No sooner had the French cleared Mali of Islamist terrorists than talk turned to exit strategy. Although no one thinks the threat over, the thought is of training the Malian army to take responsibility for securing the country’s long and porous frontiers when the French leave.
This is sheer delusion. Even before the Islamists hit town Mali was a barely functioning state. A military coup last year, led by a 39-year-old army captain who, one year on, is still pulling the strings, put paid to any notion that Mali was a democracy. Long before the coup, corruption had eroded the rule of law to the point where many of Mali’s institutions had ceased to function effectively.
Despite training by US Special forces, the Malian army is ill-equipped, ill-disciplined and underpaid. When the Islamists arrived, it disintegrated at the first whiff of grapeshot. Already, even before the French have turned their backs, the army has resumed harassment of civilians. What is needed is not an exit strategy, but a strategy for the long term. Without one, there is a danger that the country will disintegrate as soon as the foreigners go home.
Mali is only the latest example of that growing phenomenon: the failed state. Somalia is the supreme example, but we can all think of others. Liberia (currently under its formidable president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, enjoying a respite from decades of turmoil) has been the subject of three UN interventions. Sierra Leone, rescued from implosion by British military intervention, remains fragile; likewise Ivory Coast, recently the subject of another French intervention and presently hosting an 11,000-strong UN military mission. In Sudan, no less than three separate UN military missions are doing their best to maintain stability.
Then there is the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo, a vast, chaotic, dysfunctional kleptocracy. The armed forces are bloated, parasitic, disloyal, and generally useless except in so far as they threaten the civilian population. No one knows how many have died in the years of mayhem in eastern Congo. The figure is in the millions.
What is to be done? There is no simple solution but I wonder if the time has come to experiment with a new, more robust form of intervention, one that recognises that some states have failed so completely that any short term fix is doomed; that we need to start from the scratch and, subject to the consent of the people, stay for the long term. And I mean for a generation.
Some years ago, when a Foreign Office Minister, I stayed with John Blaney, the US ambassador to Liberia from 2002 to 2005, in his fortified mansion in Monrovia, overlooking the Atlantic. It was he who saved Liberia last time round. While the last bout of violence raged, desperate Liberians were literally pulling their dead outside the gate, begging for US intervention.
Unfortunately Liberia scarcely featured on the radar of the neocons then in charge in Washington. Eventually, they were persuaded to dispatch a naval task force, which, to everyone’s dismay anchored out of sight over the horizon. Mr Blaney received a message from the admiral saying that they were sending a helicopter and that he should fly away leaving the Liberians to their fate. He refused saying: “I take my orders from the state department, not the Pentagon.” The marines had to land, and barely had their boots touched the ground than the chaos subsided.
Mr Blaney had clear views on what needed to be done. It wasn’t enough to send troops. A stronger UN mandate was needed, which gave it the power to run the country in the medium to long term. “Everyone is afraid of upsetting the African Union, being accused of neo-colonialism or racism. The fact is this is a failed state. There aren’t any functioning institutions to plug into. We’ve got to do what helps people. What works. So why don’t we sit down and talk about it?”
Our man in Congo, the late Jim Atkinson, said much the same. “There are no altruistic Congolese. You have only to look at what the rulers have done to their people in the last 40 years. A mandate is the only way. The international community is wasting its time on half-hearted measures. They should either takeover and do it properly, or get out.”
Instead of scuttling at the earliest opportunity, a UN Special Representative should run Mali for as long as it takes to build stable institutions. Not just an effective military, but a fully functioning administration so far as possible funded out of local taxation, supported by the rule of law, and subject to the approval of the people by way of referendums every four years. This would be a better way to deal with failed states than anything we have so far tried.
Culled from The Times (London)
February 8, 2013
