Global Policy Forum

Last week President Bush reaffirmed his commitment to victory in Afghanistan, a victory that he rightly defined as more than purely military. "Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government," the president stated; "we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy." Then Mr. Bush invoked the Marshall Plan, that favorite precedent of maximalist nation builders. "By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall," the president said.

These statements suggest a welcome evolution in Mr. Bush's worldview. As a candidate, he spoke with more passion about taxes and education than about international issues; and what he did say about foreign policy suggested a kind of back-to-basics emphasis on great-power relationships in place of the Clinton team's entanglements in small, crisis-prone countries. Now Mr. Bush has risen to the challenge of the war on terrorism, and he has come to recognize that unstable weak powers, not just hostile great powers, can threaten the United States. One sign of this conversion came last month when Mr. Bush promised the largest increase in foreign aid in recent memory. Another came last week, with his pledge of Marshall-scale engagement in Afghanistan's reconstruction.

The challenge is to follow through on this expanded conception of foreign policy. The president needs to persuade Congress to deliver the promised 50 percent increase in foreign aid, preferably securing some kind of near-term down payment in a supplemental appropriation. But he also needs to face up to some hard facts in Afghanistan. The political and economic reconstruction that Mr. Bush rightly promises is unlikely to succeed so long as Afghanistan remains violent and unstable. And stability probably requires that the existing peacekeeping force be expanded.

The administration's position on peacekeeping has also evolved subtly. At the start of December, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested to NBC's Tim Russert that peacekeepers might not be needed. In mid- December Mr. Rumsfeld conceded that there would be a peacekeeping force, but he cautioned that "it should be a relatively small force -- I am thinking maybe three to five thousand at the most." In February Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that there was a case for enlarging the force, but he added that rather than "put your time, and effort, and money into adding and increasing the international security assistance force . . . why not put it into helping them develop a national army?"

In sum, Mr. Rumsfeld has not been enthusiastic about peacekeeping. He and other officials have made it clear the United States would not contribute troops to a peacekeeping force, and have talked up the notion that training a national army is a substitute - - even though that training effort will likely take years. The administration's lack of enthusiasm has affected allies' appetite: Big multilateral efforts seldom flourish without American leadership. Yet since March Mr. Rumsfeld has suggested that the chief obstacle to expanded peacekeeping lies not in his own caution but in that of allies. "It's not an opinion of mine, or it's not a preference necessarily, it's an observation that I don't know of any volunteers," he said on March 15. Last Wednesday he repeated the same argument, and teased that editorial pages urging extra peacekeepers should contribute troops themselves.

Mr. Rumsfeld's new blame-the-allies position is disingenuous, though his cry for newspaper armament is at least funny. But the good news about Mr. Rumsfeld's stance is that it has softened gradually, and on Wednesday the secretary would not rule out sending American troops to participate in peacekeeping efforts, though he clearly remains against it. "Sir, you are against U.S. troops as peacekeepers in Afghanistan?" a journalist asked. "No," came the reply, "I said four times that's a presidential decision."

We could not have put the point better ourselves. It is up to Mr. Bush to face the tough facts in Afghanistan, and to challenge the Pentagon's understandable reluctance to get embroiled in open-ended peacekeeping missions. This will involve the president overcoming his own misgivings about "nation building," but by engaging belatedly in the Middle East, Mr. Bush has proved himself supple enough to modify his starting positions. Having sketched out a Marshall-style vision of reconstruction in Afghanistan, the president must now will the means to that end. His credibility, and that of the United States, depends on it.