Can Intervention Work? (Norton Global Ethics Series) by Rory Stewart

Author:Rory Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

A REMARKABLE OCCUPATION

Amir Abdur Rahman, who ruled Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, was, according to former World Bank anthropologist Ashraf Ghani, one of the most successful state-builders of the late nineteenth century. In an essay published in 1978, Ghani described the secret of the Amir’s long rule: “During the twenty-one years of his reign, he was to be constantly engaged in large and small-scale wars, carrying the power of the State to the remotest corners of the country. At his death, he passed on to his heir a State that had never been so centralized.” The Amir challenged the autonomy of tribal aristocracies. He imposed taxes on everyone who had previously been exempted. He propagated a form of Islam that justified centralization. He also imposed a unitary form of religious worship on his subjects, and pushed those who resisted into exile. For Ghani, who has made a name for himself in recent years as an international expert on state-building, the Amir’s experience showed one way—this was how one could go about forging a modern bureaucratic state in Afghanistan.52

The challenge of building a functioning state in postwar Bosnia in 1995 was very different. At the very outset there were no functioning and legitimate central state institutions. At the same time, there was neither a charismatic state-builder, nor a common external enemy, nor a unifying national vision. There was certainly no appetite for another twenty-one years of small-scale wars. The task facing the international community in Bosnia was to help build the institutions of a highly decentralized state as foreseen in the peace agreement reached in Dayton and to do so without coercion, while helping to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and address the concerns of a huge number of displaced persons.

In terms of either refugee return or the extent of the state-building challenge, there were precious few precedents for what was being attempted in Bosnia after 1995. The UN had previously been successful in easing the transition to independence and democracy in Namibia between 1989 and 1990. In 1992, it had set up a Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), where it also assumed nominal responsibility for governing. Yet these missions were limited. There were never more than two hundred UN civil administrators on the ground as part of UNTAC, and the whole operation ended in 1993. Parallel to the international mission in Bosnia, the UN also took over—for a limited period of two years—the transitional administration of Eastern Slavonia in Croatia.53 All of these missions lasted for short periods of time. They involved neither U.S. leadership nor anything close to the resources and international ambitions in Bosnia. Initially, the assumption was that the mission in Bosnia would be similar. It would focus on specific concrete goals (withdrawing weapons, holding elections, and beginning the rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure); it would have a clear time horizon for international peacekeepers of one year. There was a civilian mission whose task it was to facilitate the efforts of local institutions, and about two thousand UN police observers without any executive powers.

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