Rising From the Rubble.(redevelopment of Afghanistan)(Brief Article)

Afghanistan is the picture of an unmade nation. Its cities are half rubble. Schools and hospitals are decrepit and unstaffed. The few roads are often more treacherous than driving through the desert, except where some of the country's millions of land mines are laid. Orchards have been chopped down, irrigation canals have run dry, drought ridden fields lie fallow. One fifth of the population is homeless; at least as many are hungry. What little economic activity does occur revolves around fighting and the dark trades that it enables--smuggling, drugs, banditry. After 20 years of war, fully half of all Afghans have never known a functioning state.

We have come to see such dismal scenes as the setting for a different kind of disaster: the trauma of repairing failed states. That job no longer carries the sense of grand mission that attached to the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan after World War II. In places like Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, well-intentioned outsiders have achieved at best mixed results, incurred local resentment and developed a paralyzing aversion to the task. Yet the experience of Afghanistan illustrates more clearly than ever why these holes in the global fabric need to be patched. It is a question of our own security as well as theirs.

All the term "nation-building" really means is fixing what can be fixed with international money and expertise and the hard work of local populations, and hoping that what results is whole cloth. In ...