Nation-Building Elevated

[M-A Lagrange]

Allow me: Ideally you do it by "destroying his armed force" - that is kill/capture them, until they give up. Works and proven to do so. - but you may have to settle for something less as the setting forth of policy can also change the policy.
If you are not using violence, you are using diplomacy.

Wilf, we are talking about the hold/build phase. They already have given up military, at least most of them.

Dayuhan,

Look at it from the other direction. What if the state we want to build contains multiple societies? What if these multiple societies are traditional rivals? What if they distrust each other, or loathe each other? These conditions are going to have a very real impact on the capacity to build a state, a nation, or an economy.

This answers to your first comment. The trick and what is fooling us is that we look at countries as a homogenous body while in many failed state, it's a patchwork of small entities more or less federated by a central inefficient State.
The cite can be restricted to the very core Aristotle definition: the agora. A land: a village, a leadership: the elders, an army: the men of the village (in CvC trinity).

Mike,

Still, all of that flies far above (but the results will surely affect) the village I'm currently thinking about. That is a place with a guy, his kid and wife with their two donkeys; and the former spearchuckers clustered with their cattle at the watering point (AKs and RPGs may or may not be left hidden in the underbrush). Then we have the village: umbrella huts surrounded by a prickly brush barrier - juxtaposed to adjacent steel structures of indifferent repair. So, my village is certainly a collage - and, perhaps, a mallage.

I think you are targeting the right level. But it appears that we want to first fixe the 500 m target before going to the 25 m target. Funding also come into the question. It's much cheaper to fix the State apparatus before fixing the problematic of all the small villages.
Afghanistan is a very good example of this. The assembly was created to bring together all the potential Elite that could enter our definition of it and ease the establishment of a centralized State. But we did not look at the lower level: do those people represent more than a village or a fragile structure based on violence domination a combination of Stateless entities and Charismatic/traditional domination.
Afghanistan like many others failed States is like an onion. You have several layers of complex societal organization and we come to impose another one, just because it is the one we are familiar with.

I can see "technical" problems also. It's difficult to build both State administration and Nation at village level. But not impossible, just more expensive.

Steve,

In Iraq, as I met many of the senior technocrats, they were proud of their role in twice rebuilding their country after major wars, even against the restraints of embargos, and arbitrary dictatorial government. Might not be paradise to us, but they were proud of what they had done, and on many levels, antagonistic to US civ/mil efforts that kept them from their duties/pride in rebuilding their country themselves. VP Mahdi was in Washington yesterday, and unambiguous about their self-determination, and getting the US forces out---to fly, they need us to get out of the way.

As MG Caslan (MND-North) said last month on his public post-tour debrief, he was skeptical of turning things over to Iraqis, but Gen Odierno impressed on him how important it was for the Iraqis, and the zeal they had for self-rule and independence (even with risks of instability).

Smoke and mirrors aside, Iraq has substantial resource, locational and cultural elements that, if they don't tear it apart, will drive it forward---with or without us.

But Afghanistan is a different problem all together. Current Afghans are born into economic, geographic, logistical and resource limitations, despite that it may have been prosperous once. But our strategy does not succeed by helping them to tread water----they have to grow, change, reinvent themselves in remarkable ways to meet our objectives---and it is not happening.

You describe exactly what I am talking about.
Empirically, I see two main kind of State building contexts or a context of State building (Iraq) and one context of Nation Building (Afghanistan), to make it simple.

As Steve clearly explains, Iraq was a "developed State" with all the characteristics of a Weberian State before the war. I did live in Iraq in 1978 and it was an average Middle East country with high potential (and yes I was a little boy at that time, so what? ).

Pre war Afgahnistan is a Stateless country with an attempt of Weberian State. (Cannot say it worked out nor any of us did support it. We were much too busy defeating USSR at that time).
In such context, the remark of Dayuhan takes all its sense. What is the cite? Basically the village Mike is thinking of.
In my perception, we should approach such contexts as a sea of sand and rocks with island and look at it with a Carl Schmitt approach. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt) Each village is a land with its specific and limited imperium and le land between each village an open space: a sea with a constellation of islands to be conquered. (Land and Sea. Simona Draghici, trans. (Plutarch Press, 1997). Original publication: 1954.)
Taliban or any insurgents are pirates, just like in Grotius and the right of gents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Grotius): a group of armed people without land and looking to take treasure but not an imperium.

M-A