What is Nation Building? I would define Nation Building as: establishing the foundational infrastructure, policies and laws, processes, organizations, and human resources that would allow a nation to exist and continue to function after the Nation Building efforts have concluded. When is Nation Building needed? I would answer that Nation Building is needed whenever there is an significantly large population that exists in a common geography which lacks a central government and there is significant general suffering of the people. Who can perform Nation Building? In today's world I would answer, no one.

The army believes that nation building missions will make up the majority of their deployments in the future. The problem with this idea is that the military is not equipped for this mission. Their training and toolset is designed instead to identify, locate, and destroy targets, large or small – and for that they do a superb job. We do not have a single organization that is designed to build power grids, manage water resources, establish school systems, write laws and ordinances, create police and fire departments, build roads and bridges, establish free markets, institute courts and correctional facilities, and a myriad of other things that  a nation requires. We do this in the United States in a distributed fashion with federal, state, and local governments. It involves hundreds of groups with a vast array of specialties that take years of training and experience to execute. How could anyone expect to export this vastly complicated, interconnected network of systems to another country? We have watched as the U.S. has spent nearly a decade and trillions of dollars in rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan and the job is not complete yet. It’s not from a lack of trying. There is simply too much to get right in order to setup a new nation in today’s modern world.

Taking on this effort in a place like Iraq where the semblancesemblance
n 1: an outward or token appearance or form that is deliberately misleading; "he hoped his claims would have a semblance of authenticity"; "he tried to give his falsehood the gloss of moral sanction"; "the situation soon took on a different color" [syn: {gloss}, {color}, {colour}]
2: an erroneous mental representation [syn: {illusion}]
3: picture consisting of a graphic image of a person or thing [syn: {likeness}] of government structures had been once in place and the [udimentary infrastructures existed would be tough enough. Pulling this off in Afghanistan where there really has never been a governmental body, where the nation is largely illiterate, and the people see themselves as members of a tribe rather than citizens of a nation is an impossible mission. The world is ripe with these types of environments. Lands where tribal mentalities rule and the maturity of the people for modern western government is sorely lacking. Much of Africa, Central, and South America is in this state. Is it realistic to think that when a radical Islamic threat appears in any of these places that the United States will go in and nation build it into an ally? That path will lead us to bankrupt the nation and completely exhaust our valiant men and women of the armed forces.

The army has been leaning more on special forces units which are smaller with specialized training designed to get in, execute a mission, and get out. This is the way it will have to be in the new world. Islamic terrorist groups will continue to spread, be mobile, and change – nation building will not stop that. However, in order for these special forces units to be successful we we need quality intelligence. An asset that we have not had in the history of the United States. The CIA has been fraught with failure as demonstrated before 9/11, in the analysis of Iraq, in the surprise launch of missiles by North Korea. They have little to tell us about Iran that Twitter hasn’t already reported. There are many reasons for this shortcoming but the bottom line is we need human intelligence and we don’t have it. The first priority of the federal government and the president of the United States is to protect the American people. Have we forgotten the reality of the afternoon sun struggling to shine through the dust and debris of ground zero on the 11th of September 2001? There is no way we will ever get ahead of the curve in this war against radical Islam without superior intelligence. Without intelligence we are doomed to forever play catch up in the remote places of the world.

It is time to end the nation building of Afghanistan. It is time to stabilize Iraq. It is time to protect the United States by controlling our borders. It is time to enable a new strategy of defence focused on using special forces to suppress the enemy. It is time to create a real intelligence agency that has real embedded human assets amongst the enemy. It is time to stop dreaming about how things could be, and realizing how things are. It is time to start dealing candidlycandidly
adv : (used as intensives reflecting the speaker's attitude) it is sincerely the case that; "honestly, I don't believe it"; "candidly, I think she doesn't have a conscience"; "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" [syn: {honestly}, {frankly}] with each other as fellow Americans, without hate, without name-calling, without prejudice. It is time to start believing that we all want the American dream of peace, freedom, family, friends, and progress. It is time to understand that the American dream can happen in America if we protect her. It cannot happen elsewhere unless their own people want to create it for themselves. Utopian nation building is not possible.