Haiti Democracy Project

www.haitipolicy.org

Hollow Victory

Lesson of Haiti for Afghanistan: Military Victory Unsupported by Long-term Strategy Is Futile

By James Morrell, research director of the Center for International Policy.

Published in Haiti-Observateur, New York

            Unsupported by diplomacy, even the most brilliant military victory is likely to prove hollow. This was the case with the United States' last major military intervention in the Third World—Haiti in 1994. It is likely to be the case in Afghanistan today.

            In Haiti in 1994, the victory of the U.S. military was complete. Twenty-two thousand U.S. troops landed without opposition from the Haitian army, which quickly disintegrated. Within days the deposed president was restored to office. The U.S. military departed on schedule.

            But the very ease with which that president had been overthrown by the Haitian military in 1991 and the need for overwhelming foreign force to restore him revealed a crisis of legitimacy in the Haitian polity that would require far more than a quick military operation. The situation called for a long-term program of U.N. nation-building to create or restore all of the institutions of government in tandem. The U.S. invasion in 1994 restored only the president. Restoration of the legislature, judiciary, police, and electoral machinery needed to be similarly supported by an international nation-building strategy with a continuing capability to prevent these institutions from being destroyed by one or another faction before they could mature.

            Over time, this was a feasible task in Haiti. It has a population that ardently desires democracy and has the modern-minded, professional personnel capable of operating the institutions of government to world-class standards. With foreign protection—the same degree of protection that had been afforded the returning president—Haiti could gradually build up the institutions to a level of strength, neutrality and legitimacy that would be proof against factional attack. It could hold elections, operate the machinery of government, consolidate a professional police, and efficiently use the $3 billion in foreign aid that was allocated in 1995.

            But the Republican takeover of Congress within two months of the Haiti invasion, and more broadly the lack of a theoretical acceptance of the need for intrusive nation-building in a case as desperate as Haiti's, prevented any such foreign diplomatic strategy from being even conceived, much less applied. The U.S. military operation was unsupported. In the ensuing years the rule of law it meant to institute slowly disintegrated, leaving Haiti once again to be ruled by a personalistic president and informal gangs of enforcers.

           A similar fate awaits the United States in Afghanistan despite the unexpected speed and ease of the military victory. The Bush administration did not even make contact with the U.N. negotiators in charge of Afghanistan until mid-October. As a result nothing was in place to subsume the power of the local warlords. This means that, as in Haiti, U.S. political strategy will be hostage to the ambitions of one or another well-placed faction or warlord and that there may be insufficient force on the ground to protect the new shell government headed by Hamid Karzai and the successor government to emerge from the loya jirga.

            Today, the country is effectively ruled by local warlords. The Bush administration continues to disparage nation-building and refuses to participate in the multilateral peacekeeping force—the "coalition of the willing"—that is the imperfect substitute for a full-scale U.N. mission. Afghanistan's political disintegration, like Haiti's and a number of African countries, is too far advanced for such half-measures to succeed. Most were victims of bitter Cold War rivalry by the superpowers that left their already weak governments in tatters.

            The concept of intrusive nation-building is anathema to both the right and the left, the right because it smacks of one-worldism and the left because it recalls colonialism. Nevertheless, these ideological shibboleths need to be re-examined by both camps. Multilateral nation-building has scored successes in difficult circumstances, such as Bosnia and Kosovo. In today's world, if a country bleeds refugees or launches terrorists, there will be foreign intervention in any case; the point is to make it benign.