Post-Conflict Nation Building in Iraq and Afghanistan

Introduction: Lessons from Vietnam and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Within a span of roughly forty years, the United States has found itself drawn into multiple wars in Asia simultaneously. As with Vietnam, unless the United States can influence the postwar nation-building process, powers hostile to American interests — most immediately Iran — will fill the vacuum left by an American withdrawal. This essay identifies two lessons drawn from past U.S. wars and applies them to the de facto American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first lesson is not to become too closely associated with unpopular regimes, as has been the case with the administrations in both countries where the U.S. is nominally "nation-building." The second lesson — equally obvious, yet equally ignored — is to avoid becoming mired in an open-ended guerrilla war with no foreseeable conclusion, a distinction the United States has earned in both theaters.

Unfortunately, for all involved, the damage has already been done. In the case of Afghanistan, it has been done twice, if one counts the CIA effort against the Soviets. The question that remains is whether this second round will also end in a nation-building failure.

What is troubling about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that comparisons to Vietnam break down at the energy question. For all of its horrors, Vietnam did not involve oil and natural gas. Energy is clearly central to these conflicts — if not in their origins, then certainly in their duration. Nation-states, particularly hegemonic superpowers like the United States, do not spend trillions of dollars defending nonessentials. Americans had been dying at the hands of terrorists for years before 2001, yet no widespread war on terrorism was launched until then. By understanding what makes the present conflicts different, and by examining why U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have failed, it becomes possible to learn how not to repeat such mistakes elsewhere — in Libya, for instance. The depleted state of the U.S. economy makes clear that the present course is not sustainable. Unless the United States engages the populations of these countries on a comprehensive civil-affairs basis — culturally, economically, and democratically — it will lose the war for hearts and minds to Iran.

For these reasons, this essay proposes an unconventional solution that can be added to the framework of UN conventions that have been part of international law since the early 1990s, following the first Gulf War and the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. This is an established mechanism with a number of notable, if little-known, successes, and it has complemented UN peacekeeping efforts admirably: international arbitration under the auspices of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 gave rise to long-lasting international institutions that promote peace and understanding among nations and were among the first formal international statements on the laws of war and war crimes.¹ To counter the psychological campaigns of radicals in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and to neutralize Iranian propaganda, this arbitration option deserves serious consideration as a means of engaging local populations and securing their acquiescence in nation-building efforts.