When Soldiers Become Cops

Rachel Bronson

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002

Article preview: first 500 of 3,736 words total.

Summary:  As Afghanistan has shown, keeping the peace in foreign lands requires a variety of tools--some of which Washington just does not have. Rather than avoid peacekeeping entirely, the U.S. government ends up sending in elite military units that get bogged down for years. Developing a constabulary force would be a better answer.

Rachel Bronson is Olin Senior Fellow and Director of Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS

As violence in Afghanistan continues to simmer, the stabilizing role of American troops there looks increasingly necessary. Even many members of the Bush administration -- which long resisted expanding the U.S. troop presence beyond Kabul and rejected anything that smacked of "nation building" -- now recognize how important U.S. soldiers are for Afghanistan. At the same time, however, it is also becoming evident that the U.S. military is not very well suited to the task of establishing security in precarious political environments. Because the United States has no paramilitary units and only poorly organized civilian policing tools, elite combat forces have ended up filling the void. This approach has been inefficient and expensive and has reduced Washington's ability to project power. And it has all but ensured that the U.S. military will bog down in Afghanistan -- not because of mission creep or poor civilian oversight, but because military and civilian leaders have yet to fully accept that a security-conscious nation-building plan is a necessary component of an effective exit strategy.

Afghanistan, moreover, has revealed a pattern that the United States seems doomed to repeat elsewhere. The mismatch between resources and requirements will ensure that the country continues to use its forces inefficiently -- unless serious changes are made, that is. Yet despite the best intentions of civilian and military leaders, Washington has failed to address this problem. Nor has it devoted much effort to building the international capabilities that could compensate for this weakness.

The right tools for promoting stability have not been developed for a variety of reasons. First is an institutional inertia that stems from the Cold War. Fighting the Soviets required deploying massive heavy equipment throughout the European theater, not crossing narrow and fragile bridges (as has been necessary in Kosovo) or dispersing mobs (as was required in Haiti). Policymakers planned "day after" scenarios based on thoughts of nuclear winter, not nation-building or pacifying disgruntled villagers. Second, the U.S. experience with constabulary forces in postwar Germany and Japan suggested that great caution must be exerted when designating military forces for operations other than war. Although the specially created American constabulary forces did a good job maintaining the peace after World War II, they proved disastrously ill-prepared when their mission suddenly changed to combat in Korea a few years later. And third, in some conservative quarters it is assumed that building a robust set of security capabilities will only increase the likelihood that reckless politicians will overcommit the U.S. military to an endless array of international adventures.

But an equally important part of the problem is that civilian leaders have not fought hard enough for change. The necessary high-level attention has not been devoted to preparing the full range of military and civilian responses to the security problems that America faces today. Despite the fact that President Bill Clinton issued three presidential decision directives (PDDS) during his tenure to reorganize the military and civilian apparatuses for operations other than war, not ...

End of preview: first 500 of 3,736 words total.