Lord Ashdown and Richard Holbrooke have penned a long joint letter to the Guardian warning about the risks of the international community taking its eye off the Bosnia problem.

They focus on what they see as the basic aim of Republika Srpska PM Milorad Dodik:

His long-term policy seems clear: to place his Serb entity, Republika Srpska, in a position to secede if the opportunity arises.

But they do strive to maintain some balance:

… his rival, the senior president of all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, has stressed the need to abolish the two entities that make up Bosnia, to create one non-federal country. Dodik professes to respect Dayton and Silajdzic wishes to revise it, but both men are violating its basic principle: a federal system within a single state. This toxic interaction is at the heart of today’s Bosnian crisis.

They want the ‘international community’ (ie Washington and Brussels) to step up their game:

Post-Irish referendum, the EU’s foreign policy will be, above all, a Balkan policy. Attention has recently focused on Kosovo. But Bosnia has always been the bigger and more dangerous challenge.

Really? The EU’s foreign policy (such as it is) will be and has to be ‘above all’ about bigger things than Bosnia, including the Middle East and relations with Russia.

The Bosnia problem is fiendishly complex.

And fiendishly simple.

The Holbrooke Dayton settlement – partly because Holbrooke personally did not want to listen to good advice – gave the Bosnian Serbs too much and the Bosniacs/Muslims and Croats too little.

That 1995 outcome (with Silajdzic an active participant) itself resulted from an earlier 1994 strategic philosophical blunder by the US and Germany which forced the Bosniacs and Croats into a clumsy allieance against the Serbs.

And thus the current uncertainty.

It boils down to two general options.

Stop the cart and try to rewrite Dayton, so that after extensive political pain and convulsions a newer, more stable cart can move down the road faster.

Or keep the existing cart trundling forward, albeit in fits and starts, while incentivising its bickering passengers to stop fighting each other and focus on common success.

Both have pros and cons. A supposedly sensible choice in fact depends on what is little more than crude guesswork as to where the cart is likely to get to and when, under one or other option.

I suspect that the first option will not have the necessary international (or local) political will behind it to be accomplished in a sensible time-frame, and so risks almost indefinite stagnation.

But let’s be honest, now and again.

One root of the problem is that it really just makes little sense to allow Albanian Kosovars to leave a democratic Serbia, but insist that come what may Bosnian Serbs have to be content with a dysfunctional frustrated Bosnia.

And maybe the clever Haris Silajdzic should start working hard towards success, so that the Serbs are keener to join a winning option, rather than sulkily poring over all the failures?