The rules of the meddling game

Paddy Ashdown was standing by a muddy roadside in mid-winter outside Sarajevo enduring the daily humiliation of the assembled members of the international community in Bosnia. The civil war was at its height. Sarajevo was under siege. The first horror stories of rapes and massacres were beginning to surface. And yet to gain access by the only road open to this desperate European capital, UN troops, aid workers, journalists and even the then Liberal MP had first to be subjected to an intrusive search by the very Serb soldiers responsible for tearing the country apart. They not only had a stranglehold on the city, but they also demonstrated their control over the feeble representatives of the weak and divided world powers. I doubt there was a single journalist or aid worker in Bosnia at the time who did not believe that the West had a moral obligation to intervene and stop the bloodshed. At one low point, I even recall a colleague from the Guardian admitting that she wished Margaret Thatcher was still in office because none of the other Western leaders was prepared to stand up to Slobodan Milosevic.

More than any other modern conflict, the war in Bosnia shaped the attitudes of a generation in the West and contributed to the more interventionist foreign policy of the Blair era. During the past decade British troops were deployed at least three times on humanitarian grounds, in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor. But these largely successful operations have been completely overshadowed by Afghanistan and Iraq, painful daily reminders of the limits of intervention in a foreign land.

With the possible exception of Bernard Kouchner, the newly appointed French foreign minister and former governor of Kosovo, Ashdown is the best qualified person to tackle the question of whether intervention is justified and if so how it can succeed.