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In an East Room speech explaining why the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Biden said the American mission had gone astray.
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy,” Mr. Biden said. “I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building.”
The president who sent U.S. forces into Afghanistan a generation ago, George W. Bush, had campaigned against nation-building, only to change his mind once U.S. forces along with Afghan allies toppled the Taliban government in October 2001. The project to build a new Afghanistan ultimately failed, as the central government lacked legitimacy and its armed forces, backed by U.S. air power, could not defeat a resurgent Taliban.
Proponents of nation-building will tell you no two failed or failing countries are the same. Not every nation-building project requires a massive military campaign to topple an existing government. Rather, a struggling government may request U.S. assistance to build up its security forces to thwart an insurgency, or it may need American technocrats to create state structures, such as a judiciary or prison system, where none existed.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Keith Mines of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former airborne officer and veteran State Department diplomat, contends that the U.S. has more nation-building successes on its record than it often receives credit for. Moreover, nation-building efforts often fail not because the U.S. presence stayed in a country for too long but because it left too soon.
“I look at nation-building as the coherence of the state and the nation. I look at the state where governing services are provided, the institutions that provide services to the people. The nation is one level above that. It’s the blood and belonging, as Michael Ignatieff put it. The question is does the nation provide a vision for you?” said Mr. Mines, the author of “Why Nation-Building Matters: Political Consolidation, Building Security Forces, and Economic Development in Failed and Fragile States.”
Among the U.S. interventions discussed in this episode where Mr. Mines served as either a soldier or a diplomat are Grenada, El Salvador, Columbia, Haiti and Afghanistan.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
