My latest piece over at The Commentator looks at why it took so long to arrest Ratko Mladic, and why our leaders tend to opt for gradual escalation rather than decisive blows to the head:

In late 1996 I sent a secret telegram to London arguing that the massively expensive British and Western investment in Bosnia was doomed to failure if action was not taken against the ICTY indictees, particularly the most senior ones.

My argument was simple. It made no sense for the international presence in Bosnia to go round trying to plant the green seeds of European reasonableness if a few paces behind us followed ICTY indictees pouring plant-killer on those seeds.

The Bosnian communities were not stupid. They did not believe that the international seed-planters were unaware of — or too weak to deal with — the war crimes suspects openly trying to thwart progress. The only conclusion they could draw was that for some dark reason a deal had been done with those ICTY indictees. This being the case, why take the international community’s “democracy” seriously? The ICTY indictees were looking like the real — and permanent — winners in the whole affair.

London by then was coming to the same conclusion. A new policy was worked out with Washington (Clinton by then safely re-elected), albeit at the risk of "mission creep". Specialist NATO troops would now take action to arrest and transfer to the ICTY all indictees.

But which indictees should be arrested first? The prominent senior ones who had presided over policies leading to all sorts of iniquitous outcomes? Or the nasty, less well-known indictees personally involved in carrying out atrocities?

This is where rational policy-making gives way to elusive, top-level political and personal instincts about risks and how to manage them…

The conclusion?

It takes an almost freakishly unusual combination of operational factors and the highest political nerve to launch the sort of audacious raid carried out by the Americans against Bin Laden.

As we saw with Karadzic/Mladic and when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998 and now again in Libya, our politicians default towards “safer” strategies of controlled escalation rather than up-front boldness. Perhaps there’s also an unspoken instinct that however wicked they are, even really bad leaders deserve a certain practical respect? Better a supposedly “measured”, if messy, expensive route “to keep options open” than a strong, ruthless attempt to chop off the very head of the problem.

Yet that policy comes at a high cost. Sophisticated aerial bombardment to limit the room for manoeuvre of extreme leaders usually blows up hundreds of poor regime squaddies while leaving intact (if not emboldened) the worst, and wealthy, parts of the regime which have caused the whole problem.

Plus the problem drags on. And on. And on. This is not obviously wise, obviously efficient, or obviously “moral”…