WASHINGTON – The savage July 7 terrorist attacks in London understandably sidetracked the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, from its focus on African poverty. But it would serve world leaders to recognize that terrorism and underdevelopment are not unrelated. To its credit, the Pentagon is already on the case.
The Defense Department’s latest fixation in the global war on terrorism is the challenge of weak and failing states. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has sounded the warning about the dangers of “ungoverned areas,” ranging from whole countries without the rule of law to remote areas conducive to illicit activity. In 12 African countries, as well as Afghanistan, the Caucuses, Colombia, the Philippines and beyond, U.S. soldiers are training their foreign counterparts to control borders and eliminate terrorist safe havens.
We should applaud this new attention to poor governance in the developing world. But we should be wary of relegating the entire mission to our military. An effective response to weak and failing states requires all instruments of national power, subtle as well as blunt.
The dangers these states pose are real. Beyond bringing misery to their inhabitants, they are incubators and launching pads for a wide array of threats to U.S. and global security: they host terrorist groups (as in Afghanistan and Somalia); they spawn insurgencies and humanitarian catastrophes that spill over borders (as in Africa’s Great Lakes region); they present lawless settings for criminal syndicates to traffic in drugs (coca in Colombia), illicit commodities (conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone) or human beings (women and children in the Balkans); and they facilitate pandemics like HIV/AIDS and emerging diseases like Ebola and avian flu. The situation in failing and failed states also threatens disruption of global energy supplies, including the 33 percent of oil imports we get from Angola, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela.
Al-Qaida’s ability to operate with impunity from Afghanistan convinced the Bush administration that ungoverned territories could pose a mortal threat. In 2002, for the first time in history, President Bush declared, “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones,” and for nearly three years, his administration has grappled with how to translate this insight into practical policy.
The Pentagon provided one response in March in its National Defense Strategy. While previous installments had focused on deterring cross-border aggression, the new one calls on the military to strengthen the sovereign capacities of foreign governments to control their territories and combat the internal threats of terrorism, insurgency and organized crime.
But the Pentagon’s contribution should not be the last word. Weak national governments are, above all, a symptom of failed development, and the challenge of building effective states is not solely – or even primarily – a military task. State building requires strengthening the four central pillars of governance: physical security, political institutions, economic management, and social welfare.
The U.S. military can help foreign governments police their territories and borders and protect their citizens from violence, but the Pentagon has neither the mandate nor the capacity to address the many civilian dimensions of state building, from promoting democratic processes and the rule of law to creating capable economic institutions and meeting basic social needs.
The Pentagon’s effort must become part of a broader U.S. government initiative that incorporates the “3 Ds” of U.S. global engagement: defense, diplomacy and development. Fortunately, the components of an integrated U.S. strategy already exist, albeit in fragmented form. The State Department has created a new office of reconstruction and stabilization, which has the capacity to identify global hot spots and launch prevention efforts, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has drafted a “fragile states” strategy to engage poorly performing countries.
Instead of working alone on their pieces of this puzzle, Defense, State and USAID must collaborate on the bigger picture. For proof this can be done, look no further than Britain, where Tony Blair has instructed the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development to pool their efforts and resources to head off collapse in crisis countries.
As a start, the White House should designate a focal point – ideally in the State Department – to develop and coordinate a national strategy toward weak and failing states. We should also leverage international actors, including the G-8, the UN and the World Bank, to confront this challenge.
Finally, the White House and Congress must correct the glaring mismatch between the costs of state failure and the paltry resources we devote to prevent it. For fiscal year 2006 the Bush administration is seeking $419 billion for the Pentagon but just $33.6 billion for all other international activities – and only a fraction of that to prevent state failure. Unless we begin taking prevention seriously, we will consign ourselves to spending far more later in blood and treasure to pick up the pieces after states collapse into turmoil.
Stewart Patrick directs the Project on Weak States and U.S. National Security at the Center for Global Development in Washington. He served on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff from September 2002 to January 2005.
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