by Parag Khanna
Which countries deserve a crippling blockade to isolate their rogue regimes and which leaders deserve to be assassinated? The question comes down to whether behavior change is sufficient or regime change is necessary. Some states, such as Sudan, could reasonably establish a power-sharing order (or peacefully split up) once a particular regime is removed from power, while in others, such as North Korea, removing the leadership could give rise to something even worse. Large-scale interventions such as in Iraq can backfire, turning supporters of liberation into insurgents. Most Iraqis are grateful for the United States’ removal of Saddam, just not for America’s subsequent occupation. The former was necessary; the latter was not. Few will mourn the wicked once they are gone, and the sooner they are gone, the better so that people can get on with their lives.
Ultimately, the removal of tyrants should come from and be owned by the country’s own citizenry. As people get access to wealth and voice, they will increasingly be prepared to fight to defend it. But until popular uprisings can overcome police states and cults of personality, progressive interventionists will have to continue to be guileful, and even play God, in the name of saving people from their leaders.
Finding the Peace to Keep
A couple of years ago, a famous Hollywood actress turned activist—let’s call her Mia Farrow—had a quiet meeting with the head of the private security firm Blackwater to find out if the overpaid military contractor would be able to stage a humanitarian intervention in Darfur on behalf of its own people. Blackwater answered that it could “clear and hold,” no problem. Farrow didn’t pursue the idea any further. Perhaps she wasn’t sure which was more disturbing: that the West had in its power the ability to protect those who remained of Darfur’s beleaguered population but wouldn’t, or that it was the most notorious private military company that was willing to do the job. If you could send in the troops—whether they wore green or black—would you?
In many places, the lofty term “international community” means no more and no less than the number of UN peacekeepers present. Soon after the United Nations’ founding, peacekeeping was quickly invented on the fly to monitor cease-fires in the Mideast and Kashmir. By the early 1990s, the humble United Nations had become the “Rolls Royce of conflict management.” It facilitated transitions in numerous Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian countries, conducting elections, demilitarizing armed forces, and steering economic reform. Soon there was talk of UN-led international trusteeships for East Timor, Kosovo, Palestine, Somalia, and Sierra Leone as well. UN troubleshooter Sergio Vieira de Mello ran East Timor from its independence vote from Indonesia in 1999 until its UN membership in 2002.
But by 2006, it was clear that the Australian-led UN intervention in East Timor still wasn’t up to the task of reforming the country’s security services or resurrecting the economy. And in other interventions—particularly in Congo, Liberia, Haiti, and Sudan—peacekeepers were deployed to places where there was no peace to keep. Today it seems the United Nations no longer knows what it is doing in peace operations, even though peacekeeping is the most expensive UN function by far. The number of UN military and police personnel on duty in twenty-plus operations worldwide now stands at more than 110,000. Each intervention is cobbled together with piecemeal funding and supplies (from the first world) and troops (from the third world) without sufficient training or a clear mandate for today’s more dangerous stabilization missions. Once on the ground, UN operations have fallen into every postconflict trap, from failing to confront local warlords to following mandates that don’t match local realities to designing constitutions without popular buy-in. Peacekeeping has become the continuation of politics by other means: Some operations have gone on for so many years that they may have become part of the problem themselves.
For peacekeeping to not further degenerate into never-ending, halfhearted occupations, the more than $8 billion spent on it each year would be better allocated to building local, multinational forces managed by regional organizations. Regional—not global—peacekeeping forces are the future of conflict management. The United States, NATO, and the European Union can all give more financial, military, and logistical support for the African Union to halt genocide, stabilize conflicts, and enforce peace agreements—all legitimate mandates that Africans should learn to pursue themselves. Countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Djibouti have added troops to a standby peacekeeping force, while Nigeria has set up a training center for AU forces, and South African police are training their Congolese counterparts in crowd control. Spain has become the largest funder of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) because the organization can foster on-the-ground cooperation for interventions (as it did in Liberia), combat illegal migration to Europe, and promote economic relations in the region. The United Nations could never do these things without ECOWAS—but one day ECOWAS may be able to do them without any outside help.
With UN blue helmets, American troops, and NATO armies stretched all across Africa, the Mideast, and Afghanistan, great powers may have finally realized that consistent regional anchors for peacekeeping operations are the key to both alleviating the burden on themselves and encouraging self-policing. Regional forces have far greater on-the-ground knowledge, legitimacy, and acceptance even though they don’t pretend to be neutral like the United Nations does. In Bosnia, the United Nations was accused of not distinguishing between the perpetrators of genocide and its victims. In Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, aid workers, UN staff, and peacekeepers have come under constant attack while supplying food to refugees. Militants, insurgents, and terrorists don’t care about their proclaimed neutrality: If you’re not with them, you’re against them. Local forces are better able to navigate these rifts, which constantly catch UN forces off guard.
No matter who is in charge of peacekeeping, constant security risks remain an obvious reason why the new public and private colonialists need to learn to get along for the long haul. If NGOs have to pull out due to attacks—as has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia—their humanitarian gains can go up in smoke. Some NGOs already partner with private military companies. Military outsourcing has been given a bad name by the tens of thousands of contractors involved in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But “contractors gone wild” is not a universal phenomenon. DynCorp successfully demobilized the Liberian militia. NGOs and modern-day mercenaries may seem strange bedfellows—altruism and profit—but they do, in fact, need each other: Firms stabilize and NGOs deliver services. There is no longer anything “inherently governmental” about providing basic stability. Public-private security is the order of the day in the neo-medieval world.
Taking the Reins of “Chaos-istan”
No place better exhibits the strategic stakes yet also the perpetual improvisation of public and private actors clamoring to rebuild a failed state like Afghanistan. Just months after the 2001 invasion, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid remarked that “Afghanistan has a wonderful opportunity to experiment with small government.” What it got instead was quasi-government at the intersection of heavy-handed military occupation, insipid donor politics, corrupt national institutions, traditional warlord rivalries, and vainglorious NGOs. To fix Afghanistan will be hard enough; incoherent strategies and arbitrary timelines only make it harder.
The U.S.-led occupation has lacked vision, lurching from election campaign to campaign—both American and Afghan—and donor conference to donor conference, each event marked by clashing agendas rather than collective strategy. Why, for example, were democratic elections such an early priority, when the delivery of services remains to this day inadequate, making the very inclusiveness of the elections a challenge to their own legitimacy? While the West focused on shoring up Hamid Karzai, the rest of the country became what former finance minister Ashraf Ghani called a “narco-mafia state.” Poppy eradication policies lacked complementary programs to offer alternative livelihoods, strengthening warlords who reemerged as governors and drug-t
rafficking commanders. Meanwhile, most Afghans have seen only “phantom aid” while international bureaucrats siphon off educated Afghans to work as drivers and translators, cause traffic jams, and all but invite suicide bombings with their hulking SUVs. Human security remains hard to come by: Some $30 billion has been spent by donors and yet at least half the population suffers from perpetual food shortages.
There are now two “What are we doing in Afghanistan?” questions. The first is about why we’re there in the first place. The second is about how we go about our activities there. Afghanistan’s persistent failure has many parents. Since 2009, both military and civilian resources have received a big boost, yet the coordination between them has been pathetic. Almost a decade since the invasion, the collective international presence is still asking the most basic questions: What type of government should Afghanistan have? What resources should be provided and at what level of society? Who should lead reconstruction projects? In the midst of a surge of troops, funds, donors, and civilians, a far more effective division of labor is still needed. Afghanistan remains an American war rather than an Afghan war.
In Afghanistan as much as in any other failed state, the global should support the local. In counterinsurgency, terms such as “tactical level,” “security halo,” and “population-centric” are all utterly redundant—the local is everything, particularly against Pashtun tribesmen turned Taliban who are genetically expert at guerrilla warfare. But it took until 2008 for America to commit serious resources to an Afghan Public Protection Program, which trains local Afghan community forces across ethnic lines, and for international forces to work more systematically with local shura councils to build community defense mechanisms. Similarly, on the political level, foreign diplomats built up new political parties as if they could replace tribal jirgas as the main mode of arbitration—but at best the former could be a manifestation of the latter. Also, UN reports refer to such jirgas as “alternative dispute resolution mechanisms” as if they weren’t the mechanisms of justice in Afghanistan, handling up to 90 percent of legal claims.
A better model than pouring billions into Kabul’s or Islamabad’s black holes has been the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan, which has disbursed block grants to twenty-eight thousand villages that have a participatory and transparent process for determining how the money is spent. What Afghanistan needs is more competent provincial security and administration, not a bloated government in Kabul: It can have central government without centralized government. Otherwise outsiders are practicing too much old colonialism and too little new colonialism. The goal of helping others help themselves is no less worthy simply because working through local players exposes the weakest links in the chain. Those links need to be supported even as outsiders overcompensate.
The travails of Afghanistan’s tribal population have never been in doubt: poor irrigation and seasonal flooding, lack of safe drinking water, poor health care, and shoddy roads. Unconnected spaces are often ungoverned places. A century ago, British colonialists attempted to tame the frontier through road building, turning unsettled areas into settled ones. Even in the twenty-first century, American generals invoke the old adage that “where the road ends, the insurgency begins.” Stabilizing settled population centers and then building roads to connect them is thus perhaps the most crucial step in state building. Under the mantra of “clear, hold, and build,” soldier-diplomats of the U.S. military have overseen some important successes, such as restoring the Kabul-to-Jalalabad road. But insurgents frequently target Western-built infrastructure, making the Kabul-Jalalabad road impassable—at least to Westerners. Yet when locals build them themselves, they gain the means to pursue their own livelihoods and a reason to fight for their future. As Afghans say, “If you sweat for it, you’ll protect it.”
In Afghanistan, which is cut off from global markets (except the opium market), all important economic activity is local as well. Eighty-five percent of Afghans depend on agriculture. Afghan farmers could earn as much from pomegranates as poppies, but they lack the roads and access to ports to efficiently transport their harvests to India and the Persian Gulf. With better irrigation they could grow rice in one season and fruit and nuts in another, and with small processing plants they could make fruit juices for sale. Rather than wasting millions on large-scale commercial agriculture as USAID did during the Bush administration, the U.S. military and agriculture experts from American universities are finally spreading across Afghanistan to increase rural efficiency. Mint, pomegranate, soy, saffron, and raisins could all grow in the provinces where opium has been strongest. Rapid-response bodies such as the Office of Transition Initiatives—whose diplomats-for-hire get things done by putting money straight into local players’ hands—should get fifty times their meager budgets to jump-start such local projects. Afghans can also be employed to make toilet paper, soap, and bicycles—anything China and India are becoming too expensive for. When a Canadian commander in the southern Helmand province was asked how he managed to pacify one district, he replied: “Carpet bomb the area with projects.”
Achieving human security hinges on improving the coordination of fledgling regimes, NGOs, UN agencies, and foreign militaries. Lord Paddy Ashdown, the European Union’s former high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, urged that foreign occupiers should always prepare for their own obsolescence rather than fortify their often unwelcome presence. But in Afghanistan, that horizon might be too distant to prepare for. Instead, the country is emerging as a semipermanent model of the hybrid public-private governance taking hold across the postcolonial world. It represents the new normal of globalization and failed states across Africa, central Asia, and Southeast Asia: Flights come in and out of Kabul ferrying Western consultants and Chinese businessmen, each pursuing his or her own agenda amid chaotic politics and an uncertain future. The American military even guards the Chinese-operated Aynak copper mine in Logar province, their cooperation contributing to resurrecting Afghanistan’s place along the new Silk Road.
Neo-colonialists need to learn the lessons from their present foray in Afghanistan for potential future interventions in Sudan and Congo in Africa, but also for Yemen, Myanmar, and North Korea—all strategically located states with sensitive great power interests and all populous countries with starving people. As these states’ regimes weaken and potentially collapse, geopolitical and humanitarian factors will collide in unpredictable ways. There is no choice as to whether or not to pursue the new colonialism—but there is a choice as to how to do it right.
Chapter Six
Terrorists, Pirates, Nukes
If you’re looking to traffic young girls, Haiti is the place to go. The latest in stolen electronics? Paraguay is where the action is. Pushing cocaine? Colombia has what you need. Smuggling cigarettes? Albania is a treasure trove. Selling heroin? Myanmar is a top source. States don’t have to be failing or in the midst of civil wars to be hubs for the export of trouble—often that is their main export. Opium from Afghanistan kills five times more citizens of NATO countries than the number of NATO troops killed in Afghanistan itself. Today there is a global black market for everything, from poached hides of exotic animals to high-end virility drugs to nuclear material. Real or fake, they flow off assembly lines, get ferried across borders and waved through customs by airport crews, and are sold to both willing and unsuspecting buyers worldwide.
Terrorism, piracy, warfare, and organized crime have blended together into one public-private underworld of state sponsors and nefarious shadowy groups. Market dynamics are impervious to moralizing debates: So long as demand exists, there will be supply. Since governments no longer control the market for mass crime and violence, the market for solutions is wide open as well. Only an equally robust mega-diplomacy of intelligence cooperation, investment for job creation, and prying open closed societies can effectively deal with insurgent jihadists, Somali pirates, and Iranian mullahs.
Terrorism as War
Before 9/11, terrorism
experts used to say, “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” Today’s terrorists clearly want both. In theory, warfare is between armies while terrorism targets civilians. In practice, they have become all but indistinguishable: Civilians are by far the greatest casualties of both war and terrorism. The term “terrorism” remains as contested as ever: One man’s terrorist is still another man’s freedom fighter. More fundamentally, terrorism isn’t going away because, if used cleverly, it is undeniable that terrorism works. The “war on terrorism” fared no better than the “war on drugs.” Every couple of years the strongmen of Asian powers from Russia to Uzbekistan to China get together and raise their arms in the air declaring they will together “stamp out the scourge of terrorism.” One of them is usually hit with a terrorist attack within a week or two.
Terrorism is a dirty business, but it is very much a business; the boundary with organized crime is blurry at best. The notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International was perhaps the most successful drug-money-laundering, weapons-financing, and terrorist-sponsoring (from Abu Nidal to Osama bin Laden) corporation in history until it was shut down in 1991. Without the continued ubiquity of money launderers, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would be a far weaker force. Whether they want independent statehood or a global ummah, terrorists and guerrilla insurgents use similar strategies: fragmented expertise across multiple cells, coalescing when they need to conduct large operations, pooling and directing money and weapons to wherever they are needed. They are shadowy in their diffusion, but strong in their unity.