I have been struggling with my paper on military/civilian cooperation in ‘fragile states’.

It is easy to think that the whole business is hopeless. It is just not possible in the short time-scales we all can cope with these days to work out how best to achieve Stability while maintaining Legitimacy. Not to mention Development.

It is not all bad. The Sierra Leone intervention a few years ago is said to have been a rather good one. There the state had fallen into gruesome collapse, with horrible atrocities being carried out by armed factions. The UN Sec Gen called for the British to help Do Something, and so we did, sending in a sizeable armed contingent in 2000 to ‘restore order’.

This was done, and UK forces left in 2002 soon after successful new elections. Sierra Leone totters along again, a miserably poor country but no longer a total failure.

And what about the UNTAC deployment in Cambodia in the early 1990s? In went a major UN civ/mil deployment, some 20,000 people costing $1.5bn. They left two years later with Cambodia restored to something resembling normality after the catastrophic Khmer Rouge period.

Perfect? No.

Pretty darn good by the standards of such things? Yes.

In Cambodia there was a deep tradition of success to work with. The problem there had been the Cold War and Vietnam War and then the Khmer Rouge communist insanity. With those problems ended, Cambodia could start to move back towards success again. Now growing briskly, albeit still from a very low base.

Bosnia? The conflict was stopped but it did not end. Fourteen years on Bosnia is still far from able or willing to act as a single purposeful state. Instead:

Both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are dominated by a greedy, irresponsible elite that only too often crosses the line into organized crime, as anyone who asks around in the region is likely to hear.

Deep deep down in all this are our Assumptions, often so deeply buried that we do not even pause to think about them.

One such is the idea that culture somehow does not matter in all this. That all people respond to materialist incentives as we usually do, and so it is best if Western/international ideas of ‘development’ and progress prevail. On this Marxists and liberals tend to agree: modern is good.

But are some cultures (eg in Africa) just not suited to what we want them to have? Is it wicked to ask?

Another assumption is that the right thing to do with a fragile or failing state is to get it restored to a less fragile/failing condition.

That might work for somewhere like Cambodia, where Cambodians have shown themselves to be able to pull themselves together in their own national interest.

But can it work eg in Bosnia or Afghanistan or even Iraq, where the ethno-religious-regional rivalries mean that it is not clear what the expression ‘national interest’ means at all?

Maybe some states as currently constituted are just too weak/divided to be revived, or are never going to flourish within their existing borders, however much money is poured in? Should the option of putting that thought on the table be ruled out a priori?

Putting it another way, when is it honest to say that a certain approach has failed or at least is so unlikely to succeed that other approaches deserve a try?

For a state of the art look at clever progressive socialist British opinion on such matters, read the new DFID White Paper.

Buried deep on page 135, just after the cutesy passages on DFID’s new UKaid logo (Note: is not the word ‘aid’ a tad patronising towards its recipients?), is this at 7.54:

The private sector is an invaluable part of development.

Well, there it is. Another assumption. That the core task of ‘development’ is to use state structures to prop up other state structures, with a nod to private enterprise as and when it might be a handy ‘partner’ on the donor state’s terms.

Finally, the absolutely basic assumption shared across the planet is that there must be No More Colonialism.

Fine by me. I do not want the British state to run anywhere in eg the poorer parts of Africa.

But would it be so wrong in principle or substance if a self-evidently failing state was told by the international community that as a condition for getting any further assistance it would lose the right to run its own affairs for (say) 30 years while a major international team stepped in to run the territory according to decent standards, and trained up large numbers of local people to work to those standards?

That sort of outcome would be long enough to reassure investors and get private capital pouring in. It would give the average ten-year-old living now the prospect of getting training and a decent local job in his/her lifetime. Human rights would be respected enough. Courts would function honestly. Infrastructure could get built. Women could get a better deal. And so on.

That sort of approach would almost certainly guarantee that the country concerned moved from being a failure to being a Success within a couple of thousand weeks.

Is anything else likely to work better?

No.

And that option is the one option no-one will contemplate.

Who’s failing whom here?