Nation Building: Not for the Fainthearted; As East Timor and Afghanistan show, fixing failed nations is a slog under the best of circumstances.

Byline: MICHAEL O'HANLON (O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington.)

Can nation-building work? A close follower of the news might be forgiven for thinking, no. East Timor, long viewed as an impressive example of the capabilities of the United Nations, is going up in smoke. The Iraq mission, after three years, has little to show for the huge effort, budgetary expense and cost in blood. After looking like a relative success of "nation-building lite," Afghanistan may be regressing.

Is the idea of helping a country rebuild itself after conflict simply too daunting these days? Perhaps we have made the job too hard. While the leaders of the 1940s may indeed have been somewhat better at nation-building than we have been since, their job was slightly easier, too. Most of the states we're trying to rebuild today are either ethnically more complex than Japan and Germany, or less economically developed than those two countries were prior to World War II, or both. What's more, there are typically many actors in any nation-building mission now, which can create policy confusion. Other trends in world affairs--the rise of nationalism, the easy availability of small weaponry around the world--have complicated reconciliation efforts.

On balance, there has been a roughly 50 percent success rate since the 1950s. Many nation-building efforts fail, and some are easy to remember--Bosnia until 1995, Rwanda and Angola in the early 1990s, Haiti and Congo and Somalia today. But equally true, Cambodia, Mozambique, the Western Sahara, Guatemala, Panama and now even much of West Africa have put behind them years of horribly destructive violence and begun, with the help of peacekeepers, U.N. development specialists and others, to reconstruct their countries. Most are only partial successes; at the end of the day, these are not classic Jeffersonian democracies. But at least they've ...