What will it take to rebuild Haiti?

The small Caribbean nation relied on foreign aid to feed its population of nearly 10 million, half of them illiterate and half are under age 18. The near-complete deforestation of its hilly terrain made it especially vulnerable to the hurricanes that regularly sweep the Caribbean basin.

The January 12 magnitude 7.0 earthquake not only killed more than 200,000 people and shattered Haiti's inadequate infrastructure, it also laid bare what one expert called the “fiction” of the Haitian government.

The state does not provide basic services such as reliable tap water, energy, or security, and Haiti is the only country in the Americas that does not offer free primary education to most of its children.

Before the devastating quake soldiers with the U.N. stabilization force and foreign donors helped run the state, propping up “a carefully maintained fiction that the Haitian government is in charge of affairs,” said Daniel Erikson, a Haiti specialist at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

“Now it is impossible to maintain that fiction,” Erikson told AFP. Haiti will be “in an extremely precarious state for must of this century, just like it was last century.”

Given Haiti's pressing needs, which include caring for one million people left homeless by the earthquake, few people are talking at this stage about long-term development plans.

Yet amid such dismal evaluations, experts here see specific steps that can be taken to assist Haiti once the emergency phase is over — and even reasons for hope.

Former U.S. envoy to Haiti James Dobbins said the country has intrinsic strengths, including a strong sense of national identity, a vibrant culture, and a lack of ethnic or religions sectarian divides.

Haiti is also located “in the midst of a zone of peace and relative prosperity. All of its neighbors are much richer, and none have any interest in destabilizing Haiti or inhibiting its development,” Dobbins said in testimony to Congress in late January.

Dobbins, now an expert on reconstruction at the Rand Corporation think tank, cautioned that the first essential step was maintaining the peace.

“Security is an essential prerequisite to reform, as it is to private investment. In the absence of security, any positive changes will eventually be washed away,” he said, calling on the Security Council to keep U.N. stabilization troops in Haiti for up to 10 years.

Foreign experts are helping train Haiti's police, the country's sole security force since the army was disbanded in 1995 for chronic involvement in political unrest.

Dobbins said that donors who help rebuild basic Haitian infrastructure like hospitals, roads and government buildings should also “insist on fundamental reforms in the management of these institutions.”

Haiti's Caribbean neighbors show what it could achieve.

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