Fatal Conceit | Justin Logan and Christopher Preble | Cato Institute: Commentary

Fatal Conceit | Justin Logan and Christopher Preble | Cato Institute: Commentary: "In the nearly 15 years since the Dayton Accord was signed, Bosnia has been the site of the largest state-building project on earth. On a per capita basis, the multinational project there has dwarfed even the post — World War II efforts in Germany and Japan. Tiny Kosovo received higher per capita expenditure. Yet, as political scientists Patrice McMahon and Jon Western warned in Foreign Affairs last year, Bosnia 'now stands on the brink of collapse' — partly as a consequence of persistent ethnic cleavages and the inherent difficulty of state building. McMahon and Western — who support additional efforts in Bosnia to prevent a collapse — warn that Bosnia has gone from being 'the poster child for international reconstruction efforts' to being a cautionary tale about the limits of even very well-funded and focused efforts at state building.

Similarly, in surveying conditions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Gordon Bardos of Columbia University recently concluded that "it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that we have the intellectual, political, or financial wherewithal to transform the political cultures of other countries" at an acceptable cost. If Bosnia and Kosovo — European countries less rugged than Afghanistan, and with, respectively, one-sixth and one-twelfth of its population — represent the case for optimism in Afghanistan, then the case for gloom is strong."

"Consider the following counterfactual: If everything in Afghanistan were the same today, except the U.S. did not have a large military footprint there, would anyone propose deploying 100,000 servicemen and -women to build the Afghans a government? We should doubt whether the government-building project is likely to succeed. There is little precedent for successful state building on this scale; and there are especially strong centrifugal forces in Afghanistan, including rampant illiteracy, the country's position as a plaything of regional powers (India and Pakistan), powerful identity politics, and a xenophobic culture. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that Afghanistan simply is not far enough along in the historical processes that produced national states in the past."

"It is incoherent to believe that the same government that can produce neither jobs nor well-educated children at home can build viable states in foreign lands with unfamiliar languages, customs, and cultures. To oppose such projects at home while supporting them abroad defies the laws of economics and basic common sense."