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 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.