Why does America suck at nation buillding?
Why do we suck at nation-building? A lot of reasons. Here are just a few: (1) We are ignorant. We do not know enough about the cultural, political and social contexts of foreign environments to fully appreciate how our interventions will affect those environments. Thus our aid and development spending (and military operations, to be fair), meant to ameliorate drivers of conflict, often exacerbate them. (2) We do not provide enough oversight and accountability for the projects we initiate. This is boring but important. We have spent ungodly sums of money in both Iraq and Afghanistan and have not provided enough contracting officers to effectively oversee the money we have spent. How do we just give tens of millions of dollars to agencies and departments in the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan without any oversight? Lack of contracting officers. How are contracts in Afghanistan divided up between shady sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, with tax-payer money falling into the hands of the Taliban and warlords? Lack of contracting officers. (3) We do not have any patience -- and we have limited resources. Nation-building takes time. Where we can nation-build at relatively low-cost over an extended period of time, as in Colombia, we can be successful. But asking Americans to spend massive amounts of money for an extended period of time in Iraq or Afghanistan is a recipe for ... turning your average U.S. tax-payer into an isolationist. - Andrew Exum
I think this is correct, but also incomplete. Another reason the U.S. "sucks" at nation building is the way it fights its wars. Consider the two cases that are unambiguous nation building successes - Germany and Japan. What do they have in common? The U.S. and its allies subjected both countries to an unimaginable (by today's standards) level of death and destruction. It wasn't simply that both Axis powers suffered massive battlefield losses, depriving the country of most of its fighting-aged men (though that obviously helped) - the Allies also succeeded in killing millions of civilians and related infrastructure. Japan had two atomic bombs dropped on it and suffered comparable levels of destruction through fire bombing. Germany, likewise, saw many major cities leveled.
Suffice it to say, it's a lot easier to "build" a nation that has lost most of its young male population, has almost no industrial infrastructure and has suffered significant civilian casualties. The U.S. also had the luxury of fighting and defeating coherent states - not national insurgencies. Thus, hostilities ended when the states surrendered and institution building could proceed apace. In America's contemporary circumstances, we're trying to "nation build" under fire.
