C harles Taylor, the indicted war criminal who runs Liberia, was glad that George W. Bush was in the White House.

"We've listened to statements made by President Bush," he explained to a NEWSWEEK reporter in 2001, "that America is not just going to go around the world banging every little country saying, 'This is the way we do it--do it [this way]'." Taylor's own special way has been to plunge his country into civil war, destabilize his neighbors, support groups that commit blood-curdling war crimes and, through it all, cling to power.

Last week his luck may have run out. Responding to the deepening crisis in Liberia, Bush called on Taylor to step down. Taylor, not surprisingly, refused. Has the dictator called the president's bluff?

The case against Taylor is overwhelming. Having helped to topple Liberia's government in 1990, he later emerged victorious from a bloody six-year civil war. In 1997, he won an election in which people apparently voted for him out of fear that he would continue the fighting if he lost. But the fighting continued anyway, with Taylor fomenting trouble beyond Liberia's borders to Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire. In Sierra Leone, the rebels Taylor allegedly supported were particularly brutal, making a practice of chopping off the hands and noses of tens of thousands of civilians, including children. (This is what led to his war-crimes indictment on June 4 this year.) Over the past decade, while Taylor has risen to power and wealth, 200,000 Liberians have died, and perhaps more than 1.5 million have been displaced--in a country of only 3.3 million.

America has strong ties to Liberia, a country founded by freed slaves from the United States. Its flag resembles the stars and stripes; its capital, Monrovia, is named after President James Monroe. During the cold war, Washington showered Liberia with aid. Since the fall of communism, America has ignored the country, which has helped produce the chaos of today.

It's easy to call for American intervention in Liberia; many commentators already have. Even from a strategic view, instability, failed states and chaos have an obvious potential to breed or house terrorists. But President Bush doesn’t really have the tools to do the job in Liberia.

I don't mean by this that the United States armed forces couldn't defeat Taylor's Army. Of course they could, with minimal casualties. But then what? If American troops were to leave, chaos would return and the fighting would likely begin again. And those battling Charles Taylor are not Jeffersonian democrats. The problem America faces in Liberia is the one it faces around the world. It knows how to overthrow an evil regime. It does not know what to do after that.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is rightly proud of having pushed the military toward thinking about war in the 21st century. He has made it fight wars of the future, not the past—except in one crucial sense. America’s future conflicts are all likely to be short on war and long on nation-building.

Because of its massive advantages and extraordinary skill, the American military will win any future war quickly and easily. The regime it is fighting will collapse, leaving disorder and chaos in its wake. Within weeks the Army will no longer be engaged in war, but instead in policing, law and order, aid deliveries and political negotiations. And this will take not weeks but years.

Rumsfeld is wary of having the Pentagon involved in nation-building. He disbanded its tiny office of peacekeeping. Yet nation-building and peacekeeping are mostly what the armed forces have been doing for the past decade, as Dana Priest documents in her book "The Mission." It's what they are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

Only not very well. American soldiers are the best in the world. But 22-year-old Marines are trained to fight, not to rebuild houses, manage group rivalries, adjudicate legal claims and help found civic groups. What we need in Iraq--and what we would quickly need in Liberia--are armies of engineers, aid workers, agronomists and, most important, political and legal experts to negotiate the myriad problems of peace. They would also know how to get help. Without aid from other countries and international organizations, America is simply not going to intervene in all the failing states around the world.

For the past three decades America's foreign-affairs budget has been slashed while military spending has remained high. This has starved the civilian agencies of resources and turned them into disgruntled, ineffectual organizations. Meanwhile, the military, the only agency with money, has been pushed into areas well beyond its core competence. The result is that we're untouchable at war but clumsy at peace.

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