National Strategy Forum Review – Winter 2001 Issue
PREVENTING STATE FAILURE—A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE…SOLDIERS?
No matter how much we aficionados might wish it, Presidential campaigns seldom admit real debate on issues of substance in foreign policy. Among last year’s glancing blows on international relations and defense strategy was an illuminating exchange on “nation building”—Bush against, Gore for. With President Bush in the White House and asking for a comprehensive study, we can expect in the next few months to hear more about how—and if—we should go about the business of propping up failing and failed states.
Let’s conduct our own mini-review right here. What is the problem? Is it a real problem? If it is serious, what are our choices for practical action?
Glance at your globe. Starting in our own hemisphere, let us sample the problem. Colombia, where we just committed to more than $1.5 billion in aid, mostly to boost military operations against the drug growers, seems to be sliding further into violence fueled by billions in drug money. It appears that our militarization of the problem may be deepening the crisis and spreading it to the neighbors. Nonetheless, Colombia is back in Washington asking for more help.
Go east to Africa and three separate clusters of failure. West Africa: Sierra Leone holds the headlines for now, but half a dozen states are barely functional as brutal bandit-rebels control much of the countryside including diamond- and oil-producing regions. Central Africa: A huge swath of the continent is given over to a complex war among several fragile countries and various armed factions questing for power and, again, control of diamonds and valuable resources. East Africa: all failed and failing states including Somalia where we backed out of a failed attempt at “nation building.”
On to the Middle East-which we’ve long rated a “vital” region because of its oil and its politics: Leaving aside the thorns of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, we see several other states who consider themselves vulnerable to failure should their hordes of young people, frustrated with lack of economic and political opportunity, be egged into violence by so-called Islamic extremists.
Up to Central Asia: with none of the post-Soviet states a powerhouse, clustered here are the five weakest, a region whose early hopes for democracy are being crushed under an avalanche of drugs, drug-money, weapons, and war-lords spilling out of Afghanistan. If there were to be a World War III, it might start here.
Finish with South and Southeast Asia: There are a few successes, but as in Africa and the Middle East, many whose population growth is high, economic growth is low, and social infrastructure for the poor is zero-the recipe for multiple explosions. Of all those, we should pay particular attention to Indonesia and Malaysia, faltering countries posing huge risks to their own people and the neighborhood.
Conclusion number one: Yes, there is a serious problem—and our survey didn’t even touch on some monster questions like whither Russia. Conclusion two: there is not enough money among the great powers to buy these problems out. Indeed, the main places in the developing world where we have poured our billions of aid do not seem to be developing at all; some are getting worse. Money is not the answer. Three: Military power does not seem to work either. Some countries like Canada and Jordan are much more active than we but neither their peacekeeping forces nor ours seem to be able to fix the local problems. Kosovo is the UN’s latest and most comprehensive attempt to build a nation under the protective umbrella of sizable NATO forces, but it is not yet clear that we are doing more than holding a tourniquet.
Should we care? That is an easy yes. If nothing else, we are deeply invested in a global and globalizing marketplace. Our neighborhood is the whole sphere, but a neighborhood where a quarter to half of our neighbors subsist in rickety states. Short term we can do fine by trafficking with the richer strata but in the long term we’ll thrive only if the whole global neighborhood thrives.
Is there anything practical we can do, something preventative? I think this also is a yes. Working in many of these regions in recent years I’ve discovered some simple truths. Rule one: “go local.” We can successfully concentrate on helping local groups design and run their own, locally-tailored, “peacebuilding” campaigns. Even in the poorest country we will find well-educated citizens just as committed to building better lives for their children as we. They can give the Democracy is Good lecture as skillfully as we. They just need an encouraging hand.
Using advanced planning techniques copied from wargaming in “PeaceLabs,” my local partners in several poor, war-torn countries have shown they can devise skillful, concrete peacebuilding campaigns. Our costs are measured in a few people, not in army divisions, and thousands, not billions, of dollars.
The bottom line: These failing states are not the “Third World” addressable only by the 19th Century’s colonial strategies of military intervention and welfare. They have the capacity to fix themselves—indeed, only if they do fix themselves will they no longer be failing. Our role should be to help galvanize and enable those capacities.
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Larry Seaquist, a former U.S. Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist, is the founder of The Strategy Group, in independent, international “do tank” devoted to conflict prevention and peacebuilding. He currently leads an international team building the Aspotogan Institute, a major center in Canada to support locally-led community development and peacebuilding operations. See www.strategygroup.org.