. . . AND THEIR ARMIES

The Bush administration says it won't do nation building in Afghanistan.
The Bush administration also says it wants to train a national army. This
is a bit strange.

Training an army -- that is, building a core government institution up from
scratch -- is the pure essence of nation building.

The Bush people say peacekeeping is hard, but army building is a lot more
feasible.

This is strange as well. We've tried training armies and police forces before.

It's not remotely easy.

It isn't enough, for example, to teach Afghans how to fight.

Afghans already know a bit about fighting, having done little else in
recent decades. Training an army is really more about training Afghans not
to fight, because the American vision of a new Afghan army involves
demobilizing most of the 200,000 to 300,000 fighters in the country. When
peace broke out in Angola in 1991, outsiders sent in a minimal peacekeeping
force and said they would build a national army there too. But they failed
to create the right incentives for unneeded fighters to hand in their guns.
War soon resumed and continued on and off for another decade.

If you get demobilization right, the next step is to make the remaining
gunmen coalesce into a single army. But you can't expect fighters from
different regions and factions to join hands unless you have first
reconciled their peoples.

Two successful reconstruction experiments in the 1990s -- Mozambique's
creation of a new army out of government forces and guerrillas, and El
Salvador's creation of a new police force that included ex-government and
rebel fighters -- involved a large measure of political reconciliation
first and institution building afterward.

Bosnia, on the other hand, still has three armies for its three ethnic groups.

With its tribal rivalries and multiple warlords, Afghanistan makes Bosnia
look easy.

El Salvador and Mozambique had another advantage: They have no resources to
speak of. This meant that military commanders had no reason not to join a
new national force, because freelance plundering wasn't profitable. When
the peace process began in Mozambique, the rebel leaders went from bush
camps to extended sojourns in the capital's luxury hotels, and the tab was
picked up by the peace talks' foreign sponsors.

Soldiers in both Mozambique and El Salvador actually staged protests in
favor of rapid demobilization because the aid-financed inducements were so
attractive.

Resource-rich countries are different.

Angola and Sierra Leone both have been the objects of international
peacemaking efforts, but rebel commanders made so much money out of
diamonds that they had little incentive to abandon conflict.

Equally, Colombia's civil war grinds on because drug money is fueling the
rebels.

Unfortunately for American army-building ambitions, Afghanistan has heroin.

Some warlords are said to be recruiting fresh fighters even now, counting
on a bumper heroin crop to pay them.

Suppose that, by some miracle, you could persuade three-quarters of
Afghanistan's fighters to lay down their guns and the rest to sign up for a
national army. Would that mean your task is done? No, because creating an
army that works is as hard as institution building.

First, you train the new recruits, teach them to obey orders and feel
loyalty to the nation that they serve; then you supervise them in their
jobs. If all goes extraordinarily well, a professional culture gradually
emerges. Next you have to think about who's monitoring this new force. You
need civilian oversight, human-rights watchdogs -- more institutions that
need nurturing.

How long might this take? Since the Kosovo war ended in 1999, there's been
an effort there to create a police force that would be a model of
institution building.

So far just 4,300 police cadets have gone through training, and they still
are being supervised by 4,400 foreign police officers.

The plan is to promote the trainees as rapidly as possible. But they won't
be ready to hold the most senior jobs until at least 2005.

In other words, Kosovo suggests that a new Afghan army might be ready to
stand on its own feet by about 2008, and other countries roughly confirm
that time frame.

In postwar El Salvador, the new police force became effective after about
five years.

In Northern Ireland, it's taken three years since the Good Friday accord
for the promised Catholic-Protestant police force even to begin emerging.

Train a national army? Good idea. But in the meantime there's no
alternative to an expanded peacekeeping force for Afghanistan if the Bush
administration believes its own rhetoric.

Who said last week that, without security in the country, "there's not
going to be a stable government. There's not going to be humanitarian
assistance. Things aren't going to work"? The answer is none other than
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the chief opponent of peacekeeping.