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by William Easterly

  War to the Death

  The foreign legacies in Angola were to have a longer shelf life than Crocker’s premature obituary. The Americans again showed their habit of not cleaning up after themselves. Their protégé Savimbi quickly violated the peace agreement after he lost an election to the MPLA.

  The civil war that the cold war fueled would outlive the cold war by a decade. UNITA got new sources of funding by capturing diamond mines, whose revenues it used to buy arms on the black market. Ironically, the main source of weapons for UNITA was the late Soviet bloc, which sold its surplus weapons after the end of the cold war.

  The civil war kept on, by the end killing 750,000 Angolans (7 percent of the population) and displacing 4.1 million people.43 Peace came to Angola, long after the West stopped paying attention, only when MPLA forces killed in battle that authentic hero of our time, Jonas Savimbi, on February 22, 2002.

  The combination of outside meddling, inside mismanagement, and civil war left the Angolan economy six feet under along with Jonas Savimbi. Even the surge in export revenues due to new oil discoveries did not help its recovery (see figure 31). The MPLA’s blend of Soviet central planning and kleptocracy contributed to the disaster.

  Today Angola is dependent on food aid, and it exports hardly anything besides oil (which Western companies extract on behalf of the government; during the civil war, Cuban troops defended American companies’ oil wells against American-backed UNITA rebels). Provincial capitals have been without electricity for ten or more years.44 Twenty-six percent of children die before reaching their fifth birthday, the third highest rate in the world.45 AIDS already infects 5.5 percent of the adult population. It is spreading rapidly.46

  Fig. 31. Angola: Per Capita Income and Export Revenues

  Nation-Building in the Americas

  A previous incarnation of the utopian internationalism of the cold war was the American effort to stabilize unruly republics in the Americas. The United States did direct military interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America to spread democracy and free markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After bombarding Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution in 1916, Woodrow Wilson said, “The United States had gone to Mexico to serve mankind.47

  Haiti is again illustrative. Chapter 4 discusses how the legacy of slavery left a toxic division between mulattoes and blacks in Haiti, forever destabilizing Haitian politics. Throughout the nineteenth century, the two factions called on foreign intervention to help them defeat their rivals. Americans, British, and Germans were often eager to intervene anyway to protect the business interests of their citizens. Historian Hans Schmidt noted, “US Navy ships visited Haitian ports to ‘protect American lives and property’ in 1857, 1859, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904,

  1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913.48

  Finally, tired of all those round trips, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Haiti’s second colonial masters, according to Gendarmerie Commandant Smedley Butler, were “trustees of a huge estate…the Haitians were our wards and that we were endeavoring to develop and make for them a rich and productive property.49 This patronizing attitude was only rarely contradicted, for example by the American journalist who pointed out that the Haitian mulatto elite was “so many layers in culture above the army or navy man and his wife that the visiting American must feel ashamed of his country’s representatives.50 But Haitians united again in resistance against the foreign invaders, and the Americans left in 1934.

  The Americans left behind a newly trained Haitian army, the Garde, with black soldiers and mostly mulatto officers. Mulattoes dominated political office until 1946, when the black majority of the Garde revolted with a new vision of black pride and power, the noirist movement. After further political instability, a leading noirist, François Duvalier, defeated his mulatto opponent in the elections of 1957.51 Papa Doc Duvalier would rule until his death, in 1971, after which his son Baby Doc ruled until 1986.

  After the fall of the Duvalier family, a mixture of military regimes tried to stave off the coming to power of the populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was finally elected president in 1990. Another U.S. military intervention in 1994 restored Aristide to power after a coup.

  The second U.S. occupation of Haiti was less ambitious than the first, obsessed above all else with avoiding American casualties. The writer Bob Shacochis pointed out the novelty of an invasion to protect the invading soldiers from those they were invading.52

  After the United States spent two billion dollars to restore Aristide to power.53 U.S. support weakened in Aristide’s democratically challenged second term. Aristide government ministers diverted aid money into corrupt takings, as had their many predecessors. The World Bank in 2002 ranked Haiti as the world’s second most corrupt country out of 195 countries rated.54 After an armed rebellion in February 2004, Aristide took the traditional Haitian path into exile.

  Aristide’s jet had barely disappeared over the horizon when the World Bank convened a meeting of donors. The Bank announced “a joint government/ multi-donor Interim Cooperation Framework (Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire, or CCI).55 In July 2004, the CCI believed that Haiti was now “primed to tackle many urgent and medium term development needs.56The Economist in June 2005 quoted people a little closer to reality, such as diplomats stationed in Port-au-Prince, as saying that Haiti was on the verge of being a “failed state.” Foreign Policy magazine in August 2005 classified Haiti as a failed state, ranking it as more dysfunctional than the likes of Afghanistan, North Korea, and Zimbabwe.57 The long years of military intervention have failed to produce anything constructive in Haiti.

  As far as promoting democracy, one study on the historical record of American nation-building says that it doesn’t usually work. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholars Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper analyzed sixteen American nation-building efforts over the past century.58 Only four were democracies ten years after the U.S. military left—Japan and Germany after resounding defeat and occupation in World War II, and tiny Grenada(1983) and Panama (1989). Besides those already mentioned, the long list of twentieth-century intervention disasters includes Cuba (1898–1902, 1906–1909, 1917–1922), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965–1966), Nicaragua (1909–1933), and Panama (1903–1936).

  Peace Enforcement

  What about today’s “humanitarian” military interventions to bring peace, democracy, and prosperity to the Rest? I don’t review them in detail because they are too recent to judge properly their long-run effects on the Rest. Anyway, other writers have already covered humanitarian intervention well (in particular, I recommend David Rieff’s 2002 book, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis ). I will just review briefly here how the new interventionism (or, as the U.S. government now calls it, “peace enforcement”.59 has many of the same faults as cold war interventions, not to mention many of the same problems as more traditional foreign aid. Just as the argument for more aid money presumes that there is some all-knowing Planner who can get the right technical fix to the right place, the argument for humanitarian intervention presumes an omniscient and disinterested military force coming from outside. The triple tragedies of UN peacekeeping in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda in the 1990s showed that such a force does not exist. The peacekeeping system then (which still exists today) could not get right the decisions about whether and how to intervene.

  Like the cold war interventions, the new humanitarian interventions were distorted by serving the interests of the West rather than the supposed beneficiaries in the Rest. The French (motivated by their strategic interest in maintaining a French zone in central Africa, which was allegedly threatened by English-speaking Tutsi rebels.60 played a shameful role in Rwanda, shipping arms to the Hutu extremists even after the genocide began in April 1994. In April 1994, the French evacuated from Kigali their embassy staff and citizens, some allies in the Huti elite, and even the embassy dog, but left Tutsi employees of
the embassy to their fate.61 Clinton eschewed American or UN military intervention in Rwanda in 1994 to kowtow to right-wing critics of “nation-building,” but a few years later, when it became a useful rationale for occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, the right decided it liked “nation-building” after all. Strategic interests also dictated that international peacekeepers avoid casualties to their own forces even if this effort magnified many times the local loss of life, a situation that writer Alex de Waal labels “humanitarian impunity.62 The widespread Somalian rage at UN/U.S. forces in 1993, shown in the book and the movie Black Hawk Down, had a lot to do with the humanitarian impunity that had killed many civilians.

  Like the cold war interventions and like Planners’ efforts everywhere, the interventionists suffer from ignorance of local conditions. The UN team sent to scout out peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia in 1991 consisted of “two men in a jeep,” neither of whom was a Yugoslavia expert.63 The UN Planners in New York could only fit reports from the field in Rwanda into such preconceptions as “civil war” or “violent chaos,” arguing against intervention by not processing the evidence that Hutu extremists were organizing a campaign of extermination against the Tutsis. In Somalia, by contrast, lurid images of gunmen and famine victims argued for intervention, exaggerating the crisis (one TV journalist instructed an aid worker to “pick the children who are most severely malnourished” for filming) and fatally ignoring the complexity of clan politics.64

  Peacekeeping has an even worse problem than foreign aid in dealing with gangsters. The interventionists alternate from one extreme to the other. Either they (1) maintain neutrality between the government and its opponents (operating only with the consent of both parties) or (2) force change on (or terminate) some evil governments. These oscillations seem unrelated to the realities on the ground. Thus, the peacekeepers first followed the principle of consent in Bosnia when Serbs were murdering and raping civilians, then took sides against the Aidid faction in Somalia when the factions were close to equally reprehensible, then maintained neutrality for far too long in Rwanda between the genocidal Hutu government and the Tutsi victims (a policy described by the Czech member of the UN Security Council at the time as “like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews”).65

  International intervention also suffers from the same collective responsibility system that plagues foreign aid. Peacekeeping could be good, but just who is willing to be accountable for its success or failure? When something goes horribly wrong, like the Rwandan genocide, the UN blames the Western powers, while the Western powers blame the UN and each other. Iqbal Riza, assistant secretary general for peacekeeping at the UN at the time of the Rwandan genocide, more diplomatically uses the passive voice, indicating that “mistakes were made” but nobody made them. Riza also used the bureaucrat’s classic “that’s not my department” excuse: “Our mandate was not to anticipate and prevent genocide.66 Nobody pays for mistakes. After presiding over debacles like Rwanda, virtually the entire peacekeeping department of the UN ascended to run the whole organization when Kofi Annan (the former head of peacekeeping) became secretary-general.67

  Interventionism suffers from the patronizing assumption that only the West can keep the locals from killing each other. Stanford political scientist Jeremy Weinstein notes that peace usually succeeds war because of a decisive victory by one side, not because of negotiated settlements by outsiders. The intuition is simple: military victors are likely to form a more stable government, whereas a coalition of recent antagonists imposed by outside planners is likely to be unstable. Weinstein calculated the likelihood of a stable peace: at least ten years without the resumption of war. UN interventions produced a stable peace only a quarter of the time. With no UN intervention, a stable peace resulted nearly half the time.68

  In Somalia, the “international community” has sponsored fourteen rounds of fruitless peace talks since the collapse of government in 1991, not to mention the failed UN/U.S. military intervention. Meanwhile, without outside intervention, foreign aid, or even international recognition, the breakaway Republic of Somaliland in the north of Somalia has enjoyed peace, economic growth, and democratic elections over the same period. There can be awful military victors as well as good ones, but local actors are statistically more likely to find peace on their own.

  Such common sense has little impact on the overconfidence of the interventionists. The World Bank issued a 2003 report proclaiming that “our new understanding of the causes and consequences of civil wars provides a compelling basis for international action…. International action…could avert untold suffering, spur poverty reduction, and help to protect people around the world from…drug-trafficking, disease, and terrorism.” With the predilection of the Planner for precise quantification, the report suggests that Western-led military peacekeeping forces, reforms based on Western advice, and Western aid can halve the risk of civil war in poor economies, from 44 percent to 22 percent.69

  There is a strange confluence of the neoconservatives on the right supporting “regime change” and the humanitarians on the left calling for military intervention in whatever human rights emergency makes the headlines at the moment. As David Rieff notes, this logic would require “endless wars of altruism,” given the ubiquity of human rights violations.70 This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

  The pre–cold war, cold war, and post–cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson—don’t. Maybe one should never say never, but one should learn from history that the typical Western error is to do too many military interventions in the Rest, not too few.

  Silvia

  Silvia Neyala Zinga of Huambo, Angola, is not a fortunate person. Her mother, Deofina Chinima, can no longer walk since a mortar shell destroyed her left foot during the Angolan civil war. Her father died fighting in late 1992, after Savimbi again took up arms after losing the election. Her eldest brother, Alberto, has been missing ever since the siege of Huambo by UNITA rebels beginning on January 8, 1993. The only food the family had for long periods was cornmeal donated by the Red Cross. Silvia is two years old.71

  The best rule of all for Western helpers is, first, do no harm.

  SNAPSHOT: CHEMIST TO THE POOR

  THIRTY-NINE PERCENT OF Ugandans are malnourished. Malnutrition in children and teens causes fatigue, listlessness, reduced immunity to disease, swollen gums, decaying teeth, painful joints, slow growth, and trouble paying attention in school. A pregnant woman who is malnourished is more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby, who has a smaller chance of survival. Some studies estimate that 60 percent of all deaths of children under five are directly or indirectly related to malnutrition. The poor in Uganda eat a diet heavy in carbohydrates (such as cassava and bananas) with little protein.72

  George Mpango is a chemistry professor on the faculty of Makerere University in Uganda, founded in 1922 by the British. George studied at Makerere himself during the horrific rule of Idi Amin. He saved enough money from tutorials to finance half the cost of a plane ticket to the United States; a wealthy friend of his father paid for the rest. He got a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, in 1980.

  As his father’s eldest son, Dr. Mpango returned to Uganda in the late 1980s to fulfill his duties as the head of the extended Mpango family after his father died. He took up a job as assistant professor at Makerere, earning a hundred dollars a month. Coffee trees and cassava on his family farm in the countryside brought in another hundred dollars a month. Dr. Mpango had ideas that could help hungry Ugandans: developing a high-protein biscuit, teaching the next generation of Ugandan chemists, and developing improved varieties of cassava on his family farm. The obstacles were tremendous: Dr. Mpango’s lab at Makerere was chronical
ly short of funds, with thirty-year-old chemicals, no new beakers for the past fifteen years, no pH meter, no academic journals since the 1970s, periodic water cutoffs for failing to meet the bills, and not even enough lightbulbs. Aid donors gave unneeded items such as a German chemical reactor, with no instructions on how to use it, and fire extinguishers. “The donors give us what they have, not what we need,” said the head of the Makerere chemistry department.

  Eventually things looked up for Dr. Mpango. The government changed the policy of free tuition at Makerere to charge tuition for an expanded number of students (shrewdly offering scholarships to the same number who had gotten free tuition before). Students from all over Uganda and neighboring countries came to Makerere to take Dr. Mpango’s chemistry classes, which would enable them to get high-paying jobs as chemists for private food companies. Faculty salaries tripled. The high-protein biscuit was now ready for the market; Dr. Mpango also developed an orange juice powder for the local market. He started a private high school back in the family’s home village. Despite troubles in the extended family he heads and years of hardship, Dr. Mpango has found a path to his own success and benefits for those around him.*

  PART IV

  THE FUTURE

  CHAPTER TEN

  HOMEGROWN DEVELOPMENT

  I listen with attention to the judgement of all men;

  but so far as I can remember,

  I have followed none but my own.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE(1533–1592)

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD CALEB and I are in Tokyo, in a district called Akihabara. We have visited three temples: a Buddhist one, a Confucian one, and now an Electronics one. We are in an eight-floor electronics department store in a district that is thick with them—blocks and blocks of electronics stores. All the latest electronic gadgets are on display. Huge plasma-screen televisions (Caleb’s favorite). MP3 players the size of packs of bubble gum. Laptops the size of a hardback book. Digital cameras the thickness of a credit card. Reclining chairs that give an electronic back massage (my favorite). Customer service is exemplary—a sign in English announces WE CAN HELP YOU WITH OUR PLEASURE.