Bernd Debusmann

America’s costly efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq came under intense scrutiny this month in critical reports and a gloomy Senate hearing that prompted a memorable assertion. “If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States.”

That came from a Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, who continued: “When we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure in another country, it should only be done if we can articulate a vital national interest because we quite frankly need to be doing a lot more of that here.”

Webb spoke at the confirmation hearing of the veteran diplomat President Barack Obama nominated to be his next ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, who faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that left no doubt over the growing impatience of U.S. lawmakers with a military and financial commitment that is producing limited progress.

Webb’s juxtaposition of spending on Afghanistan and the state of things in the United States – a stalled economy, stubborn unemployment, an aging infrastructure – is made more often in online debates and private conversations than in official hearings. But it is a subtext for a debate likely to grow in the campaign for the 2012 elections and feature both Afghanistan and Iraq as money pits, object lessons for ill-conceived development projects, and lack of foresighted planning.

A report by the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting issued early in June set the tone. “U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are scheduled to begin in July 2011, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq is scheduled to end by December 31, 2011. But America will leave many legacies in both countries carrying large sustainment costs long into the future.”

The commission, the report said, saw no sign that the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were making plans to make sure that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan could operate and maintain, on their own, the vast array of projects built under U.S. government contracts, from schools and clinics to hospitals and power plants.

An examination of a decade’s wartime contracting in the two countries, says the report, had identified tens of billions of dollars of waste. Unless the U.S. paid prompt attention to the “how to” of maintaining, operating and paying for the projects it will leave behind, “the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

One example of money already wasted, and beginning to waste even more: the Kabul Power Plant, built with $300 million in American taxpayer money. “It is little used and the cost to operate and maintain it is too great for the Afghan government to sustain from its own resources.”

WHAT SUSTAINABILITY?
That raises a question: what resources? According to a World Bank estimate, 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) comes from “spending related to the international military and donor community presence.” Annual government revenues run to around $2.5 billion, funding the Afghan security forces costs more than twice as much.

The word “sustainability” sounds very much out of place in this context though it is sprinkled liberally through the Contracting Commission’s report as well as a report issued a week later by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It focused solely on Afghanistan and questioned the long-held theory that development projects in conflict zones helps to stabilize them.

That report pointed out that Afghanistan now receives more U.S. civilian assistance ($320 million a month) than any other country and it addressed a problem which looks more difficult to solve than any other: “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption …”

No doubt about that. Both in Afghanistan and Iraq corruption is the stuff of legend, featuring tales of government officials becoming multi-millionaires, warlords getting kickbacks for allowing development projects to go forward, contractors for the U.S. government over-billing to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, suitcases stuffed with $100 notes being shipped out of Kabul airport, newly-rich Iraqis and Afghans buying extravagant mansions in Dubai. In Kabul, the word for this is “Afghaniscam”

Things are not getting better, notwithstanding dire warnings about the corrosive effect of badly-spent aid. In 2008, the year the Commission on Wartime Contracting was set up in response to reports on vast misappropriations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the two countries ranked 176th and 178th out of 180 on a widely-respected corruption index. It is put out annually by the Berlin-based watchdog group Transparency International.

On the 2010 list (of 178 countries), Iraq ranks 175th and Afghanistan 176th. Myanmar and Somalia occupy the bottom slots.

Which helps explain the frustration about nation-building priorities Senator Webb expressed at the Senate hearing. He was one of the two senators who introduced a bill, in 2007, that led to the establishment of the Commission on Wartime Contracting.

Its members need not fear running out of work.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

Sombre analyses of America’s decline come in waves and the latest seems to be gathering strength. “AMERICAN DECLINE. This Time It’s Real” proclaims a recent magazine cover. “Yes, America is in Decline,” echoes another. Time to prepare obituaries for the world’s remaining superpower?

How long will it take for the U.S. to follow the example of the Roman Empire and end up as Italy? That’s a question the prognosticators of America’s waning power and influence (also known as declinists) tend to sidestep, perhaps because so many past predictions of doom have been so wrong.

The “This Time It’s Real” assertion is on the cover of Foreign Policy, a magazine closely read by the foreign policy community. Inside, the British commentator Gideon Rachman lays out a well-argued case for saying the U.S. will never again enjoy the dominance it had in the 17 years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global financial crisis of 2008.

The “Yes, America Is in Decline” headline is on the cover of TIME, the country’s most widely-read news magazine. The author and foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria bemoans the fact that Americans seem unable to grasp the magnitude of the challenges facing their country and that the political and economic changes now being debated in the U.S. “amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

America’s modern-day Cassandras (Rachman and Zakaria are not the only ones) draw on a wealth of statistics to back up their arguments, from spending on research and development (once 1st in the world, now 6th) and domestic savings (84th) to life expectancy (27th) and college graduation (once 1st, now 12th). They all add up to a bleak picture that could lead to the following observation:

“The decline argument…is driven by concern about the vast federal deficits of recent years and, consequently, the immense growth of the national debt. It reflects apprehensions regarding the deficits in the balance of trade, the necessity to borrow staggering sums abroad and the dramatic shift of the United States from a great creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor.”

That sounds as if it were culled from today’s headlines but it was written in the summer of 1988, by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and then scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. At the time, there was a full-blown debate over whether the United States was past its prime and headed for second-rank status. The dispute was prompted by the historian Paul Kennedy’s book “The Rise and Decline of Great Powers.”

In Kennedy’s view, the decline of the United States could probably be slowed but not averted and “the American share of world power has been declining relatively faster than Russia’s over the past few decades.” Not long after the book came out, the Berlin Wall fell. Not long after that, the Soviet Union collapsed.

CYCLES OF DECLINISM
The Soviet threat to American dominance turned out to be more imagined than real and that may well prove to be true for China, the country that today looms large in the popular imagination and in forecasts about the future alignment of world powers. According to a Gallup poll in February, 52 percent of Americans think China is the world’s leading economic power.

Such perceptions are out of synch with reality. China’s Gross Domestic Product is less than two thirds that of the United States. GDP per capita is roughly one to six ($47,123 to $7,518), according to 2010 figures from the International Monetary Fund. As far as productivity is concerned, one American produces, by some estimates, as much as six Chinese.

Harvard University’s Joseph Nye, in a response to Zakaria’s gloom-and-doom analysis, says polls such as Gallup’s highlight “cycles of declinism” that say more about America’s collective psychology than underlying shifts in power.

“In the last half-century, polls showed Americans believed in their decline after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, after Richard Nixon’s devaluation of the dollar and the oil shocks in the 1970s, and after the closing of Rust Belt industries and the budget deficits of Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s,” he writes.

Declinists tend to give short shrift to an element that tends to play a key role for the global standing of a country – a culture that encourages innovation and attracts the world’s best and brightest. On this, the U.S. has an edge over China, whose world-changing inventions belong to the ancient past – paper, gunpowder, the compass and wood printing.

The contemporary invention that changed the  world more than any other, the Internet, was made in the United States which, declinist talk notwithstanding, still employs more than two thirds of the world’s Nobel Prize winners, accounts for about a third of the world’s patents, and is home to 13 of the world’s 20 top-ranked universities.

Unlike the doomsayers, President Barack Obama sounds confident that the U.S. can retain its position: “It is my belief that we have all the pieces in place for us to make sure that the 21st century is the American Century just like the 20th was,” he said in February. “That means that we’ve got to out-educate every other country in the world. We’re going to have to out-innovate every country in the world.”

It’s a very tall order. Is it possible? We’ll know by around 2030.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

On February 18, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. The vote raises a question: Who dominates in the alliance between America and Israel?

Judging from the extent to which one partner defies the will of the other, decade after decade, the world’s only superpower is the weaker partner. When push comes to shove, American presidents tend to bow to Israeli wishes. Barack Obama is no exception, or he would not have instructed his ambassador at the United Nations to vote against a policy he himself stated clearly in the summer of 2009.

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop,” he said in a much-lauded speech in Cairo.

Compare this with the text of the resolution that drew 14 votes in favor and died with the U.S. veto: “Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”

Linguists may quibble over the difference between “illegal” and “illegitimate” but the substance of the two statements is pretty much the same. So why the veto? It followed an energetic campaign by the Israeli government and its allies in the United States to keep the issue out of the United Nations, seen by Israel as a reflexively anti-Israeli body.

Washington’s ambassador at the U.N., Susan Rice, had a different explanation. Though the U.S. opposed settlements, she said, adopting that resolution would have risked hardening the positions of both sides in future negotiations. In other words, let’s return to the parallel universe of the “peace process.”

In that universe, American presidents make optimistic predictions detached from the realities on the ground. George W. Bush, early in 2009: “The peace agreement should happen and can happen by the end of the year.” Obama, last September, held out the prospect of an agreement that would, by next year,” lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”

While the peace process has sputtered on, Israel has been building settlements in the territory of what would be a Palestinian state. Demands from nine successive U.S. administrations that these settlements – illegal under the Fourth Geneva convention – be stopped have been ignored.

Since the peace process began with the Oslo accord of 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank has risen from around 110,000 to more than 300,000. The government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu refused to agree even to the extension of a temporary halt, despite an offer of jet fighters worth billion of dollars. American aid has been running at around $8.5 million a day for many years but obviously doesn’t buy much influence.

The number of optimists who still believe in the “two-state solution” – an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – has been shrinking as the number of settlements grew. The peace process ground to a halt when the Palestinians refused to negotiate as long as there was no halt to settlements.

The problem with America’s role in the process (highlighted again by the February 18 veto) was spelt out with memorable clarity six years ago by Aaron David Miller, who worked in senior roles at the State Department for 25 years as a Middle East negotiator and adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs.

AMERICANS AS ISRAEL’S LAWYERS, NOT HONEST BROKERS

“For far too long,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peace-making have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering for and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations. If the United States wants to be an honest and effective broker…then surely it can have only one client: the pursuit of a solution that meets the requirements of both sides.”

The obstacles to this are numerous and difficult, from a weak Palestinian leadership that does not represent all Palestinians to fractious Israeli politics that have moved farther and farther to the right and are now dominated by a government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is a settler himself.

But perhaps the most difficult obstacle to American peace-making lies in the United States – the “Israel, right or wrong” crowd and its pervasive influence in Congress. That the Middle East policy decks would be stacked against the Palestinians became clear even before the creation of Israel in 1948.

When President Harry Truman and his top diplomats in the Middle East discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it and predicted it would result in foreign policy problems for the U.S. His answer: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

No annual meeting of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee is complete without a senior member of the administration (Democratic or Republican) reminding the audience of the “unbreakable bond” between the U.S. and Israel, as evidenced by the fact that Truman recognized the state of Israel just 11 minutes after its declaration of independence. (His calculation about constituents is not part of the homage.)

So, if the peace process is really dead, as many experts now say, what’s next? At the end of the 2007 Annapolis conference, one of a long string of peace summits that produced photo opportunities but no progress, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had this to say: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-like struggle for equal voting rights…the State of Israel is finished.

“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

That rings even more true now, when Israel’s Arab neighbors are ousting their dictators in mass movements for democracy, than it did then.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)