Stabilization and Reconstruction After Iraq and Afghanistan

The following conversation derives from an on-line chat between Global Forecast editors and two CSIS scholars on what stability operations might look like under the next administration.

As Washington debates the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan, it may be time to look back and ask what we have learned as a country after a decade of massive state-building operations.

ROBERT LAMB: I don’t think there’s agreement on what we’ve learned. On one hand, there’s lots of evidence that it doesn’t work. It distorts labor markets and the country’s nascent private sector. It puts us in the middle of violent local politics we don’t understand. We can’t coordinate between our own agencies, much less with dozens of other countries. And yet, 10 years ago Afghanistan was a medieval theocracy. Today, with all its flaws, there are new institutions, roads, schools, rights, and a lot of other things that didn’t exist under Taliban rule.

NATHAN FREIER: I think we’ve learned two things. First, these are time- and resource-intensive endeavors that engender enormous costs. And second, this type of long-duration military action ought to be avoided at almost any cost in the future. If and when we do undertake operations of this scale again, the level of investment must be commensurate with the interests at stake and the level of opportunity cost and risk associated with tying down finite military and civilian resources.