Hey Dayuhan, all the Steve, Mike and the others

You have well encapsulated the major problems with the US approach (essentially "It's all about us...") in developing nations. I've seen it happen in half a dozen countries, every flaw you cited.
Well I think we are not speaking about the same thing.
State Building as a tool in Stabilization process is part of a greater plan.
You have 2 main issues on this. Most of the people tend to see Stabilization as a continuum that goes as follow:
Emergency/humanitarian => recovery/reconstruction => post conflict/pre development => development.

State Building is integrated at all stages with various tasks. What I developed in my previous mail is clearly located in Emergency/Humanitarian while what Dayuhan is addressing is clearly located in Post conflict and/or development.

This is the basic sheme for stabilization following the Rostow approach: a continuity in development from disaster (Prehistoric stage) to development (Full capitalist economy with democratic regime).

But conflicts are not homogenous. They are composed of a mosaic of situations that can be labeled in all the categories. Rather than mosaic, I prefer the concept of islands as the limits are porous. So you end up with a various rabge of micro contexts which can be extremely different: emergency in one village and development in the next one.
This is close to the edge concept that Surferbeetle was talking about.
In humanitarian “science” this is called a contiguum. This theory has been developed by a French guy based on urban emergency actions in the Balkans. I, basically (with others) extend it up to the village level.

So if the country as a whole is following the steps of the continuum, it is divided in a unlimited number of islands with a contiguum of situations going from war to stabilized economy for each of those island. The conytinuum situation of the country as a whole is determined by the prevailing situation in the majority of island. If it is emergencies then the country is still at the war/emergency stage. If it is development then the country is at the development stage.
So the first thing is to identify which box the place you are working in fits. Then when you know in which box you are then you can start pretty much standard actions. In emergencies all is covered by SPHERE Standards and NGO practices. In development, it is mostly best practices from USAID and other development actions. In the middle, then we can come with what we, as the practitioners part of SWJ, think are the best practices, the do and do not do.
And from that we can look at what CIMIC can do and how it is integrated into COIN or Population centric COIN or even POPULACE centric COIN.

And to respond to Steve
Yes, I think that a Civil/Military for the dummy hand book is what we, at SWJ, can contribute with.