American foreign policy.
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In 2002, Perito wrote a policy book proposing a civilian constabulary police force to help the military in the turbulent waters of post-war countries. Attuned to the needs of a conflicted peace, they would be on-call to do the jobs the Army and Marines couldn't. They would be assisted by a reserve of civilian professionals in law, banking, agriculture, and the many other specialties lacking in failed or rogue states.
Perito has extensive experience leading reconstruction efforts in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. But his counsel, and that of likeminded others, was ignored in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Even a visit to Richard Perle's Defense Policy Board proved fruitless.) Now he has seen the military taking increasing interest in his proposal. He worries, however, about what happens when the military takes over post-conflict operations. The military's attitude, Perito says, is "we're doing this not for development, we're doing this to win hearts and minds" -- that is, pursuing such tasks as part of a military strategy.
"We need to gear up the civilian agencies to do this, not augment the capabilities of the DOD," Perito argues. And the Department of Defense agrees: It fought for and won a $100 million contingency fund to help the State Department establish a civilian reserve corps.
This is a strange state of affairs, and it stems in part from Congress' deep aversion to looking weak by increasing the percentage of the budget that goes to the State Department or USAID. The Department of Defense, by contrast, easily won Congressional support for its $500 million Commanders' Emergency Response Program (used to fill aid and development holes in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the 2006 fiscal year at the same time the State Department was scrounging for money to start its conflict-response fund. Between 2002 and 2005, the portion of U.S. official development assistance controlled by the Pentagon went from 5.6 percent to 21.7 percent. According to the GAO, the State Department says it needs 1,000 new positions for foreign-language training and crises.
A new department within the State Department, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, was set up in the summer of 2004 to lead civilian efforts, but it has run into serious problems with funding and operational authority. Janet St. Laurent, who authored a May 31 GAO study on stability, says the office has run into a "complicated coordination problem" both between civilian agencies and with the military. According to Stewart Patrick, a former member of the secretary of state's policy planning staff who now directs the Center for Global Development's weak-states program, "Lebanon would have been tailor-made for the State Department's S/CRS office to take over in 2006, but it was passed over."
As counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen notes, "The Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined." In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for an expanded civilian role in post-conflict environments, but he failed to follow this proposal up with budget requests -- reflecting what Patrick calls a "schizophrenic" attitude toward civilian-led stabilization and reconstruction efforts.
Proposals along the lines of Robert Perito's, for a reserve corps of civilians ranging from 2000 to tens of thousands, have been floating around for years. Patrick says such a reserve could prevent many of the problems the United States has seen with contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. He says the military feels an "incredible frustration with the DynCorp model of getting Rent-a-Cops -- put them through eight days of training and then send them out to the field." Training police would be just one function for the proposed civilian reserve, which might help faltering countries with everything from farming to electricity generation in the wake of disorder.
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Everywhere the military has gone in the last six years, it has encountered serious deficits in the capabilities of American civilian agencies and organizations. "There has," the Patrick says, "been this incredible frustration at the inability of civilian agencies to come through." In response, the Pentagon has started to build its own parallel system of diplomacy and development. And that has not been for the best.
In Afghanistan, the military has taken the lead in building the Afghan National Police. Before then the Department of Justice had been in charge of such efforts, because, Perito says, "they know how to train police. That's their skill set. When the military took over, they created a militarized police force ... They created themselves."
In Africa, the military is pioneering the pre-conflict "phase zero" work of cultivating allies and trying to prevent war in the first place. Esquire's Tom Barnett found a mix of attitudes about the new approach. He encountered one top commander who bragged in classic fashion that, with just a little more free rein during the recent war against Somalia's Islamic Courts Union, "we could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks." But Barnett discovered everything else the military is doing in East Africa as well: building schools, courting Muslim clerics, and trying to stem conflicts in the first place. He met with Capt. Bob Wright, who said, "You can't make the Horn a better place simply by killing bad guys."
There is, however, more than a whiff of colonialism to the new arrangement. As Patrick euphemistically puts it, "the optics aren't great" -- the sight of Westerners in fatigues inevitably recalls Africa's colonial past. NGOs have also raised questions about the Pentagon's requests for a permanent authority to spend $750 million annually on training and equipping military and police forces, mostly in developing countries. If the proposal, called the Building Global Partnerships Act, passes, it will allow brass to bypass many of the safeguards set up in civilian agencies and institutions to prevent assisting regimes with records of human rights violations. (Throughout the Cold War, the State Department was charged with dispersing money for foreign armies and police forces.)
A coalition of NGOs, including Amnesty International, the Open Society Policy Center, and the Presbyterian, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ denominations, came out against the measure. They called it "part of a disturbing trend toward the militarization of programs previously controlled by civilian agencies." They fear the Pentagon will pay little heed to human rights violations in places like Algeria, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, instead giving greater priority to efforts to ward off terrorism.
Patrick says the military is now in the "driver's seat" in East Africa -- the men with the guns own the butter. (A senior defense official disputed this assessment, saying that the Defense Department is just one of many partners working in the Horn of Africa.)
Patrick and others worry that if the Pentagon starts taking the lead in stabilization and reconstruction across the world, the duplication of services may stop politicians from ever building up civilian capacities. Unless they end their addiction to raising budgets for defense alone, the future of stabilization, reconstruction, and development will increasingly lie in the hands of the Department of Defense. Robert Perito says stabilization and reconstruction efforts should be militarized only under the threat of violence or "when the civilians can't get there fast enough" -- but many are now wondering whether the civilians will get there at all.
