Do you believe the USA should ever engage in "Nation Building"?

Petraeus’s impossible mission in Afghanistan: armed nation-building
he US can’t build society at the barrel of a gun, but it can hunt Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.


But no one, no matter how brilliant, can achieve the impossible. And the problem in Afghanistan is the impossibility of the mission. The United States is pursuing a nation-building strategy with counterinsurgency tactics – that is, building a nation at the barrel end of a gun.

Might armed nation-building work
in Afghanistan? Sure, but history shows that it would take a very, very long time for a foreign occupying power to succeed. Are we willing to commit to such a generational effort, not just for mere months or years?

The US military tried to do nation-building in Vietnam with major combat forces from 1965 to 1972. It failed because that mission was impossible, too. Muddled strategic thinking, however, caused Washington to commit to a major military effort in South Vietnam when its vital strategic interests did not demand such a maximalist effort. The war was simply not winnable based on a moral and material cost that the American people were willing to pay.

Yet once Washington committed itself to Vietnam, it failed to see in the closing years that the war was lost. Instead it doggedly pursued an irrelevant strategy that got thousands more US soldiers killed.

Afghanistan today eerily looks more and more like Vietnam.

Alternatives to nation-building

There are alternatives to nation-building in Afghanistan. Columbia University scholar Austin Long recently offered an operational method that would reduce significantly the size of the US military in Afghanistan by transforming its mission from building up Afghan society to destroying and disabling Al Qaeda, along with limited training and advising to the Afghan military. This smaller force would focus on the areas most likely to harbor potential links and alliances with Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, Washington is caught in a cycle of thinking that sees each setback in the war in Afghanistan as a failure of the US military. Such thinking tends to exacerbate bad policy.

***snip***

President Obama has given the American military the mission of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan so that it cannot carry out strikes against the US from those locations. Contrary to common belief, this is a limited policy objective. Yet US military leaders have embraced the president’s limited objective expansively by attempting to reconstruct governments and reshape entire societies.

***snip***

By focusing on the American military and the promise of better tactical methods and generals, we neglect the true nature of the impossibility of nation-building at the barrel of a gun in the graveyard of empires.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0706/Petraeus-s-impossible-mission-in-Afghanistan-armed-nation-building