[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9542-9543]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




  ORGANIZING THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO HANDLE POST-CONFLICT AND 
                          STABILITY OPERATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chocola). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, even as jubilant Berliners chipped away at 
the Berlin Wall 15 years ago, many Americans saw the end of the Cold 
War as an opportunity for the United States to cut its military forces, 
reduce the number of American troops deployed overseas and divert the 
monies saved, the so-called peace dividend, to address priorities here 
at home.
  In the wake of the heady days of November 1989, few American 
policymakers were concerned about the civil war that was raging in 
Afghanistan, which the Soviet Army had quit 9 months earlier. As the 
Soviet armor rumbled north across the Afghan border, we closed the book 
on our deep involvement in the landlocked South Asian state.
  Humanitarian and demining aid still flowed to Kabul, but the United 
States effectively left the heavily armed warring factions to battle 
each other, setting the stage for the rise of the Taliban. Eleven years 
later, on September 11, we paid dearly for our reluctance to get 
involved in helping to bring peace to Afghanistan and to stabilize and 
disarm the warring factors in the aftermath of the Soviet departure 
from the country.
  Much of this failure can be attributed to an aversion to the kind of 
post-conflict nation-building operation that might have created a 
different Afghanistan in the 1990s. These operations are expensive, 
they are dangerous, they require an extended commitment of our national 
resources and our attention, and they impose a heavy burden on the 
military.
  Throughout the 1990s, the United States took on other post-conflict 
reconstruction and stability operations in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, 
Northern Iraq, and East Timor.
  More recently and most significantly, the invasions of Afghanistan 
and Iraq have compelled the United States to shoulder much of the 
burden for two enormously complex post-conflict operations. Despite our 
experiences in the 1990s and the crucial importance of the effort to 
stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, these most recent efforts have been 
improvised affairs, led by the Department of Defense, which

[[Page 9543]]

has pieced together personnel and expertise across the U.S. Government.
  Our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed that of the 1990s 
and the past 15 years, has made clear that this Nation needs a 
centralized civilian capability to plan for and to respond to post-
conflict situations and other complex contingencies.
  Last fall, Senators Richard Lugar and Joseph Biden assembled an 
extraordinary bipartisan group of experts from inside and outside the 
government to study how best to reorganize the foreign affairs agencies 
to improve our ability to meet the challenges of the post-conflict 
operations.
  Drawing on the discussions with these experts and administration 
officials, Senators Lugar and Biden introduced the Stabilization and 
Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004. In introducing the 
bill, Senator Lugar said that it was his intention ``not to critique 
past practices, but rather to improve our stabilization and 
reconstruction capability for the future.''
  In that spirit, my colleague, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. 
Shays), and I recently introduced H.R. 3996, which is the House 
companion to the Lugar-Biden legislation. This bill will establish a 
Stabilization and Reconstruction Coordinating Committee, chaired by the 
National Security Advisor.
  It will authorize the creation of an office within the State 
Department to coordinate the civilian component of stabilization and 
reconstruction missions.
  It will authorize the Secretary of State to create a Response 
Readiness Corps, with both an active duty and reserve component that 
can be called upon to respond to emerging international crises.
  It will have the Foreign Service Institute, the National Defense 
University, and the Army War College establish an education and 
training curriculum to meet the challenges of post-conflict and 
reconstruction operations.
  This bill is an important first step in reconfiguring the U.S. 
Government to strengthen our ability to deal with complex emergencies 
overseas. It will institutionalize the expertise we have acquired in 
the past 15 years at great cost in blood and treasure, so that we do 
not have to learn and re-learn how to do these operations each time we 
are forced to undertake them.
  Finally, and most important, it will shift much of the burden for the 
planning and execution of these missions from the military to the 
civilian side of our government.

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