WASHINGTON -- James Dobbins, a former State Department official involved in five of six nation-building exercises over the past 11 years, says the United States should be doing better in Iraq after all this experience.

"We don't seem to have learned much," says Dobbins, who served as U.S. special envoy in operations around the world.

President Bush's special envoy for Afghanistan James Dobbins (AP Photo)

In 1993, Dobbins led the diplomatic part of getting U.S. forces out of Somalia. In 1994, he helped arrange the multilateral intervention in Haiti. Just before the Kosovo conflict erupted in 1999, he became senior envoy for the Balkans and later headed the U.S. delegation to the Kosovo peace talks. In 2000 and 2001, he worked to organize international efforts to oust Slobodan Milosevic from Yugoslavia. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was President Bush's special envoy for Afghanistan.

Dobbins, who has been working for the Rand think tank since his retirement from government last year, said in a recent interview the most successful operations, especially from the standpoint of postwar casualties, have been Bosnia and Kosovo.

In Bosnia, he says, the ratio of security forces to the population was 18 soldiers for each 1,000 inhabitants. In Kosovo, it was 20 per thousand. In Iraq, it is only seven.

In the two Balkan regions, he notes, there hasn't been a single postwar U.S. combat death. In Iraq, as of Monday, the figure was 32 American soldiers killed in hostile action since Bush declared major combat operations ended on May 1.

"If you go in with heavier force, you sustain fewer casualties and you inflict fewer casualties," says Dobbins, who believes the relatively small coalition troop commitment in Iraq has emboldened anti-U.S. militants to resort to violent tactics.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld seems to agree that coalition force levels -- 147,000 U.S. personnel and 13,000 from allied countries -- are too low. He said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that as many as 30 countries could be added to the current 19 now pitching in. Also, he said, the number of Iraqi police should be doubled to about 60,000 in the near term. Iraqi army manpower is increasing as well, he pointed out.

All this, Rumsfeld said, could lead to a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq. Dobbins sees this as a good thing because the Iraq commitment has left the U.S. Army overextended, with virtually the entire 500,000-member force preparing to go to Iraq, already there or coming back.

"They are unavailable for other duties," he says.

It's hard to overstate the importance of establishing order, Dobbins says, pointing to the lack of security in Afghanistan as a major impediment to reconstruction there.

"Nothing happens without good security," he observes. "International investors have to feel free to travel the countryside. Otherwise they won't invest."

L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, said Tuesday American troops will need to remain in Iraq until a constitution and a democratic government are in place.

Dobbins says American patience in Iraq is essential, claiming that "no nation-building operation has succeeded in less than seven years."

That's how long postwar reconstruction of Germany took a half-century ago, Dobbins notes, recalling that the country was still in such a mess two years after the war that the Truman administration proposed the Marshall Plan.

Historians agree that the initiative played a vital role in German recovery even though that former enemy received only 11 percent of the $13 billion in Marshall Plan money. Funding for Britain and France was much higher.

Dobbins believes the United States has to begin taking nation building seriously because these operations probably will be a permanent fixture of U.S. foreign policy.

He says the problem is systemic because neither the State nor Defense departments regards nation building as a part of its central purpose.

"We need people available on short notice to staff these operations," Dobbins says. "There has to be an ongoing doctrine on how to approach them. It has become an inescapable responsibility, but it's not acknowledged.

"We treat each of these as is if it were the first and also treat each as if it were the last."

© Copyright 2003 The Associated Press

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