WASHINGTON: The Bush administration says it will not do nation building in Afghanistan. The Bush administration also says it wants to train a national army.

This is a bit strange. Training an army - that is, building a core government institution up from scratch - is the pure essence of nation building.

The Bush people say peacekeeping is hard, but army building is a lot more feasible.

This is strange as well. The US has tried training armies and police forces before. It is not remotely easy.

It is not enough, for example, to teach Afghans how to fight. Afghans already know a bit about fighting, having done little else in recent decades.

Training an army is really more about training Afghans not to fight, because the American vision of a new Afghan army involves demobilising most of the 200,000 to 300,000 fighters in the country.

When peace broke out in Angola in 1991, outsiders sent in a minimal peacekeeping force and said they would build a national army there too.

But they failed to create the right incentives for unneeded fighters to hand in their guns. War soon resumed and continued on and off for another decade.

If the US gets demobilization right, the next step is to make the remaining gunmen coalesce into a single army.

But the US cannot expect fighters from different regions and factions to join hands unless it has first reconciled their peoples.

There were two successful reconstruction experiments in the 1990s - Mozambique and El Salvador.

Mozambique’s creation was of a new army out of government forces and guerillas.

El Salvador’s creation was of a new police force that included ex-government and rebel fighters

Both these creations involved a large measure of political reconciliation first and institution building afterward.

Bosnia, on the other hand, still has three armies for its three ethnic groups. With its tribal rivalries and multiple warlords, Afghanistan makes Bosnia look easy.

El Salvador and Mozambique had another advantage: They have no resources to speak of.

This meant military commanders had no reason not to join a new national force, because freelance plundering wasn’t profitable.

When the peace process began in Mozambique, the rebel leaders went from bush camps to extended sojourns in the capital’s luxury hotels, and the tab was picked up by the peace talks’ foreign sponsors.

Soldiers in both Mozambique and El Salvador actually staged protests in favor of rapid demobilization because the aid-financed inducements were so attractive.

Resource-rich countries are different. Angola and Sierra Leone both have been the objects of international peacemaking efforts.

But, rebel commanders made so much money out of diamonds that they had little incentive to abandon conflict.

Equally, Colombia’s civil war grinds on because drug money is fuelling the rebels.

Unfortunately for American army-building ambitions, Afghanistan has heroin.

Some warlords are said to be recruiting fresh fighters even now, counting on a bumper heroin crop to pay them.

Suppose that, by some miracle, the US could persuade three-quarters of Afghanistan’s fighters to lay down their guns and the rest to sign up for a national army.

Would that mean the task is done? No, because creating an army that works is as hard as institution building.

First, the US trains the new recruits, teach them to obey orders and feel loyalty to the nation that they serve; then it supervises them in their jobs.

If all goes extraordinarily well, a professional culture gradually emerges. Next the US has to think about who is monitoring this new force.

The US needs civilian oversight, human-rights watchdogs - more institutions that need nurturing.

How long might this take? Since the Kosovo war ended in 1999, there’s been an effort there to create a police force that would be a model of institution building.

So far just 4,300 police cadets have gone through training, and they still are being supervised by 4,400 foreign police officers.

The plan is to promote the trainees as rapidly as possible. But they will not be ready to hold the most senior jobs until at least 2005.

In other words, Kosovo suggests that a new Afghan army might be ready to stand on its own feet by about 2008, and other countries roughly confirm that time frame.

In postwar El Salvador, the new police force became effective after about five years.

In Northern Ireland, it has taken three years since the Good Friday accord for the promised Catholic-Protestant police force even to begin emerging.

Train a national army? Good idea. But in the meantime there’s no alternative to an expanded peacekeeping force for Afghanistan if the Bush administration believes its own rhetoric.

Who said last week that, without security in the country, ”there’s not going to be a stable government. There’s not going to be humanitarian assistance. Things aren’t going to work”?

The answer is none other than Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, the chief opponent of peacekeeping. —Dawn/LAT-WP Service (c) The Washington Post.