This is a book for our times, a pair of linked essays, the first, by Rory Stewart, on the troubled decade of Western intervention in Afghanistan, followed by the success story of the ten years of Western intervention in
Bosnia by Gerald Knaus. The authors write not for glory, or to secure a professorial chair, but out of desperation.
Year on year over the last decade, the leaders of the West have immersed us ever deeper in ‘sorting out’ Afghanistan. They do this from the best possible motives — a sense of obligation and moral decency — but also out of fear, hubris and historical ignorance. As a result, our soldiers and our treasuries bleed, and so, to a much greater extent, do the poor, war-devastated people of Afghanistan. But every year there is talk of a new strategy, which requires bigger budgets and another 20,000 troops.
One of the problems is the successful UN operation in Bosnia (from 1995) which established the current belief in a scientific liberal interventionism. With one million refugees safely returned to their homes, 64 war criminals brought to justice and three rival militia armies disbanded with not a single US soldier sent home in a body-bag, it was indeed an extraordinarily successful mission.
But the devil, whether in Afghanistan or in Bosnia, is in the detail. Knaus reveals what unique conditions existed in Bosnia. There was no oil, no strategic importance, no super-power rivalry. The US government was a reluctant rather than an insistent peacemaker, Serbia was exhausted, Croatia triumphantly cautious and the Bosniaks had won the sympathy of the world by enduring the shelling of Sarajevo and the massacre at
Srebrenica. In addition, there was the juicy carrot of membership of the EU to make ending the civil war an attractive option. Both Stewart and Knaus know that intervention can work well when there is a narrow enough time-scale and a specific technical task. Preventing a massacre, rescuing a population from famine, flying in high-level health care, even fixing a Central Bank can be done by foreigners with superlative efficiency. The events in Libya are too recent to be covered by this book, but dovetail neatly with the authors’ concept of advance planning, local allies, an urgent need, speed and the lightest possible footprint.
But they are both adamant that ‘nation-building under fire’, which is currently being attempted in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is not possible. Part of the problem is time. Soldiers and diplomats are sent in for risibly short tours of duty, but from our imperial past we know that success depends on the hands-on knowledge of language, culture and local kinship ties which can only be learned over decades, sometimes generations.
Another related problem is isolation. Living in a ‘green zone’ safe haven, as the experts and the garrisons do, means they know nothing of the realities of village or street life. These compounds are populated by a migrating tribe of international aid-experts (typically under-35-year-old, postgraduate intellectuals) who deal in concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘state-building’, strict accountability and gender issues that look inevitable, contemporary and sharp at Harvard or Cambridge, but which cannot be translated into what matters on the ground.
Rory Stewart reminds us that in a recent recruitment drive, 92 out of 100 Afghan policemen could not write their names or record numbers. He tells the story of a western rule-of-law consultant who was sent out to advise the Afghan judiciary (at $1.5 million a year, including the cost of his security staff). Yet the local courts are only ever used for passport applications while 85 per cent of Afghans take their cases to the Taleban commanders who dispense justice quickly, cheaply and effectively under a tree.
But even if the Western intervention in Afghanistan were to be manned by linguistically fluent, long-term careerists, working amongst the people they wish to protect, there are still insuperable problems. The very presence of foreign bases, and the disproportionate scale of the aid budgets, undermine the authority of the state they are meant to be nurturing. In just one aid programme, the training of a new Afghan army out-spends the entire Afghan government revenue by 14-1. The ‘interveners’ are inevitably seen to be an army of occupation, while the locals who oppose them are regarded as heroes, defending religion, nation and people.
As one senior US officer confessed at the end of his tour of duty, ‘I am undeniably proud of my service’; yet he also realised that his combat presence had helped create ‘what has become one of the most violent and unstable valleys in Afghanistan’.
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