Successful nation building is an investment in future allies. Successful nation building promotes stability and order. Successful nation building promotes democracy.

Unsuccessful nation building doesn't do any of these things. The United States and its allies have been banging away at the nation building task in Afghanistan for almost nine years. Civil strife in the country is worse than it was in 2002; the Afghan government is widely regarded by Afghans as corrupt and ineffectual; the heirs to the widely despised former government of the country control large swathes of territory. This doesn't look like success to me.

I grant that the nation building effort in Afghanistan suffered for years under the burden of a malignantly incompetent Commander in Chief. It was under-resourced, and pursued piecemeal. Helpful as this all is to our understanding of history, it does not point the way toward making a success out of the failed effort of which Paul Miller was a part.

What would? If Miller does return to this subject, I hope he will address the problem of how to overcome the inertia built up during all the years of half-hearted, half-witted nation building in Afghanistan. The country doesn't have a reset button, you know.

Comparing nation-building in Afghanistan to the Marshall plan is completely fatuous. The Marshall plan was not anything like what is meant by "nation-building" in Afghanistan. I don't think I should need to point out why; but here are a few reasons:

1. The nations benefiting from the Marshall plan were actually nations in a modern sense, whereas Afghanistan is more of a geographical expression, referring to a ethnically diverse country that hasn't had a real government in over 30 years. It's also worth keeping in mind that Afghanistan has no experience of centralized government, and that historically governments have been successful by restricting their activity and respecting local arrangements.

2. The Marshall plan applied to nations that were allies of the U.S. In Afghanistan we are an occupying power, and are seen as such.

3. Nation building requires a credible partner, something we don't have in Afghanistan and won't find (see point 1).

Mr. Miller, I tend to agree with what you've written here, but not this: "You don't have to be a bleeding heart idealist or an advocate for international social work to support nation building. You just have to recognize that sometimes nation building is the best, or the only, tool available to secure our interests."

My limited capacity tells me that nation building is a good tool only in the case that opposition can be persuaded to get on board or otherwise eradicated. A thriving insurgency--the guerrilla war must rule out effective nation building, esp. of the democratic kind.

But, I would ask you:

When civilized middle-eastern leaders have yet to successfully democratize more-civilized middle-eastern people, what compelling reason have you to believe that the will to democratize exists in Afghanistan under US occupation? Would not widespread poverty, radical (in this case, violent and oppressive) religious ideology and a surplus of guerrilla fighters (willing to lay down their lives) rule it out even if the Afghan Taliban did not think us "the Great Satan", and the Afghan people had a long tradition of stability on which to draw?

It seems we dare not even to pursue Afghan "middle-classification" and religious reformation. We do not more than "hope" to build a democracy there. And, thus it seems that nation building excuses vital US presence in the region (at a time when the world would reject the kind of wholesale violence that western peoples have customarily prosecuted in order to achieve these kinds of objectives).

Never mind an Afghan democracy! You must be low on blood--I wonder you're still walking around, that is.

Are always the examples invoked by realists who claim nation-building to be possible. They are, if anything, the exception that prove the rule. People who cite them seemingly forget that these nation building projects took 40-50years of US troop deployment (I realise US troops are still in Germany and Japan but certainly nowhere the same presence level during the Cold War. The threat of communism - and potential use of atomic weapons was far more tangible than potential terrorist attack - despite the best efforts of FOX news and others scaremongering in a post-9/11 era.

Efficacy of Nation-building generally:
The UN has tried and failed in a number of nation-building attempts, with Haiti, Bosnia, El Salvador, Cambodia and Timor Leste as just a few examples. And that even with the preordained legitimacy that comes with UNSC resolutions and collective action - legitimacy that the US acting alone (or even in ad hoc coalitions - perhaps NATO) would lack!

Possible?
I agree that the US has the power and ability to nation-build, but I disagree that it would or should try it. If the US was an authoritarian state, perhaps, but the democratic nature and importance of domestic issues would surely cause most constituents to go against the long-term investment necessary in successful nation-building. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all point to this concern of foreign wars.

PS. English is my first language, so please dont make too much of the fact its not grammatically perfect or spelled correctly!

Mr. Miller, your arguments are irresponsible, ill-considered, and wrong. Leaving aside the moral arguments for later, this 'realistic' argument is anything but. Light on specifics and relying mostly on vauge abstractions, your argument strikes this idealistic realist as primarily idealogical, and dangerously out of touch with reality.

1) If our objective is to check the power of potential competetors like China, Russia, or Iran, how exactly, specifically, are we doing that by nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Leaving aside the very serious moral concerns about whether we have the right to make war and kill civillians for geopolitical reasons utterly remote to the peoples whose homes and farms we are shooting up, our attempts at nation-building are geostrategically completely pointless. Even we did succeed at building a functioning democracy in Afghanistan - which would take another decade at the *very* least, and more likely will never happen at all - the enormous amount of resources we'd have to commit to achieve that end would deprive of us the ability to take more effective action, and leave our rivals unconstrained from asserting themselves against their regional neighbors. This, of course, is precisely what is happening now, as we saw in South Ossetia in 2008 and the Senkaku islands this week.

If we were really concerned about preventing our rivals from amassing enough power to threaten us, we could do any or all of the following:

- Heavily buttress the Georgian military against Russian aggression.

- Invest much more intensely in missile defense for Eastern Europe and the Causcus, potentially including space-based defenses.

- Support the development and deployment of clean nuclear technologies here and overseas, and support regulatory reforms to allow private organizations to build responsible nucler plants in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Aside from reducing our dependance on foreign oil, this could be a major help in constraining the power of Russia by reducing Europe's dependance on Russian oil and gas. Reactors along the line's of Hyperion's Small Modular Reactors, (http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product.html) if delpoyed on a large scale, could put a serious dent in Russian imperialistic muscle. We could also help provide storage space and technical expertise in storing and refining nuclear waste.

- Open rare-earth mineral refining facilities in the US and elsewhere, to decrease China's ability to economically blackmail its neighbors.

- Establish the technology and diplomatic relationships to create a large-scale network of stealthy, highly automated, highly mobile naval and air bases in the South Pacific to more effectively counter Chinese territorial aggression.

-Invest *much* more heavily in cyberwarfare, and assume our proper role as an innovative leader in what will be a vital arena in 21st century conflict. When Russia, China, or Iran annoy us, blast their industrial, technical, or military infrastructures with coordinated cyberattacks. Steal their information, keep them guessing and on their toes, and keep them off of our cyberturf.

As it is, we don't have the resources to do *any* of these things properly, because we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars nation-building. The oppourtunity costs of our failed attempts to remake societies which we do not understand is that we give up the geostrategic iniative to our anti-democratic rivals. We are watching today as the international society of states slips slowly out of our control, and if we stubbornly insist on continuing failed policies out of adherence to antedated 20th century ideology, we won't be able to do anything about it.

For the record, our attempts at nation-building don't improve our relative power position vis a vis Iran, either. Having a great big army right next door isn't much good when it's tied down chasing gnats and lacks heavy armor anyway.

If it was really our goal to keep Iranian power in check, we'd need a flexible, adapatable military with a fluid deployment structure, poised offshore or on friendly territory to invade, attack with varying levels of intensity and deniability, feint, infiltrate, disperse propaganda, or support local democratic insurgents, at a moment's notice, all from multiple unpredictable directions. Iran knows that we don't have those capabilities - because our failed and failing nation building attempts consume all of the resources of blood, treasure, and international credibility and goodwill that we might use to attain them.

So point 1) is complete bullshit. The only geostrategic power kept in check by our nation-building policies is our own.

Point 2) is even more obvious bullshit. Anyone who thinks our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq contribute to order and stability is just way out of touch with reality. War, especially COIN war, yields chaos, not order.

To maintain our fragile supply lines in Afghanistan, we arm and materially support a shadowy network of thuggish and unaccountable warlords ("security contractors") who sieze local power for whatever ends they choose. Often, they wind up suppporting the very terrorists and drug dealers we are theoretically trying to get rid of, and even in the best cases they set themselves up coercive local fiefdoms. The government the American military is 'building' is a nepotistic kleptocracy with zero concern for human rights or democracy, which routinely tramples the rights of its citzens.

In Iraq, our nation-building actions directly resulted in a still-simmering inferno of sectarian violence, which only calmed down when one side slaughtered enough of the other to convince them that fighting was little use. Now that we're pretending to pull out our troops, we're handing off the baton not so much to the Iraqis but to shadowy, violent, unaccountable private 'security contractors'. I dare anyone to go to Iraq and say that there is 'stability' and an 'absence of war'.

Our attempts at nation-building bring vast destruction, violence, and social disintegration. Claiming that we're establishing 'stability and order' is Orwellian in the extreme. We're establishing *dominance*, not stability or peace, and we're not even doing that very well.

It is indeed true that "Unstable or weak buffer states are unpredictable and tend to spill instability into neighboring great powers." - and that's an excellent reason to stop nation-building. We're trying to dynamite square pegs into round holes, and acting surprised when they both fall apart.

Point 3) is bullshit, too, because it rests on the unquestioned assumption that we *can* establish lasting democracies by means of violence in societies that lack a democractic tradition. This assumptions rests on a nest of blatant misunderstandings of how history, law, and strategy work.

A functioning democracy depends for its legitimacy on the collective social acceptance of democractic memes, which take centuries to evolve organically. If our goal is to establish and nuture a respect for democracy in the societies we are trying to alter, and establish the memes much quicker than they evolve naturally, surely we would need to use different means.

In Iraq, we physically destroyed entire towns, created huge populations of internally displaced refugees, and unleashed brutal sectarian conflict that still continues today. Our occupying military forces often treated the entire civillian populace as potentially hostile and dangerous, restricting their freedom of travel, subjecting them to arbitrary arrests, searches and siezures, and physically destroyed the technological infrastructure on which thier lives depended. Over half the bridges that were in Iraq when we showed up are still gone. Power generation has not recovered to pre-war levels. Many people's houses, property and livlihoods were destroyed with no compensation. Et cetera.

Afghanistan, needless to say, is *worse.*

If we think that this is going to convince people en masse to embrace the idealogies we're trying to spread, then we're really, really dumb.

What is the pathway from where we are today to a functioning democracy in Afghanistan? How can we possibily convince Karzai and cronies to stop embezzeling everything they can get their hands on? Get them to step down? How? The election system we put in place is so distorted by violence, including on the part of the groups we put in power, that only our direct extra-legal intervention could remove him, which would make an even further mockery of the rule of law. How could we possibily clean up the mess of independant, fueding strongmen and warlords we've armed? How can we piece back together the communities we've shattered?

The answer is that we *can't.* There is no way for us to fix the things we've broken, or clean up the chaos we've caused. A broad-based local movement for democracy might be able to do it, but only if we have the humility to quit trying to 'help' by 'carefully' murdering and bombing at will.

The result of nation-building in the sense that people mean it today is *anarchy* or foreign-controlled dictatorship, not democracy, and anyone who's paying any attention should be able to see this.

There are a couple of historical counter-examples, but even cursory examination should show how utterly different they are. In every case, without exception, where nation-building succeeded, it was precceeded by the nearly complete collapse of civil society resulting from massive total war. This is as true of the American South as it is of Germany and Japan. In order to impose a government on a foreign people by force, it is necessary utterly to break the spine of any possibility of resistance by any organized group. This requires absolutely overwhelming force, and the complete breakdown of existing forms of social control.

We should keep in mind that it wasn't merely the occupation of Germany that made possible the Marshall plan and the subsequent stable democracy. It was the war. Until every single group with the ability to resist our power had been physically smashed and morally exhausted, it would never have worked.

We simply don't have the resources to duplicate this feat today. It would take hundreds of thousands of troops, and several years; possibily decades. Even if we could do it, the electorate, not at all unreasonably, doesn't have the stomach for the kind of expenditures of cash or the wanton bloodshed that would be necessary to attempt it.

"You don't have to be a bleeding heart idealist or an advocate for international social work to support nation building."

No - you just have to be arrogant, short-sighted, callous to human suffering, and historically ignorant.