Can we rebuild Afghanistan?

There is no Marshall Plan for this tattered nation, and the lessons of trying to fix Cambodia, Bosnia and Somalia aren't inspiring.

By Damien Cave

Oct 11, 2001 | It's the American way of war: First we destroy a country, then we try to rebuild it -- and usually fail. Is there any reason to believe Afghanistan will be different?

Even before the U.S. attacks, much of Afghanistan was rubble. The pictures of Afghan desolation released by the Pentagon to date hint at military progress, which means even more destruction: Where training camps and buildings once stood, only strewn debris could be seen; roads and airstrips were warped from straight lines into pockmarked patches. Few worthwhile targets remained by the fourth day of bombing, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The initial campaign, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, was clearly a "success."

But today's success story could be tomorrow's nightmare. It's impossible to know when or how the war in Afghanistan will end -- or even if the United States will win. Administration sound bites discussing limited deployment of "special forces" elicit a distinct sense of déjà vu from those who still remember Vietnam. But should the United States indeed be victorious in removing the Taliban from power, the pictures of ruined infrastructure and hospitals unintentionally hit demand their own response.

The good news is, the U.S. has pledged to help rebuild the embattled nation. The bad news is, the task will entail not just nation-building, but wholesale "nation-creating," says Dan Goure, a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a military think tank. There's no "there there," he says. "It's a tar baby, because once you get there, how do you get out?"

But the U.S. is already there, and foreign experts see assistance to Afghanistan as an inevitable outcome of the war, because Americans have been rebuilding countries that they have attacked ever since World War II.

"For most Americans, the concept of conducting a war against a government rather than against a people is very engrained," says Ilana Kass, professor at the National War College in Washington. "In every case of conflict, America has gone in and tried to rebuild after the war is over."

Reconstruction, suggests Kass and other experts, will lead to stability, which will in turn transform Afghanistan from a haven for terrorists into a vital part of the international community.

For many observers, the option of fighting and leaving -- something the United States is already guilty of at least once in Afghanistan, after having abandoned the country once the Soviets were successfully pushed out -- will only lead to more chaos, more radical fundamentalism. Terrorism, the most ardent proponents of intervention argue, can't be defeated without a complete reconstruction of Afghanistan's government, infrastructure and society. In effect, what is needed is a 21st century version of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.

"Our fundamental goal of eliminating terrorism and keeping Americans safe can't be realized without improving the average Afghan's lot," says Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked for the National Security Council under President Clinton. "We can do nothing less than completely rebuild the country."

Politicians, so far, are going along. The United Nations has promised to create a $700 million fund for Afghanistan, while Sen. Joseph Biden called last week for a $1 billion recovery and development package for Central Asia. Even President Bush, who has repeatedly stressed that his administration wants nothing to do with "nation building," has allocated $320 million for short-term aid. Since the Bush administration is already simultaneously dropping food and bombs, says Kass, "they'll surely be thinking of offering assistance after the bombs stop dropping."

But the Bush administration has shown no signs of abandoning its opposition to broad international intervention. The money it has set aside specifically applies to short-term humanitarian needs created by the war effort. And even if the staunch isolationists in the White House recognize that there are huge benefits to creating a stable Afghanistan, they might have a hard time convincing Americans that the cause makes sense. The potential costs -- politically, economically and militarily -- could tip the political scale.

The success of the Marshall Plan more than 50 years ago notwithstanding, recent history is less than encouraging when one looks for examples of successful national reconstruction campaigns. Stabilization campaigns in Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and elsewhere have cost billions -- and substantially failed.

And the basic conditions of such countries shine in comparison to Afghanistan. Decades of civil war and foreign invasions have destroyed what little infrastructure previously existed, even as a two-year drought has ruined the country's ability to feed itself. Most of the educated class that might be willing to create stable government left long ago, and even if they returned, Afghanistan has little history of self-government to fall back on. Add to all of this a rugged terrain that makes any kind of geographic cohesion extremely difficult and you end up with a quagmire that defies description.

"[Fixing Afghanistan] is more difficult and complex than anything the international community has done in the last 10 years," says Kass. "It's bigger than Vietnam and Korea."

Next Page: Plenty of guns, but no banks and no roads

• View blog reactions