A-Team in Blue Suits.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)(Iraq's Office for the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization)

Byline: Adam B. Kushner

Iraq showed that the U.S. is better at breaking things then fixing them. A new unit aims to change that.

The United States bumbled into Iraq without much of a postwar plan. There were too few troops to secure the country, and the U.S. authorities often lacked the civilian experts to get things up and running again. So key jobs fell to inexperienced Republican apparatchiks or just about anyone the Coalition Provisional Authority could get its hands on. That's how 20-somethings with no experience in finance wound up running Iraq's $13 billion budget (their names were plucked from a job-application page on the conservative Heritage Foundation's Web site) and setting up Baghdad's new stock exchange. Embarrassed by the disasters that resulted (and by grumbling from more-experienced hands), U.S. officials eventually realized they had to come up with a better system for training and deploying seasoned civilians in future conflicts.

So was born one of Washington's wonkiest, most mockable and most important new agencies since 9/11. Known as the Office for the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, its goal is to become the civilian equivalent of the U.S. military's Special Forces. "We went into Iraq and Afghanistan, and our military proved very efficient at dealing with the bad guys," says John E. Herbst, the former ambassador to Ukraine and Uzbekistan who now runs the agency, which came together in 2005. But the U.S. also had to ensure stability and technocratic competence, "and our efforts to do that proved to be very difficult." Troops aren't trained to govern; the CPA needed bureaucrats.

To provide them, Herbst's new office has collected experts from throughout the federal government in a Civilian Response Corps (CRC). It's a kind of temp agency for specialists, deploying them whenever they're needed to help unstable governments. Beverly DeWalt, a Foreign Service officer and CRC member, was sent to Kosovo in the months before that nation declared independence to help synchronize its laws with international standards. After Kosovar independence, DeWalt was dispatched to a provincial reconstruction team outside Kabul in order to help make municipal government more democratic and transparent. She erected a police recruiting station and helped broker a deal between local clans.

But Herbst's most dramatic new unit is the CRC standby force, only now being assembled. It ...