Inevitable Conflicts, Avoidable Failures: Preparing for the Third Generation of Conflict, Stabilization, and Reconstruction Operations

Foreign internal conflicts clearly remain a permanent feature of the U.S. foreign policy landscape, especially since the United States regularly participates in efforts to stabilize countries affected by conflict and then helps them recover afterwards. Yet U.S. government officials and the American public in general have difficulty accepting the inevitability of U.S. involvement in such efforts.To ensure lasting progress and security in post-conflict situations, the United States must adjust its approach from a focus on large operations to preparing adequately for small-scale, long-term interventions. Most U.S. deployments since the end of the Cold War have been in small or what the Department of Defense once called military operations other than war.1 Yet the has usually been more prepared to fight large, technologically advanced wars than smaller contingencies that require greater integration with civilian capacities. As a consequence, each time the U.S. is deployed to a complex-but small-emergency, it has had to relearn lessons on the ground about the best way to manage these types of contingencies. Civilian participation in stabilization and reconstruction efforts is likewise inevitable, but civilian institutions are even less prepared for such work than the military. Lessons learned over the last decade are only recently being institutionalized, through offices like Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) and the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). In part this is due to bureaucratic politics. But in large part it is because government officials, Congress, and the American public do not acknowledge that the civilian expertise and resources needed to do this work is inadequate relative to the demand.The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have colored perceptions about whether and how the United States should operate in conflict and post-conflict environments. In many ways, those wars were exceptional: the scale of effort, the number of troops deployed, the number of U.S. casualties, and the amount of money were all far higher than any other U.S. intervention since the war in Vietnam. Many in Washington have concluded that U.S. interventions will not come close to that size any time in the near future, and so the capabilities developed to participate in those conflicts need not be emphasized in future strategic decisions.In other ways, however, those conflicts brought to light the key challenges facing the United States as it participates in foreign internal conflicts at any scale. Problems have included civilian-military coordination, international civilian coordination, the inability of civilians to move freely and interact with populations in conflict zones, the inability to measure progress, the difficulty of translating tactical and operational success into strategic success, the desire to do for foreign partners what they should be doing for themselves, and the tendency to take shortcuts. In other words, the pathologies that exist in the U.S. response to the smallest conflicts were shown in high relief in these large-scale conflicts in a way that, in the popular imagination, has reflected poorly on the institutions and individuals involved in conflict, reconstruction, and stabilization operations.There is danger, however, to overstating how pervasive these pathologies are. In truth, those institutions and individuals had many successes and made many improvements within Afghanistan and Iraq and in smaller, less-visible conflicts outside of those theaters. In Afghanistan, for example, there has been a 43% reduction of enemy attacks over the past year; Afghan security forces, up 31% from 2010, now lead half of all combat operations; and school attendance rates for girls have increased 67% since 2001.2 In Iraq, there has been progress in transforming the security sector, and the decline in attacks on civilians has been noted by the United Nations report on the country situation. …