The United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change completed its comprehensive review of collective security, recommending historic changes to the U.N. in its report, "A more secure world: Our shared responsibility." Among the panel's 101 recommendations for the U.N. and member states are expansion of the U.N. Security Council and creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to advance proactive, preventive global security measures.

The report culminates a year-long project for which SIIS Senior Fellow Stephen J. Stedman served as research director. The 16-member panel, commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and chaired by former Thailand Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, represents the U.N.'s most comprehensive effort to analyze collective security, since the founding of the international body in 1947. The select panel sought international input in an effort to honor the perspectives of all member states, as it analyzed current threats and identified specific security measures.

Nations are the "front line in today's combat," Annan said, introducing the report. He added, "The task of helping states improve their own capacities to deal with contemporary threats is vital and urgent. The United Nations must be able to do this better. The panel tells us how."

The report identifies six major threats to global security: war between states; violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses and genocide; poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation; nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime.

The panel proposed expanding the U.N. Security Council--for which it put forth two options--as well as creating a Peacebuilding Commission to help the Security Council pursue the recommended preventive security strategies. One proposal for Security Council expansion would appoint new permanent members, and the other would establish new long-term, renewable seats. Neither option creates any new vetoes.

In a cover letter to the secretary-general, Panyarachun thanked CISAC and Stedman for supporting the panel's work. CISAC Co-Director Christopher F. Chyba served on the panel's 30-member resource group, providing expertise on nuclear nonproliferation and bioterrorism. CISAC hosted a nuclear nonproliferation workshop at Stanford for the panel last March, and Panyarachun discussed security issues with representatives from China, India, Pakistan, Russia and the United States at CISAC's Five-Nation Project meeting in Bangkok last summer. Stedman's research staff included Bruce Jones, a former CISAC Hamburg Fellow, and Tarun Chhabra, a graduate of CISAC's undergraduate honors program.

Annan has asked Stedman to stay at the United Nations another year to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations.

The panel's report received prominent news coverage, including a front-page New York Times article ("Report urges big changes for the U.N.," by Warren Hoge, Dec. 4), and in the Economist an invited article by Annan ("Courage to fulfill our responsibilities," Dec. 4) as well as several other pieces in the Nov. 24 and Dec. 4 issues.

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.

Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, a physician, infectious disease expert and medical anthropologist who has dedicated his life to treating some of the world's poorest populations, spoke to an overflow crowd on April 8, 2004 at the Stanford Institute for International Studies. Farmer spoke in his capacity as the inaugural S.T. Lee Lecturer.

In his talk, titled "The Nexus of Health and Human Rights," Farmer spoke about the clinic he directs in Cange, Haiti. The clinic has become the center of a thriving community-based medical care system that is tackling Haiti's HIV problem head-on, demonstrating that complex medical treatments can be implemented successfully in poor, underdeveloped nations. Farmer, who has won several awards for his humanitarian work, also talked about promoting access to medical care as a basic human right.

The S.T. Lee Lectureship is named for Seng Tee Lee, a business executive and noted philanthropist. Mr. Lee endowed the lectureship in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today.