SPP Adjunct Professor Janine Davidson, a former Air Force officer, recently co-authored an editorial that appeared in The Washington Post about what is going wrong in Iraq and what our troops there really need. “History demonstrates that successful counterinsurgency requires an integrated civil-military effort focused on strengthening local institutions, not just chasing down bad guys,” noted Davidson and her collaborator, Tammy S. Schultz, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. “Unfortunately, the United States lacks the nonmilitary institutional capacity to carry out this strategy—and if current political trends continue, it will not have the capacity to ‘build’ anytime soon.”

They go on to criticize the implementation of a new strategy of the Bush administration called “clear, hold, build” which emphasizes “‘clearing’ an area of insurgents through aggressive military operations.” Davidson and Schultz argue such an approach is “only useful if that same area is then ‘held’ by security forces that can prevent insurgents from resuming violence against the civilian population. But U.S. forces cannot hold these areas forever. The population's future depends on the ‘building’ of durable local institutions, including mechanisms for security, governance and economic development. This building requires the assistance of nonmilitary experts—the type that the United States has failed to develop and deploy in sufficient numbers to adequately assist the troops in the field.” What the U.S. should really be doing, to help carry out its mission in Iraq, is relying more on the expertise of a number of different government divisions. “We need Treasury and Commerce Department officials to help build the regulatory mechanisms of legal economic life,” Davidson and Schultz assert. “We need Justice Department experts to assist with the rule of law and the training of police. And we need State Department diplomats to tend to the governance and the coordination of these disparate efforts.” The piece concludes by saying: “If we really want to support the troops, we need to get serious about supporting the State Department.”