President Bush describes Afghanistan, the first front on the war on terrorism, as a success. In comparison to Iraq, perhaps it is. But if you look at Afghanistan on its own merits, the lack of progress is disheartening. In 2002, President Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for the country, with the goal of turning Afghanistan into a stable, democratic state. On Tuesday, before the United Nations General Assembly, the president said that "the Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." Yet in nearly three years we have failed to create security, stability, prosperity or the rule of law in Afghanistan.

These failings are not just a reflection of the great difficulties of nation-building in places like Afghanistan, they are also the direct result of the Bush administration's policy decisions. Our efforts in Afghanistan are underfinanced and undermanned, and our attention is waning.

The root of the problem is that we invaded Afghanistan to destroy something - the Taliban and Al Qaeda - but we didn't think much about what would grow in its place. While we focused on fighting the terrorists (and even there our effectiveness has been questionable), Afghanistan has become a collection of warlord-run fiefs fueled by a multibillion-dollar opium economy. We armed and financed warlord armies with records of drug-running and human rights abuses stretching back two decades. Then we blocked the expansion of an international security force meant to rein in the militias. These decisions were made for short-term battlefield gain - with disregard for the long-term implications for the mission there.

Our Army continues to hunt insurgents in the mountains, but we have refused to take the steps necessary to secure the rest of the country, and it shows. More coalition and Afghan government soldiers and aid workers have died this year than in each of the previous two. This summer, Doctors Without Borders, which has worked in the most desperate and dangerous conditions around the world, pulled out of Afghanistan after 24 years. In other words, the group felt safer in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed than it did three years after the United States-led coalition toppled the Taliban.

Last month, after a United Nations-backed voter registration office was bombed, the vice president of the United Nations Staff Union urged Secretary General Kofi Annan to pull employees out of Afghanistan. The opium trade is also out of control, fueling lawlessness and financing terrorists. Last year, the trade brought in $2.3 billion; this year, opium production is expected to increase 50 to 100 percent.

Amid terrorist attacks and fighting among regional warlords, the country is preparing for presidential elections on Oct. 9. A recent United Nations report warned that warlords were intimidating voters and candidates. This month, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has monitored post-conflict elections in trouble spots like Bosnia and Kosovo, declared that Afghanistan was too dangerous for its election monitors (it is sending a small "election support team'' instead). President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped assassination last week on his first campaign trip outside Kabul, and eight other presidential candidates have called for elections to be delayed, saying it's been too dangerous for them to campaign.

Many of these problems flow from early mistakes. Rather than moving quickly to establish security and then gradually turning over control to a legitimate domestic authority, we have done the opposite. As fighting among warlord militias in the countryside intensifies, we are slowly expanding our presence and being dragged into conflicts. The American "advisers" in Afghan Army units, the ubiquitous heavily armed "private" security forces and the fortress-like American Embassy are garnering comparisons to the day of the Soviets.

In Kabul, the effort to build a stable, capable government has also lagged dangerously. President Karzai has begun to show great fortitude in challenging warlords. But his factious cabinet, born of political compromise, has collapsed under the pressure of the country's hurried presidential elections. Outside Kabul, his control remains tenuous in some places, nonexistent in others. Kabul's Supreme Court, the only other branch of government, is controlled by Islamic fundamentalists unconcerned with the dictates of Afghanistan's new Constitution. On Sept. 1, without any case before the court, the chief justice ordered that Latif Pedram, a presidential candidate, be barred from the elections and investigated for blasphemy. His crime? Mr. Pedram had suggested that polygamy was unfair to women. These clerics are trying to establish a system like that in Iran, using Islam as a bludgeon against democracy.

It's true that there have been several important accomplishments in these three years: the Taliban and Al Qaeda no longer sit in Kabul's Presidential Palace; girls are back in school in many parts of the country; some roads and buildings have been rebuilt; and more than 10 million Afghans have registered to vote for the presidential elections. Thousands of international aid workers have been working with the Afghans, often at great risk, to make things better. Despite the slow progress, most Afghans are more hopeful about their future than they have been in years.

But many people working there are left with the nagging feeling that much more could have been done both to help Afghanistan and fight terrorism over the last three years. Our experience demonstrates that you can't fight wars, or do nation-building, on the cheap. Afghanistan should be a critical election issue this year, but Iraq looms much larger in the public mind. Unless the next administration steps up to the plate, it may well be an issue in four years, when we start asking, "Who lost Afghanistan?"

J Alexander Thier, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, was a legal adviser to Afghanistan's constitutional and judicial reform commissions.

Whole World on Fire, by CISAC associate director for research Lynn Eden, received the 2004 Robert K. Merton Professional Award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. The award was presented to Eden on Aug. 15 during the association's annual meeting in San Francisco.

The award committee cited the book's merits:

"Whole World on Fire is an ambitious undertaking that examines a critical problem using theory and methods from two fields of sociology: the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of organizations. It is a study of how organizational processes led nuclear scientists to drastically underestimate the damage of a nuclear attack. At a deeper level, it is a study in the social construction of organizational knowledge.

"The question Eden addresses is: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? Eden's research shows that U.S. efforts focused on the damage that would result from the explosion while systematically ignoring the far more damaging effects of subsequent fires. How and why could this 'ignorance' continue until today? . . .

"This book takes a position on an ongoing scientific controversy about the predictability of fire damage and on scientists' current assessments of risk. There is a debate in science and technology studies about whether we should take positions on scientific controversies--that is, on the science itself. Some scholars prefer to leave arguments about the 'science' to the scientists and instead follow the activities and political logics of the various debating parties. In this case, Eden chooses to take a stand on the truth claims of the science in question. As such, Whole World on Fire is a work of intellectual daring.

"To our knowledge, there have been few sociological studies that have penetrated the inner workings of the military establishment. Few sociologists have studied the highest reaches of the social structure, as does Eden in this study. In fact, those of us who study science and medicine usually do our research in university-based laboratories or teaching hospitals--that is, we study people who are in some senses like ourselves.

"While the book addresses a critical issue--that is, nuclear-weapons policy, it is an exemplar of how sociological concepts can illuminate important public issues. Eden's analysis can be readily applied to explaining how decision makers construct relevant and legitimate science to illuminate disasters such as the collapse of the Twin Towers. But what convinced one committee member of the book's power was a recent New York Times article describing the findings of the committee investigating the Iraq War. The Committee reported that the CIA had systematically denied the credibility of numerous reports that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, in part because those reports were outside its organizational frame.

"Finally, we all believe that this book will have a major public impact. In addition to its accessible style and meticulous research, the book is often riveting and sometimes chilling. We had thought that by now everyone believed that survivable nuclear war is an oxymoron; that people had filled in their bomb shelters long before the close of the Cold War. That a significant portion of the military establishment still believes that a limited, winnable and survivable nuclear war is possible gave us nightmares. That Eden's book may give people nightmares is only appropriate, given the frightening scenario she presents."

Serving on the award committee were Renee Anspach, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan; Sydney Halpern, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago; Kathryn Henderson, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University; and Joan Fujimura (Chair), Department of Sociology and Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a 15-month $1.65-million contract to the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford Institute for International Studies. CISAC's program will be run as part of a joint project with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey.

CISAC co-director and professor of political science Scott D. Sagan and former co-director and professor emeritus (research) in the School of Engineering Michael M. May are the Stanford co-principal investigators of the new program.

CISAC's portion of the project entails a homeland security seminar and fellowship program, which will bring eight research fellows to campus in 2004-05. Fellows will join CISAC and other faculty to conduct research on some of the most daunting issues confronting the homeland security mission, such as how national and local agencies can learn to cooperate quickly and effectively and how they can learn from past emergencies, real and simulated. CISAC will undertake in-depth scholarly research that can help inform DHS efforts to improve the design and evaluation of future terrorism exercises of national and local response systems.

Scholars will study diverse approaches to learning--and failing to learn--from emergencies, including those of armed forces, medical emergency rooms, police and fire departments. Researchers will also investigate how government organizations can stay ahead of potential attackers in the "competitive learning" situation that terrorism presents--one in which terrorists and law enforcement officials alike try to learn from vulnerabilities exposed in public emergencies.

The DHS research contract resulted in part from CISAC's observation of the spring 2003 State Department-DHS sponsored full-scale exercise called TOP OFFICIALS-2 (TOPOFF-2), designed to prepare national, state and local officials to respond to potential terrorist attacks within the US. CISAC led 11 Stanford scholars in observing and analyzing the exercise involving officials from 25 federal, state, and local agencies. DHS Secretary Tom Ridge received a briefing of CISAC's findings, prepared under May's direction as principal investigator.

Lynn Eden, CISAC associate director for research, will manage Stanford's participation in the new project and mentor the homeland security fellows. Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, assistant professor of law at Stanford, will contribute research on how judicial review processes affect responses to terrorism. Dean Wilkening, director of CISAC's science program, will model uncertainties in biological weapons use, such as effects caused by different exposure rates and different doses of contaminants like anthrax.

The Organizational Learning and Homeland Security fellows chosen for 2004-2005 are Charles Perrow, professor emeritus of sociology at Yale; Marc Ventresca, university lecturer in strategy and fellow at Wolfson College in Oxford's Said Business School and visiting associate professor of organizations and strategy, Graduate School of Management at the University of California-Irvine; Michael Kenney, assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs at Penn State University-Harrisburg; Laura K. Donohue, Ph.D., history, Cambridge University and student at Stanford School of Law; Tonya L. Putnam, J.D., Harvard Law School and Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford; Manas Baveja, a graduate student in the Scientific Computing and computational Mathematics Program in Stanford's School of Engineering and Dara K. Cohen and Jacob N. Shapiro, graduate students in political science at Stanford.

Those advocating nuclear arms control and nonproliferation have few reasons for optimism and many reasons for concern, with obstacles including a lack of public interest in the issue; inadequate security controls at facilities storing nuclear-weapons materials; the threat posed by rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea; and the Bush administration's opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear weapons testing.

These and other challenges were explored at a special CISAC workshop on "Arms Control and Nonproliferation: Past Triumphs, Future Prospects," held June 1 at SIIS. The event honored George Bunn -- a nuclear nonproliferation pioneer and consulting professor at CISAC -- on the occasion of his 79th birthday. The workshop, which drew more than 120 attendees, was moderated by CISAC co-director Christopher F. Chyba and featured presentations by four expert panelists who have worked closely with Bunn. They included his son Matthew, a senior research associate for Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom.

As the first presenter, Matthew Bunn discussed the problem of inadequate security systems to prevent the theft of weapons-grade nuclear materials. Because there are no worldwide standards for protecting such materials, many nations devote inadequate resources to the task. Bunn showed slides of nuclear materials storage facilities with primitive locks, flimsy seals and broken-down fences. He cited Russia as the largest threat, because it has the world's biggest stock of unguarded nuclear-weapons materials. He urged international standards for safeguarding nuclear materials; renewed discussion with Russia on the issue; and the removal of nuclear material from sites where adequate security is not feasible.

In the second presentation, Thomas Graham -- a senior U.S. diplomat who has negotiated numerous major arms-control agreements -- said the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was not meant to forever discriminate between nuclear "haves" and "have-nots." Instead, it was designed so that those without nuclear weapons would benefit by receiving peaceful nuclear technology from weapons-producing nations, and guarantees that they would not be attacked. But when the United States shirks its nonproliferation obligations -- as it has done by rejecting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and taking steps to develop new nuclear weapons -- the entire regime is threatened, Graham said. He cited Pakistan and North Korea as the biggest nuclear threats, and said the United States must engage in direct negotiations with the latter.

The next presentation, by Daryl Kimball -- executive director of the Arms Control Association -- addressed prospects for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Though the treaty has been signed by 171 nations including the United States, it has been ratified by only 113 of those nations -- not including the United States -- and must be ratified by 12 more of the 44 designated "nuclear-capable" nations before the treaty can take effect. Kimball discussed the Bush administration's opposition to the treaty, noting that Bush has sought to remove it from the Senate's agenda. Still, Kimball said he's optimistic that the treaty will ultimately be ratified by the United States and will take effect. He cited increasing international pressure on CTBT "holdout states," and a recent U.S. poll showing that public support for the treaty is at its highest level ever, 87 percent.

John Rhinelander, an attorney who helped negotiate the ABM Treaty and SALT I agreements, discussed the prospects for nuclear weapons in space. The weaponization of space is supported by the Bush administration, he noted, and is a real possibility if the United States follows through on its missile defense program. He predicted that President Bush, if re-elected, would continue to pursue weapons development in space, but said Kerry seemed unlikely to do so if elected.

During a question-and-answer session following the presentations, the panelists offered perspectives on why it is so difficult to get the public's and lawmakers' attention on nuclear non-proliferation issues. The panelists agreed that since the breakup of the Soviet Union, most Americans -- including lawmakers -- no longer perceive nuclear weapons as a serious threat, and they have little knowledge about the existing quantity of nuclear weapons. Matthew Bunn said the problem is, "there is no one whose reelection depends on reducing or securing nuclear weapons." He said nuclear non-proliferation could best be promoted by tying it to the issues of terrorism and homeland security. Rhinelander and Grahm advocated holding Congressional hearings on the issue for the first time in 20 years.

Regarding Israel, India and Pakistan, Graham said those nations -- which produce nuclear weapons but have refused to join the NPT regime -- cannot continue to remain outside the regime. He proposed that the three nations be allowed to join in limited form, in exchange for accepting basic limitations such as no first use and no nuclear testing.

Throughout the event, Bunn was praised by the panelists and moderator; Chyba described him as "the personification of the best that CISAC strives to be." Bunn was the first general counsel for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, helped negotiate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and later served as U.S. ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference.

CISAC is announcing the selection of its 2004-2005 fellows. This group of 21 scholars, selected through a competition, will spend the fellowship year working on their research projects, participating in seminars, and exploring international security issues with resident faculty, research associates, and other fellows.

The incoming fellows come from a broad range of academic and professional backgrounds, and they will be focusing on an equally diverse set of research topics, including chemical and biological weapon detection, the future of nonproliferation regimes, and analysis of homeland security policies.

CISAC sponsors three fellowship programs: Pre/Postdoctoral Fellowships; Science Fellowships; and Organizational Learning for Homeland Security Fellowships. In addition, CISAC sponsors visiting scholars, providing opportunities for concentrated research and study within CISAC's multidisciplinary environment.

View the complete list of 2004-2005 fellows and their respective research topics.