Rebuilding Weak States [Foreign Affairs]
01/01/2005
From Foreign Affairs Magazine
"Postconflict reconstruction" has become the foreign policy issue du jour in Washington. Multiple think-tanks, a new State Department office, and no fewer than ten proposed congressional bills all tackle the subject. This flurry of activity to rectify a long-ignored deficiency is a welcome development: recent U.S.-led endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that the planning, financing, coordination, and execution of U.S. programs for rebuilding war-torn states are woefully inadequate.
But the narrow focus on postconflict misses a larger point: there is a crisis of governance in a large number of weak, impoverished states, and this crisis poses a serious threat to U.S. national security. The foreign policy architecture of the United States was created for the threats of the twentieth century--enemies whose danger lay in their strength. Today, however, the gravest danger to the nation lies in the weakness of other countries--the kind of weakness that has allowed opium production to skyrocket in Afghanistan, the small arms trade to flourish throughout Central Asia, and Al Qaeda to exploit Somalia and Pakistan as staging grounds for attacks.
Reprinted by permission of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, (January/February 2005). Copyright 2004 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.