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" KANSAS CITY \u2014 Conservatives have a new idea, and it&amp;#039;s a pretty good one. Right now in Afghanistan, for example, in the province of Kandahar, our military and our State Department are clashing over how to solve the very tricky problem of getting electricity to the people. Since this can mean the difference between a restive population inclined to kill American soldiers and a hopeful population inclined to befriend them, the Army general in charge wants to pass out generators without delay. But the American ambassador wants to wait until they finish the dam they&amp;#039;ve been building since... oh, about 1950. So the question is: light footprint or large footprint? Top-down or bottom-up? Central planning or entrepreneurship? Or to put it in the terms that have us all fired up here in the States: small government or government takeover? Over the last few days, a group of heavy hitters from think tanks and universities hashed this out with an impressive group of military generals, contractors and diplomats here in Kansas City. Meeting at the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, they included Niall Ferguson of Harvard, Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, Richard N. Haass (who&amp;#039;s held too many high government positions to list here), thinkers from the Heritage Institute, the Brookings Institute, and a whole flock of guys with stars on their shoulders, including the general in charge of Africa, the general in charge of the Combined Arms Center and the general in charge of developing military doctrine. The meeting was prompted by an article in Foreign Affairs by the head of the Kauffman Institute, an economist named Carl J. Schramm. In a nutshell, his argument is that the fastest route to peace is through establishing economic growth, so the military shouldn&amp;#039;t leave the job of economic rebuilding to liberally inclined do-gooders besotted with the idea of central planning \u2014 a.k.a. the State Department. Too often, in both the military and the international development spheres, there has been a failure to consider the postwar economy is any strategic sense. Military doctrine has usually treated operations other than war as secondary matters to be handed off to other agencies. These agencies, USAID in particular, have rarely conceived of their work as part of a larger strategy for the country in question or for promoting U.S. interests. One-off projects and bureaucratic delays \u2014 due in no part to congressional constraints on USAID - have created the impression that dependence and subsistence are the inevitable future for countries such as Afghanistan. Economic growth is rarely even considered a possible goal ... yet economic growth plainly is a positive force in society and for governments; it is no coincidence that most conflicts today, most of which are civil wars, occur in countries with weak or stagnant economies. Schramm&amp;#039;s idea was that the military should take over economic development as an essential tool of war. Accordingly, he&amp;#039;s trying to &amp;quot;rebrand&amp;quot; the dreaded nation-building as &amp;quot;expeditionary economics.&amp;quot; On one level, this is deeply annoying. After decades of ridiculing liberals for trying to win &amp;quot;hearts and minds&amp;quot; in Vietnam, after all the Republican squawking about Clinton&amp;#039;s efforts in Bosnia and Sarajevo, after George W. Bush rode his much-trumpeted disdain for nation-building (&amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t do windows&amp;quot;) straight into the disaster of the Iraq insurgency, after about 50 years of deliberately gutting the State Department and USAID and foreign aid in general, now they discover their inner liberals. Funny how 5,000 dead Americans and a disaster at the polls can concentrate the conservative mind. But instead of just admitting they were wrong, they decide to hammer State and USAID again by putting the military in charge. Hell, if they could figure out a way to put the military in charge of health care, they might embrace that too. Also, the conference started on a hubristic tone of liberal-bashing, with folks like Schramm and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University ragging on &amp;quot;the means of Jeffrey Sachs&amp;quot; \u2014 which Hubbard defined as &amp;quot;taking America&amp;#039;s dwindling wealth and spreading it around.&amp;quot; Hubbard did not mention the recent news that Sachs&amp;#039;s approach has saved the lives of about 5 million children so far, and when he advanced the absurd argument that the Marshall Plan succeeded because it encouraged business instead of bothering with governments, he didn&amp;#039;t mention that we also took over their governments, rewrote their constitutions, and put friendly leaders in charge. In other words, the Marshall Plan (which conservatives hated) could focus on business because we had already taken care of the government problem. But bitterness is unproductive. Conservatives may be late to the party, but they spent their time in Kansas City wrestling with the problem in a deep and impressive way. The first complication came from a professor from Fort Leavenworth&amp;#039;s military history department, who explained how big &amp;quot;liberal&amp;quot; reforms laid the ground for the extraordinary economic growth of post-WWII Japan. These included laws forbidding union-busting, which revitalized the labor movement and gave 79 million union members a stake in the government, a massive land reform that placated angry peasants, breaking up the large business cartels that helped push Japan into war and purging pro-military conservatives from the government \u2014 and real economic growth still didn&amp;#039;t come until we gave Japan one hell of a stimulus package in the form of the &amp;quot;massive infusion&amp;quot; of cash that accompanied the Korean War in 1950. Same story in Korea, where we also did major land reform and educational reform and real growth required the near-dictatorial industrial planning of Pak Chung Hee&amp;#039;s keiretsu system. Ditto Vietnam, where we spent the &amp;#039;50s building schools and enacting a program of \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 land reform. It&amp;#039;s forgotten now, but things were getting steadily better in South Vietnam until the communists launched their insurgency in the late &amp;#039;50s. The conservatives breezed by this without much comment. But in general, the presenters did agree that &amp;quot;top-down&amp;quot; reform in the classic big-project, fix-the-infrastructure way was often destructive because it centralizes power and leads to corruption. Also, big dams and power companies tend to make great targets for insurgents. Some of their other arguments were very persuasive, like James &amp;quot;Spike&amp;quot; Stephenson&amp;#039;s description of our &amp;quot;light footprint&amp;quot; approach to El Salvador. Ordered by Ronald Reagan to avoid &amp;quot;mission creep,&amp;quot; we limited our &amp;quot;mil-group&amp;quot; to 55 people and USAID to 36 people. Twelve years and only 20 America lives later, the people of El Salvador elected a member of the FLMN resistance movement as president. So maybe lower expectations was key \u2014 to restrain ourselves, help with stabilization and let the countries develop in their own way. Another example: In Afghanistan, the fans of central planning wanted to spend $100 million to build a phone industry. Instead, they licensed businessmen to do it. Now there&amp;#039;s a $1 billion industry and 7.5 million phones. The hitch here is that they couldn&amp;#039;t have done it without a $20 million loan guarantee from the U.N., which makes it a tad shy of free-market nirvana. That didn&amp;#039;t stop many of the presenters from getting all giddy with their neocon enthusiasms, especially the ones from the think tanks. We need a RAND for economic growth! How about trade cities that function like giant enterprise zones? What about a Department of Development Assistance?! What about an Academy of Diplomacy?! The push back came from the guys with actual experience. One of the Army generals pointed out that the Kandahar generator solution wasn&amp;#039;t quite so obvious because there wasn&amp;#039;t enough gas to keep them all running. Another warned that our can-do spirit tends to make us over-confident, which struck this veteran of the war at home as an awfully nice way to put it. A CIA/USAID worker from the Vietnam era \u2014 Rufus Phillips, a good man who clashed a bit with my father when he ran the CIA station in Saigon \u2014 said none of this would solve the eternal problem posed by the government&amp;#039;s tendency to assign the task of assessing conflict zones to high-ranking people who are almost by definition little inclined to listen or to study local conditions. Michael O&amp;#039;Hanlon of the Brookings Institute pointed out that the last batch of &amp;quot;highly ideological&amp;quot; conservative ideas about free markets led to a disaster in the early days in Iraq, when starry-eyed 20-something young Bush appointees tried to remake the economy in Milton Friedman&amp;#039;s image and left the few civic institutions Iraq had left \u2014 like unions and state industries \u2014 in tatters. Ironically, a lot of the pushback came from the Army. The general in charge of Africa said he definitely agreed with the premise. &amp;quot;Stability doesn&amp;#039;t come from the point of a 500-pound bomb, it comes from development.&amp;quot; But the dream of quick fixes was a dangerous one, he said. Ditto from Leif Rosenberger, the man who gives economic advice to General Petraeus. All the talk of free markets didn&amp;#039;t strike him as realistic, given that there are very few real free markets in the world. More common is a government setting goals and the market trying to reach them. This point was widely echoed by others, who pointed out that Taiwan started growing its economy via an industrial policy that focused on making shoes and clothes. Singapore did the same with the construction industry. And how, they asked, could the conservatives reconcile their love of free markets with the extraordinary rise of China? They also refused to back down on the importance of major infrastructure projects (like fixing the canals in Iraq in order to save their agriculture) and providing basic social services. To my mind, some of the smartest comments came from our former Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann. A low-key man of wry intelligence, Neumann was a platoon leader in Vietnam as a young man, but his heart was with the diplomatic corp. &amp;quot;The idea that the military should do this is fundamentally flawed \u2014 it will only increase the militarization of foreign policy,&amp;quot; he said. Also, the problem with making plans is that you then measure yourself against the plan instead of keeping your eyes open and paying attention to &amp;quot;truthful reporting.&amp;quot; Also, a lot of foreign aid money really serves real-politic purposes that don&amp;#039;t fit into the conservatives&amp;#039; oddly idealistic framework. &amp;quot;The creation of jobs is power and power is political,&amp;quot; he said. Our real task was to change the power structures that create the conditions for growth or failure, and that was something bottom-up economic change was unlikely to do any time soon. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have a good answer,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;but trying another theory is possibly a lousy idea.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And as an aside,&amp;quot; he added, &amp;quot;many entrepreneurs happen to be criminals.&amp;quot; During the break, talking to me on the patio, Neumann emphasized the point with a great metaphor: Afghanistan is like a broken cup, he said, and we&amp;#039;re the rubber band holding it together while the glue dries. If you take off the rubber band too fast, it falls apart. But the rubber band doesn&amp;#039;t determine the shape of the cup.  If this showed a modesty all too rare in American officials, Richard Haass underlined the point with a story about American arrogance: We actually did have an economic plan for Iraq that even had a section on entrepreneurship, he said, but Donald Rumsfeld decided to throw it in the circular file. Rumsfeld&amp;#039;s primary motive was probably his obsession with creating the modern army, small and swift and light of footprint, but no matter how beguiling this new light-footprint, give-away-generators approach may be, no matter how well it fits into conservative economic theory, we can&amp;#039;t forget that peace depends on spreading the wealth. We have to create a &amp;quot;buy-in for all different groups&amp;quot; in order to reduce the tribal strife at the heart of these conflicts, he said. His point was echoed by Claire Lockhart of Institute for State Effectiveness, known in the foreign policy world as &amp;quot;the queen of the failed state,&amp;quot; who loved the idea of economic growth but said it was very hard to get the right balance between state and market. &amp;quot;Domestic stability rests on shared prosperity, not division of spoils.&amp;quot; For a liberal, even a cold-war liberal like myself, it was hard listening to all of this without musing on our domestic problems. After all, if spreading the wealth and land reform and health care and essential public services are so vital, why exactly do they become evil socialism the second we get to American shores? But I have to give credit to the conservatives: The idea of bottom-up growth is a good one, as long as it doesn&amp;#039;t become another conservative fetish along the lines of no-taxes-ever-no-matter-what. We have to find a sweeter spot between necessary infrastructure and stupid central planning. And Fred Kagan&amp;#039;s idea that we have to accept a certain level of &amp;quot;financial casualties&amp;quot; \u2014 failed experiments and corruption \u2014 was provocative and true. (Black markets, for example, are still markets, often vital ones, so maybe we shouldn&amp;#039;t be so eager to shut them down.) And we definitely need better economic intelligence about foreign countries. And it&amp;#039;s certainly true that we&amp;#039;d be better off if we could think long-term instead of harnessing ourselves in 18-month rotations, although short-term thinking has been America&amp;#039;s problem since about 1777. Ultimately, the new conservative idea that economic development is actually a branch of war \u2014 war by other means, as it were \u2014 could be transformative, especially if it makes them think harder about what happens after the &amp;quot;kinetic phase of war&amp;quot; ends. You can find more detail about the conference discussions here. 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<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a7633/conservatives-have-a-new-idea/>