The office of reconstruction and stabilization was finally funded in fiscal year 2009; its Response Readiness Corps has now recruited 78 officials, plus 554 on standby. This will not take you far in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the office is not expected to play an important role in staffing either theater. Even the thousand-odd civilians now being thrown into the breach in Afghanistan are spread very thin on the ground: A "district support team" may have half a dozen civilians quartered with, and escorted by, 300 Marines -- this in a country of more than 28 million spread across an area about the size of Texas. The civilians, while no longer carrying tennis rackets, are scarcely as well grounded in their jobs as the Marines. A 2009 report by the National Defense University (NDU) notes, "Stabilization has to be led by teams of professionals who specialize in that work, train for it, and develop plans and doctrines for expeditionary operations in the same way that the military plans for crisis interventions."
The distribution of resources is just as skewed as the distribution of manpower and preparedness. A State Department official told me that in Kunar province, in the east, the military commander had $150 million to spend on local initiatives, while his USAID counterpart had just $10,000. A military officer is, of course, going to spend that money to support military objectives: If the local warlord makes himself useful, he's probably going to get his share of that money no matter how much the locals hate him.
Officials in the Obama administration suffer none of their predecessors' hostility or ambivalence toward the tools of soft power, very much including the civilian force. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been adamant about reclaiming some of the capacities, and some of the authority, that in recent years have migrated to the Pentagon; and her belief in the centrality of development to American national security dictates a far more prominent role for USAID. There has been a slew of studies in recent years advocating enhanced civilian capacity; most of the authors recommend situating that capacity not in State, which is a policy rather than an operation agency, but in some expanded and fortified version of USAID. The NDU study proposed the establishment of a cabinet-level Agency for Development and Reconstruction.
The administration is now seriously contemplating such questions in its Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Lew, who is running the review, says that before officials figure out where to locate the new corps, they have to ask themselves, "What capabilities do we need?" One operation may require 100 agronomists, but if the next demands 100 hydrologists, do you really want to hire all those experts instead of knowing where to find them? What "core capacities" must the government retain? If you need to be able to both rapidly deploy and sustain a presence over time, so that public health experts don't go home after three months -- as they do now -- does that require two different forces?
The searing experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has made many Americans doubt the U.S. capacity to do much good at all abroad. That skepticism is a necessary corrective to the airy fantasies of a few years ago, but it's also a new kind of hyperbole. The Thomasites, four-fifths of whom, by the way, had prior teaching experience and thus more or less knew what they were doing, not only established a national school system in the Philippines, but offered the most benevolent possible face to America's colonial enterprise. They didn't leave a working democracy in their wake, but that's not what we're asking of the "civilian surge" in Afghanistan either. We are hoping they will help tip the scales of Afghan public opinion toward the government rather than the Taliban. Even that might be too much to ask. But it would be a shame if we failed because we hadn't taken the responsibility seriously.
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