What Kaplan observed, in practice

In partial response to Chirol’s post on colonizing Nepal—which I suspect was provocative in part to elicit good comments—look what picture and caption the New York Times has on the front page today:

A Nepalese police officer tried to stop his men from beating demonstrators in Katmandu Saturday.

This is exactly what Kaplan has been talking about for the past three years. To quote from notes of a Kaplan address at Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Institute in 2003:

The U.S. had 550,000 troops in Vietnam but didn’t accomplish much. By contrast, at no point between 1979 and 1992 did we have more than 55 special forces trainers on the ground in El Salvador, but with just those 55 and a few hundred support personnel, the U.S. was able to help the rightwing groups suppress the leftwing groups and then the regular army to absorb the rightwing groups and turn them into a professional army that respected human rights. El Salvador today may not be a success story, but in an imperfect world it is about as normalized as one could reasonably hope. Because you cannot fix a whole society or its whole military, you have your elite units train the trainers of their elite units. You work to convert a few elite units in the host country’s military and train them to go after a few pivotal targets, thus achieving maximum effect with minimum manpower

And in a similar article on El Salvador that same month:

U.S. security-assistance programs also professionalize foreign militaries, thus helping to prevent coups and to improve the human-rights climate. In the 1980s in El Salvador, Colonel J. S. Roach, a member of the operational planning team there, observed that “the Salvadoran military understood they weren’t supposed to violate human rights, but they believed they were driven to extreme measures by extreme circumstances.” One can debate what members of El Salvador’s military “understood,” but Roach’s team and others pounded home the point that violating human rights almost never makes sense from a pragmatic perspective, because it costs the military the civilian support so necessary to rooting out guerrilla insurgents. “Human rights wasn’t a separate one-hour block at the beginning of the day,” Roach said. “You had to find a way to couch it in the training so that it wasn’t just a moralistic approach.” Human-rights abuses didn’t come to an end in El Salvador, but observers agree that they were sharply curbed.

Do not overestimate what we can do. There is no magic right answer that fixes all the problems in Nepal or Iraq or elsewhere. With the limited resources, an enormous chaotic domestic politic, and shaky public tolerance in the US for even small-scale overseas interventions, the US has learnt to do the most about of good with as much as it can spare. We can only hope that cooler heads in the government like the police officer above prevail before its too late.