Saurav,
I am sure you had a reason for addressing this article to me. But I failed to connect to the reason. If you are trying to imply that USA has failed to do what she was supposed to do in Kosovo after separating the fighting forces, you should remember that the responsibility is UN's. Please visit the web site http://www.unmikonline.org. USA went in to put a stop to the fighting and the genocide that was happening, USA never committed to nation building there. UNMIK took that responsibility and Mr. Priest should talk to the UN and Kofi Anan, in stead of asking for another US bureaucracy of nation builders.
Now if you are wishing that USA take the responsibility of reshaping and rebuilding the whole world, then it gets a different color altogether. But I'd think neither you nor I want that, for our individual reasons.
The author you quoted is another American who would like to see USA to be the big brother and straighten out everyone's mess in the world with a combination of arms and peace corps. But is it USA's responsibility to do so in areas other than those where USA has a direct hand as in Afghanistan or Iraq? If USA fails to set up a fair election and a democratic government in Afghanistan according to the time table, I'd blame Washington DC.
Please respond after you sort out the roles of the USA and the UN in these trouble spots.
Dilipda
Saurav Pathak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
washingtonpost.com
Nation- Building, At Its Very Corps
By Dana Priest
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page B01
As I walked through the run-down town of Vitina, Kosovo, with a
squad of U.S. infantrymen in the winter of 2001, a woman in a
tattered sweater beckoned me into a small store. She must have
figured I was part of the military. Not only was I surrounded by
rifle-carrying troops, but for the first time in several trips to
the Balkans between 1997 and 2001, the Army had required me to wear
one of its flak jackets while I accompanied the patrolling soldiers.
I stepped inside, along with the squad's interpreter and a
well-armed lieutenant. There were two dozen Serbian women in the
smoke-filled room. They had risked their lives to come from nearby
villages. Eighteen months into the U.S. Army's "peacekeeping"
mission in post-war Koso! vo, some ethnic Albanians still were trying
to kill off the few Serbian families left after NATO's 1999 air war
against Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbian forces.
The women handed me a four-page, handwritten document. They asked me
to deliver it to the lieutenant colonel in charge of U.S. troops in
Vitina. No matter how many times they had been told that the United
Nations was in charge in Kosovo, the townspeople believed the real
power, resources and organization lay behind the barbed wire of the
Army's nearby megabase, Camp Bondsteel.
The declaration was a sort of bill of rights, proclaiming that
Serbian women deserved to live in peace and raise their children in
safety. But there was also a concrete request: three sewing
machines. The women wanted to set up a sewing cooperative to mend
and make clothes, as well as other items.
This was the kind of entrepreneurial idea that any development
specialist would have seize! d on. But development specialist is not a
rank in the U.S. military. By the next day, the document had made
its way to a battalion commander at the 101st Airborne Division.
"Sewing machines! We don't do sewing machines!" he bellowed when I
asked about the request.
Of course he didn't do sewing machines.
The 101st, a key part of the current war planning for Iraq, is
trained to move with lightning speed into high-intensity combat. In
Kosovo, much to their surprise, troops from the 101st found
themselves in charge of school integration and the safety of school
children -- the sort of "nation-building" tasks that candidate
George W. Bush had shunned during the 2000 presidential campaign.
The 101st also ran town meetings, monitored tax collection, oversaw
wood-cutting and settled property disputes, sometimes by evicting
the ethnic squatters who had occupied vacant Serbian homes as a way
of preventing their former tormenters fro! m returning.
On paper, the United Nations is Kosovo's government. On the ground,
the 101st found itself handling the basic tasks of civil society --
a role that the legendary "Screaming Eagles" are neither trained nor
equipped to undertake.
Despite Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, the United
States still does not have a robust cadre of nation-builders: a
civilian corps of police, judges, aid workers, agronomists,
teachers, and engineers -- a 21st-century Peace and Reconstruction
Corps, if you will -- to take charge of postwar rehabilitation. But
that is what we need if we are serious about achieving the long-term
political goals we often seek in sending our military into combat in
other nations.
In Kosovo, "U.N. primacy" is still just a phrase each U.S. soldier
repeats to himself hoping it will become true. Lt. Benjamin Saine, a
young officer as earnest as they come, was one of them. To
accomplish one! eviction I witnessed, Saine literally had to pull the
U.N. police out of their cozy base station, away from the video
games they were playing on workstation computers.
The U.N. police patrol that night consisted of an Indian and a
Ghanaian. They had little police experience, could barely understand
each other's English, and didn't want to mix it up with the ethnic
Albanian rebels for fear of retaliation. (After all, they didn't
live in barracks under armed guard like the U.S. troops, but in
unprotected rented homes in town.)
As they approached the squatters' house, Saine gently pushed the
Indian toward the head of the line. Police "primacy." U.N. in front.
But when the door swung open, the Indian officer didn't have a clue
what to say. He backed down the stairs, leaving a reluctant Saine in
charge.
A 4-year-old boy stood at the door, staring wide-eyed at the
soldiers, as if he had just received a Christmas gift, a! ll these
G.I. Joes standing in front of him. The boy stepped closer to Staff
Sgt. Chris Dohl, a corn-fed 26-year-old with no neck, a wad of
tobacco in his cheek and a helmet that covered his eyebrows. The kid
smiled at him, checking out his gear. Dohl tried to scowl.
"Is your father here?" Capt. Darrell Driver, Saine's commanding
officer, asked.
The house held the boy's older brother, father, mother and cousin.
The father tried to convince Driver that he was the owner. Driver
knew otherwise. He had befriended the rightful owner, an elderly
Serb named Mele, months ago. Mele was the town drunk and charmed
every American officer in Vitina with his gratitude and humor.
"Here's the deal," Driver told the father. "You can't just move into
other people's houses. The U.N. is setting up a shelter. You need to
move out tonight. You have one hour. Gather up all your things."
Dohl looked worried behind his armored vest. "Nothi! ng prepares you
for this," he whispered . "All these kids around. . . . "
The mother stepped forward, arms folded. "I'm not going anywhere,"
she yelled. "It's cold. These kids are cold!"
The mother refused to budge. That was it, Driver concluded. The
troops burst forward. "Put your hands up!" Dohl shouted at her. "Or
else we'll force them up." Dohl and a sergeant grabbed her arms. She
tried twisting free. The boys screamed, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"
The two soldiers pushed the mother against the wall, face first. She
continued to struggle. They forced her to the ground, their knees in
her back, their shoulders against hers. "Give me a double!" the
staff sergeant shouted as Dohl handed him a pair of zip-strip
plastic handcuffs.
Driver, meanwhile, had cut a deal with the woman's husband. The
family could stay the night. It was cold and he knew the shelter
wasn't open yet, despite weeks of U.N. promises. Maybe tomorrow i! t
would be. "By 10 tomorrow morning, you will have gone to the U.N.
and asked about the shelter," Driver instructed. He cut away the
handcuffs.
"You guys are acting worse than the Serbs!" the woman growled. The
soldiers walked in silence as they returned to the base.
The shelter was never to be. The U.N. also had promised to set up a
property dispute board to avoid such calamities, but that hadn't
happened either. The family moved out, whereabouts unknown.
As in every other major peacekeeping operation in the last dozen
years, the United Nations -- a sum of the political will and
financial commitment of its members, with the United States being
the most important -- could not live up to its promises, despite the
tireless work of many involved.
The U.S. Army, too, has failed to come up with adequate training and
doctrine for troops engaged in what is really nation-building. Why?
"They don't want to define it," co! ncluded Lt. Col. Michael Ellerbe,
a battalion commander in the 82nd Airborne Division after spending
time in Kosovo. "It's too hard."
Yes, it is too hard.
The military is a richly complex organization, but it is not
designed to deal with the inherent chaos of everyday civil society.
Its armored units are best when positioned away from the center of
town, as a deterrent to serious violence in post-war situations. The
ever short-handed military police units can handle temporary
policing and aid in the transition to a civilian police force. Civil
affairs teams, working with humanitarian organizations, can be
hugely helpful in cut-and-dried relief efforts and in the
restoration of basic services. But none of these military units is
good for even medium-term solutions, when the local population must
be pushed into reclaiming its own destiny.
Soldiers and Marines may be President Bush's vessel for bringing
regime change t! o Iraq and elsewhere in the largely monarchical
Middle East, but they are far too blunt an instrument to draw the
first outlines of democracy and true civilian rule.
This mismatch was evident to Pfc. Ian Smith, of Ventura, Calif.
While downloading music to his laptop one night in the Vitina
factory-turned-barracks, the 19-year-old offered this unsolicited
assessment of his Kosovo mission: "If you want to put a country back
together, you can't send the military. You have to send reformers."
Congress, which is also culpable for not having found a better
solution to military peacekeeping, could push this sort of
alternative to long-term military occupation and control. Creating
such a civilian force -- anchoring it perhaps in the U.S. Agency of
International Development's rapid-reaction Office of Transitional
Assistance -- would be a concrete contribution. It would be better
than more rhetoric about leaving a big military boot p! rint in a
region hostile to an American armed presence.
Whatever the bureaucratic mechanism chosen, this new Peace and
Reconstruction Corps must have a solid police and judicial
component, as well as full access to U.S. military and intelligence
analyses of threats. Even more important, it must establish
meaningful relations with the U.N. peacekeeping office and the
hundreds of private humanitarian groups working in war-torn
countries. Ad hoc arrangements will not do.
This is not a new idea. For years, virtually every major national
security think tank in the United States and Europe has advocated a
more systematic approach to nation-building. The reason for not
creating a separate corps is always the same: If we have such a
group, then we're more likely to use it, to jump into
nation-building more readily.
But that logic masks the reality that nation-building -- assisting
messed-up countries that are struggling to ! become something better
-- falls to even the most reluctant of presidents, as Bush has
discovered in confronting the inevitable consequences of war and
regime change in Iraq.
Congress could cling to pipe dreams, like the one President Bush
sold concerning Afghanistan. "We are working in the best traditions
of George Marshall," Bush said at the Virginia Military Institute on
April 17, 2002, referring to the $13.3 billion Marshall Plan that
rebuilt Europe after World War II.
But Bush's plan for Afghanistan has hardly come to pass.
Reconstruction is moving too slowly. Troops are scattered so thinly
throughout the country that civilian aid workers don't feel safe
leaving the capital. And al Qaeda lurks on the Pakistani border.
If the United States is serious about rebuilding Iraq, it is worth
rereading the words of one famous political strategist. Niccolo
Machiavelli warned in 1513: "There is nothing more difficult to take!
in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of the new order of
things."
A Peace and Reconstruction Corps would be a start.
Dana Priest covers intelligence and national security issues for The
Post. This essay is based on reporting she did for her new book,
"The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military"
(W.W. Norton).
--
saurav
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