As United States President Barack Obama announces a shift in strategic focus in the Afghan war, from skirmishing with insurgents to promoting nation building, it's worth remembering America and its allies do know how to do this stuff, though the record is mixed.
Obama wants 30,000 more American troops deployed over the next year or so, in addition to the nearly 70,000 already in Afghanistan. He also wants
NATO and other allies, who have about 45,000 soldiers there, to send another 10,000.
The mission will change significantly.
Instead of sending out troops to confront the Taliban insurgents, and capture and hold largely indefensible territory, the bulk of the military will be used to defend urban areas and important transportation links.
Emphasis will be put on training Afghanistan's woeful national army and its abysmal police force.
At the same time, special forces and the missile-equipped drone aircraft which have become a significant weapon of this war, will be used in targeted attacks on leaders of the Taliban and their allies in the al-Qaida terrorist group.
For several reasons -- most notably the uselessness and corruption of the regime of President Hamid Karzai -- this is not a wholly appetizing strategy. But it is perhaps the best available option to defeat the Taliban, whose insurrection has grown and spread since soon after they were pushed from power in Kabul by the 2001 American-led invasion.
It is an awful judgment on former U.S. president George W. Bush that the Afghan war has now gone on for eight years -- almost as long as the First and Second World Wars combined and longer than American involvement in those wars.
Moreover, the NATO allies and other partners are now closer to defeat than they were at the outset.
But this is now Obama's war. As well as his management of the stumbling American economy, the ability of Washington and its partners to bring peace, security and development to the failed state of Afghanistan will be a key measure of his presidency.
America and its allies have a strong record of reviving failed states.
After the war in Europe ended in 1945 the formal military occupation of West Germany concluded in September 1949 with the creation of a new and freely elected government.
In Japan the military occupation ended in April 1952 and, again, a freely elected government came to power.
In both cases, after taking reparations, the U.S. and allies helped stimulate the extraordinary post-war economic revivals of Japan and Germany.
A clear advantage in those cases and one not enjoyed in Afghanistan or several other recent examples of collapsed states was that the Axis powers were conclusively defeated. There was no insurgency.
That was not the case in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s where there are still 14,000 NATO troops protecting the world's newest nation, Kosovo, from its Serbian neighbours.
But although it was a good deal more messy and bloody than it should have been, the realignment of the Balkans now looks reasonably successful.
The same can be said for East Timor, the former Portuguese colony illegally occupied by Indonesia in 1975. Under pressure from the United Nations, Jakarta relinquished control in 1999, but in parting loosed its local militias so that the new country was born on a mound of death and destruction.
Despite some aftershocks, East Timor has achieved a productive degree of social calm and political stability.
The same is true in somewhat different ways in Cambodia, which also became a ward of the United Nations after the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, followed by the invasion and 10-year occupation by neighbouring Vietnam.
It is difficult to argue that the 1993 UN-sponsored elections and those that have followed have produced a fully fledged democracy. Prime Minister Hun Sen has a limited appetite for political opposition.
But there is stability. There is peace and there is economic development.
Even Iraq, after the criminally irresponsible invasion by the Bush administration and its allies that in many ways spawned the Afghan insurgency, is beginning to look as though it may emerge as a functioning state.
But the classic modern example of bungled efforts to rebuild a failed state is, of course, Somalia. Now without a government for almost 20 years, Somalia was the bomb president George H. Bush left under the White House bed for Bill Clinton in 1993, much the way the younger Bush has left Afghanistan for Obama.
jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com
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