A Brookings Institution expert said that the United States must engage in nation building in Syria immediately or face "ruinous" costs at a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
"Syria is going to need [nation building] too," said Kenneth Pollack, Brookings senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy. "We can’t just walk in there, crush Dash, and walk away. We are going to have to help the Syrians and others build a stable Syrian society. I recognize this is not a very popular thing to say, but if there is anything that the history of the last thirteen years should have told us it is the necessity of that."
In a recent report, Pollack put the cost of nation building in Syria at as much as $22 billion a year. The report says Afghanistan cost the United States about $45 billion per year since 2001 and Iraq cost about $100 billion per year between 2003 and 2011.
"The worst mistake we could make would be to try not to do it because if that’s the case we will solve nothing or else we will try to make things up as we go along after the fact the way the Bush administration did and it will be ruinously expensive," Pollack said. "If we do it now there is no reason it needs to be like Iraq or Afghanistan."
The costs include an air campaign, building a new Syrian army, and infrastructure rebuilding, some of which could be passed on to allies.
Pollack said Obama went wrong with Libya by only doing a military takedown without building Libya up.
"If we do it right in Syria there’s every reason to believe the [United Nations] can provide the leadership, the NGOs can provide most of the muscle work, we’ll probably provide a good chunk of the security, the Gulf states will provide most of the money, but we can’t get away from that," Pollack said.
Brookings Middle East expert Salman Shaikh suggested an international steering committee for the nation-building process in Syria to lead toward long-term security, economic recovery, and possibly a new constitution.
"There’s a series of things that the international community, if it was organized and if it was so minded, could very much help on as a Syrian-led national dialogue starts to try to resolve these kinds of questions that they pose under these kinds of themes," Shaikh said.
American Enterprise Institute Middle East expert Michael Rubin is among the foreign policy experts who disagree with Pollack.
"It’s important to defeat ISIS. And fill the vacuum," Rubin said. "And that may require ground troops. But what it does not mean is a repeat of the massive flushing down the toilet of tens of billions of dollars in ill-conceived, unnecessary, and poorly-executed nation-building projects."
Rubin says that pouring money into the country leads to corruption that can be more corrosive to the region than terrorism.
"The American agencies—USAID, for example—which focus on development and nation-building are notoriously inefficient and ineffective," Rubin said. "And when I visit Iraq and Afghanistan—and I do so not at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy or military and so escape the distortion of the security and powerpoint bubbles—what I see is modest progress that most often has occurred despite us rather than because of us."