Day: April 10, 2013
Lessons from Iraq
A decade of military involvement in Iraq has imparted precious lessons regarding stabilization and reconstruction. A United States Institute of Peace (USIP) event this week drew on the seven main lessons enumerated in Learning from Iraq: A Final Report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The panel featured:
–Jim Marshall, President of USIP
– William B. Taylor Jr, former director of the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office in Baghdad (2004-5)
– Manal Omar, the Director of Iraq, Iran and North Africa Programs, USIP
–Quil Lawrence, NPR Baghdad Bureau Chief
–John Nagl, Senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Minerva Research Fellow at the US Naval Academy
Lesson 1: Establish who’s in charge
“Create an integrated civilian-military office to plan, execute and be accountable for contingency rebuilding activities during stabilization and reconstruction operations”
The Iraq reconstruction effort suffered from a dual handicap: disjointed command and poor coordination of efforts. According to the SIGIR report Defense, State, and USAID failed to integrate their operations. No one entity was tasked with planning and executing the reconstruction activities.
Lesson 2: Stability before reconstruction
“Begin rebuilding only after establishing sufficient security, and focus first on small programs and projects”
State and Defense made the mistake of investing on large infrastructure programs before establishing a safe and secure environment to spur Iraq’s recovery. According to William B. Taylor, Jr, his office found itself repeatedly rebuilding sabotaged projects or entirely reallocating funds from an $18.4 billion bill list of national projects designed for a secure environment. The take-away: the greater the instability, the smaller the infrastructure projects should be. In an unstable environment, smaller, local projects have a greater impact than large, easily targetable infrastructure projects.
Lesson 3: Make sure investments are both productive and sustainable
“Ensure full host-country engagement in program and project selection, securing commitments to share costs (possibly through loans) and agreements to sustain completed projects after their transfer”
The Iraqi leaders interviewed in the SIGIR report complained of the US’s failure to consult with them on what construction projects Iraqis wanted and needed. The botched consultations resulted in the construction of unwanted, underutilized, and often dysfunctional projects—including a $40 million prison sitting empty in the Iraqi desert north of Baghdad. Lawrence argued that to this day, Iraqis can point to few tangible constructions iconic of the US contribution to the Iraqi people. In order to distinguish between a need and a want, the US should have fully engaged the Iraqi leadership and deferred to its judgment. Better consultation would have forced the US not to build above Iraq’s capacity and to secure cost-sharing commitments.
Lesson 4: Standardize the management system
“Establish uniform contracting, personnel, and information management systems that all SRO participants use”
Good coordination among agencies was the exception, not the rule. Systematic planning was completely lacking. Poorly coordinated personnel assignments caused team members of the various participating agencies to deploy and depart on diverging schedules, hampering coordination and aggravating tensions. There was no shared database listing the contracting, personnel and information management systems between agencies, so it was impossible to know what infrastructure was complete, and which was under construction.
Lesson 5: Oversight and accountability
“Require robust oversight of SRO activities from the operations’ inception”
Congress established SIGIR in 2003 to oversee the reconstruction effort and it’s challenges. In this respect, the Iraq reconstruction operation proved successful.
Lesson 6: Learn from the successes
“Preserve and refine programs developed in Iraq, like the Commander’s Emergency Response Program and the Provincial Reconstruction Team Program, that produced successes when used judiciously”
Omar complemented this point with what might represent a pre-requisite to lesson six: the importance of recognizing and highlighting successes to the population, the host country leadership, and the international community. Iraq is far from stable, but the country has experienced some successes: Iraqi police man checkpoints and the Iraqi civil society engagement is stronger than ever.
Lesson 7: Plan ahead
“Plan in advance, plan comprehensively and in an integrated fashion, have backup plans ready to go”
The abrupt shift from a liberation mission to a state building and reconstruction mission points to the lack of foresight in planning the Iraq program. The absence of a defined mission led to perennial re-evaluation and re-organization of the reconstruction program.
The panelists’ comments all converged on the final point. The absence of an “exit strategy” led to two major mistakes: poor consultation and weak engagement of Iraqis. Nagl argued that the military’s ignorance of Iraq’s culture and environment left the US unable to contextualize the little consultation it was receiving. The decisions to disband the army and de-Baathification– often touted as the poorest decisions taken during the reconstruction period—were based on hasty US consultations with aggrieved members of the Iraqi population. These early blunders destroyed Iraqi expectations, shattering the small window of opportunity offered directly after the fall of the regime.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Syria isn’t going away
I couldn’t agree more with Fred Hof’s bottom line in his and Alex Simon’s paper prepared for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sectarian Violence in Syria’s Civil War: Causes, Consequences, and Recommendations for Mitigation:
Left on its current trajectory, Syria is on the path to state failure and sustained sectarian violence, featuring mass atrocities and cleansing that could amount to genocide in some areas.
That is a clear and compelling alarm, one the Holocaust Museum is uniquely qualified to sound.
As Fred and Alex painstakingly elaborate, all of the likely scenarios, including an opposition victory, will produce serious risks. This is due in no small measure to the history and context of the Syrian war. Syrian society is riddled with cleavages: sectarian, ethnic, regional, urban/rural and ideological. The Asad regime papered over them a thin veneer of secularism but quickly ripped that off when the Sunni majority rebelled. The regime has intentionally sectarianized the war, ensuring itself Alawite and other minority support by making the fight an existential one. As Hof and Simon put it:
Thus, while preaching and promoting secularism, Assad built a system implicitly featuring the sectarian poison pill: any attempt by non-Alawites to bring down the regime would run the risk of taking the country down with it via a bitter sectarian struggle.
- regime victory
- managed transition
- rebel victory
- stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure
They quite rightly conclude that each is worse than the last when it comes to the risks of mass atrocity and even genocide in some areas.
Check: possible future developments foreseen. Check: alarm bell rung. What is to be done?
That’s where the Holocaust Museum paper is less satisfying, but not for lack of good policy proposals. Hof and Simon want an inclusive, tolerant opposition government committed to rule of law on Syrian territory. They want a negotiated settlement that creates a transition regime. They want trust funds to back the transition. They want supply of training and weapons to good guys, while funding to bad guys is blocked. They want a UN-authorized, NATO-led stabilization force, to accompany unarmed observers. They want US support for a democratically oriented, non-sectarian outcome.
I can’t quarrel with wanting these things. But it is not at all clear how to get to them, or even how some of them would help to prevent mass atrocity. In my view, what is needed is a less global set of options targeted on the specific issue of protecting civilians. More than 70,000 Syrians are now dead due to a war that started only a bit more than two years ago. This is a colossal failure of the responsibility to protect, which lies first and foremost with the Syrian government. The options may be quite different in each scenario, but the moral imperative is the same: something needs to be done to save lives.
It is looking very much as if the fourth scenario is the most likely one (stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure). Preventing that or mitigating its consequences is going to require more international political will than has been forthcoming so far. Even if there is an opposition victory, the transition will be a long and painful one. With the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has dismantled much of its civilian capacity to handle cases of state failure. We need to be thinking about how to fill the gap, either with our own personnel and resources or other peoples’. UN? Arab League? Turkey? One way or another, Syria is going to be with us for a long time. It isn’t going away just because Washington ignores it.
RSS - Posts
