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Haiti, six months after the earthquake 2010-Jul-18 at 09:44 PDT

Posted by Scott Arbeit in Blog.
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When the earthquake happened, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we mount a serious SysAdmin effort in Haiti.  All of that logic still applies.

From In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging to the Edge, by Deborah Sontag, 10-July-2010:

Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins.

The tableau does contain a spectrum of circumstances: precarious, neglected encampments; planned tent cities with latrines, showers and clinics; debris-strewn neighborhoods where residents have returned to both intact and condemnable houses; and, here and there, gleaming new shelters or bulldozed territory for a city of the future.

But the government of Haiti has been slow to make the difficult decisions needed to move from a state of emergency into a period of recovery. Weak before the disaster and further weakened by it, the government has been overwhelmed by the logistical complexities of issues like debris removal and the identification of safe relocation sites.

Christ, it’s bad.  I mean, it was bad before the earthquake, but it’s really bad now.  The cynics will say that we’re not strongly participating in rebuilding because there isn’t any oil there.  I think we’re not doing it because Washington and the American public doesn’t yes have a long-enough attention span to pull it off.  And I think it’s karmically appropriate that we should be working to build Haiti, and would change the perception of the United States for some people in the rest of the world if we did lead it.

Unfortunately, we’re wasting an incredible, relatively low-cost opportunity to do the SysAdmin right in Haiti.  Because there’s no war involved, we could get other nations to participate.  We could learn together how to take the capabilities of those nations and plug them into the larger effort managed by the U.S. military (the only organization large enough and skilled enough to run the whole thing).  We could put a general in charge of it who has served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who knows what counterinsurgency looks like… because counterinsurgency looks a lot like civilian construction, and infrastructure, and creating the conditions for foreign direct investment (FDI) to flow to the country being rebuilt.  In other words, COIN looks like what we need to do in Haiti, minus the smacking down of an entrenched insurgency (because that’s just a part of COIN, and could happily be done away with in more peaceful locations).

As I said in January, I still support a strong U.S. military involvement in the rebuilding of Haiti, and a strong international effort to plug into that.  I know I’m just wishing in 2010, but eventually we’ll have enough attention span to take responsibility for seeing something like this through.

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Haiti needs the SysAdmin 2010-Jan-14 at 11:14 PST

Posted by Scott Arbeit in Blog.
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It’s clear to me, and to our top-level military planners, that we need to have both a war-fighting force and a peace-making and reconnection force, which Thomas Barnett calls the SysAdmin.

Our efforts in Iraq since 2004, and our efforts in Afghanistan starting in 2009, have been all about building the capabilities required to effectively run the SysAdmin.

Unfortunately, because these first two efforts have come after our Leviathan, war-fighting capability has done its job, many people are resistant to it, simply because we’re doing it after fighting.

OK… so let’s do a SysAdmin effort – sustained reconnection, lasting 8-10 years, building government institutions and inviting FDI and connectivity – in Haiti.  Let’s do it where it wouldn’t be “tainted” by having invaded first (leaving aside for now the question of the conditions under which such invasions should be done).

Let’s do it where some of the American public wouldn’t be resistant to it up front.  Let’s do it in a way that invites other nations to participate, and trains them in what such an effort would ask of them.  Let’s do it where NGO’s other than the U.N. get involved.  Let’s do it where the only shooting we’ll be doing is against criminals, not “insurgents”.

Let’s get used to doing it, because we’re going to be doing it anyway, all over the world, for the next 40-50 years.  Let’s get the world used to it, comfortable with it, and expecting the benefits of it.

I’m not sending any text messages to send $5 to Haiti.  It doesn’t matter.  This does.  Let’s all get behind a serious, mature, well-conceived, long-term SysAdmin effort in Haiti to once-and-for-all move that nation up from the hell it was even before the earthquake to a fully-connected part of a globalized world.