Lord Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative in Bosnia and leader of the UK's Liberal Democrat Party, shares his thoughts about how to bring peace to an increasingly unstable world.

 

I was going through Paddington station the other day and somebody came up to me and said '’Ere,' he said, 'didn’t you used to be Paddy Ashdown?' And I said 'Yes I think on balance I probably have been at some stage or another.'

Somebody came up to me the other day and said 'When are you going to stop taking on suicide missions? Leading the Liberal Democrats, and then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now parading in Northern Ireland.' And the answer is, I suppose pretty soon, but not quite yet.

I love those wonderful stories that occur when you have a mistaken identity. My favourite one is the famous one, which you may have heard, in which case forgive me, about George Brown, the then much loved Foreign Secretary, son of a railway man, rather a straightforward, frank, trade union negotiator, but loved at the Foreign Office. He had, however, two sins, neither of them wholly unknown to politicians. One was that he particularly liked a glass of whiskey from time to time, and the other was that he was particularly attracted to a pretty face.

And there's a wonderful story where the Foreign Secretary was sent down to sign the Anglo-Peruvian trade deal, after which there was a reception. He walked in and he saw an extremely beautiful woman at the other end of the room, dressed in a long crimson dress which came down to her ankles. They started to serve some drinks, so he had a glass of whisky, and then he had a second, and then he had a third. And then, to cheer him up, no doubt he may have had a fourth. And then they started to play some music, and so he went up to the beautiful woman in the long crimson dress and said, 'Can I have this dance?' And she said, 'No, for three reasons. Firstly, you are drunk. Secondly, this is the national anthem. And thirdly, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima!' 

I had a sort of similar occurrence when I arrived in Sarajevo - my first night there as High Representative, this Gilbert and Sullivan title, with powers that ought to make a Liberal blush. I had to go to a football match, and somebody asked me if I would help them present the prizes – Sarajevo railwaymen against Sarajevo town, and there was real dark local blood lust.

Anyway Sarajevo, which is sort of the toff's team in the city, won, and the local railway workers lost. And there were, shall we say, some disputed decisions by the referee.

Afterwards a splendidly brawny man from the railwaymen team came up to me; he spoke very good English, was a Croat and hadn't shaved for about half a week.  He poked me - I have to say not too gently - in the chest when I was presenting him with his prize, and said to me, 'What's the point of having you here as High Representative with all those powers if you can't give us a clean football match?'  Which is a wonderful misunderstanding about what this is about.

I think it's about time now, and I wrote this book with this in mind, to get serious for a moment, that we started to think about the post-Iraq world. We are clearly now in the end-game now in Iraq, and it's not going to end well. I have my serious doubts about Afghanistan, where I think we are not winning, and I can see the thing beginning to tip down the other side now, but that's a different issue. So I think it's time that we started to look at what the post-Iraq world will look like, and I think we can identify one or two things.

First of all, I think we will see a retrenching United States. I see we will see the United States pulling back into their own homeland. I don't say isolationism - I don't think that's possible in our interdependent world - but I certainly think we're going to find a United States which is dominated on a single force, and that's homeland defence. And we are relevant to that to the extent that we are relevant to homeland defence. 

I don't necessarily say, as some do, that we have seen the zenith, the apogee of American power. Some argue that. I think we'd be foolish to underestimate the change, the dynamic change that a woman or a black American could bring to the Whitehouse, and what America would look like in the world. But - secondly - I think undoubtedly we are moving into a much more multipolar world. We're not any longer going to be in a world dominated by a single superpower.

Thirdly, I think we're going to see an increasingly assertive Russia, filling those spaces wherever they occur. And you can see that already in Europe at the moment, and probably China as well. 

Fourthly, I think we're going to see an increasing impetus, acceleration, in the globalisation of power, the big phenomenon of our time, which is power being translated out of the systems that we have created to control it, the systems of the nation-state, and now being planted on the global stage, where it is by and large without regulation and not subject to the rule of law. 

By the way, I think that's also the challenge of our time. There is a rule that liberals know and understand, which is that where power migrates, governance must follow. And the challenge for our time, the great thing that is destabilising us, it is a very dangerous time in my view, is this advent of unconstrained global power – both malevolent, criminal, terrorism, but also benevolent, the need to bring order to the global space. I think you'll see an acceleration of that process. 

And I think we will see a considerable challenge, particularly to Europe. I think Europe is going to find itself in much, much colder territory. There are going to be very chilly winds blowing around Europe. I doubt if we will be able to rely on the United States for the security guarantee behind which we have sheltered for so long. I think an increasingly assertive Russia is going to be difficult to deal with. I think there are going to be strains in the Atlantic relationship. 

And I think that there are two things that Europe can do.  One of them is to indulge in another mindless fit of anti-Americanism, which I hope we won't do; but the other is to recognise that the right response to this world in which we're about to move actually is to deepen our European institutions, and particularly the institutions of foreign policy and defence. As a liberal passionate European, I have to confess that I have lost the intellectual argument in favour of greater European integration, but I have a strong suspicion that what we're about to find is that the next stage in the integration of Europe, particularly in relation to foreign affairs and defence, becomes a necessity rather than an intellectually recommended course for us to take. And if we don't take that, I think the world's going to be even more cold for us. 

In particular, as we also see, the other big fact of our time, which is the growth, the massive shift of power away from the nations of the Atlantic and Mediterranean shoreboard, towards the nations of the Pacific rim. 

So, to come back to the challenge of our time, which is to bring governance to the global space: if you want to have stability in what I think is an increasingly turbulent world, then you have to face up to the challenge of beginning to construct some system of global governance, of which one part is the establishment of a system of international law. We are doing that uncomfortably, untidily, sometimes inconsistently, but slowly that's what we're doing. 

And this brings me to the last of the challenges in a post-Iraq world, the one that I wrote the book to address, which is that I have a terrible fear that what the world is about to say is that after the pain of Iraq, after the pain of Afghanistan, we will never intervene again. That would be a major disaster. 

I think we are living in exceptionally turbulent times. I think any one of the challenges, the ones that I've enunciated, would cause turbulence, but I think that all added together, it seems that we have huge challenges ahead of us, and there is a hell of a lot of dry tinder lying about in the world, a great number of fire brands. And unless we are prepared to intervene, to control if we can, to suppress if it's possible, the process of small conflicts, then a larger conflict seems to me to be likely. 

One of the ways of looking at the present world, in which there are by the way 74 conflicts in place around the world, is not that the era of great wars is over and all we're going to see is small brushfire inter-ethnic cross-border and internal state wars in the future. Another way of looking at it is that these are the pre-shocks that always occur before a larger shift in the established order. 

So one of our capacities to be able to control extremely turbulent times, is to be able to intervene on behalf of international law, messy and inconsistent though it can be, where we have to; carefully, sagaciously, which is what we haven't done, in Iraq and Afghanistan arguably. To be able to prevent war, and I think prevention is essentially part of this, we spend far too little time on it. And to reconstruct states after conflict much more successfully than we have. 

The tragedy is that we think we can't do it. But that's not true. We ought not to be deluded by the pain and failure of Afghanistan, a copy-book example of how not to do this; every mistake in the book has been made in Afghanistan.

You can have different views as to whether we should have gone in. The fact of the matter is that the military campaign was an astonishing success. It's in what happened afterwards and our failure to reconstruct a nation, which is always going to be very difficult, where our failure lies. We do know how to do it, and we ought not to be distracted by the hopefully singular but maybe twin problems of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And let me just give you some figures. Actually the pace of international intervention has doubled since the end of the Cold War in 1992. International intervention is not an exception now. It's very much part of a bloodstream of diplomacy in international affairs. The pace of interventions by coalitions of the willing post-1992 has doubled from about once every decade, to about once every four years.  But the pace of UN interventions, sanctioned by the UN Security Council in the domestic jurisdiction of another state, has more than doubled, so that on average since the end of the Cold War, the UN Security Council has sanctioned an intervention in the domestic jurisdiction of another state once every six months. And about 60 to 70 per cent of those are regarded as being successful. 

Let me define success. The figure is that if you have an internal war in a country, the likelihood is that that country will return to conflict within five years, with about a 75 per cent likelihood, so a success would be preventing that country returning to conflict.

And the second criteria in my definition of success is to raise the institutions of that country, not to the level of Washington or London or Paris or Berlin, but roughly the level of the neighbouring states, the sister states, in the region. If you define that as success, then somewhere around the high 60 per cent of interventions that we have carried out have been successful, not unsuccessful as Iraq and Afghanistan would show. 

What's more is, they have contributed to a much more safe world. In fact, the number of wars in the world has halved since the end of the Cold War in 1992, as a result of that policy of intervention. And the number of war deaths, that is total deaths including of course civilians, has more than halved since 1992. 

So this is not an exception. It's part of the routine of international affairs. Secondly, it has by and large, been successful not unsuccessful, as we would believe by looking at Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirdly, it has made the world a safer place. And particularly in the period we're looking at, if we abandoned it, if we say never again, then the world would be a much more dangerous place.

So the right reaction to Iraq, and the evident failures of Iraq, is not that we should never do this again; it's rather, how can we do it properly when we do it again? And that's what the book is all about. 

By the way, it's nonsense to say we don't know how to do this. We do. Techniques are well-established. Of course, you can't rebuild the last state any more than you can re-fight the last war. You have to apply intelligence to it. But there are some basic principles, and I shall go through them in a moment.

So the purpose of the book was to say to the world - hold on, don't draw the wrong conclusions from Iraq. We need to do this, we will need to do this more, and we do know how to do it. The tragedy of Iraq in particular, and I fear to a certain extent in Afghanistan too, is the tragedy of hubris, nemesis and above all amnesia. Because that's what it would be to abandon it altogether.

If you look at, for instance, the rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War - and I go into a number of case studies in the book - you will discover that the United States were much more intelligent, much cleverer, much more sophisticated and much more successful than were the British and the French, who adopted a post-colonialist attitude in the rebuilding of Germany. 

So I said there were some lessons. Well, here they are: 

First of all, we can fight our modern digital wars now rather quickly, rather easily. By the way the safest place to be on the modern battlefield is in the Services, is in the Army. The most dangerous place to be is a civilian. Because if you're in the Army you very rarely get killed in these things; it's the civilians that get killed in our modern digital wars. You don't like that and neither do I, but it's a fact of life. 

But we can fight these wars, relatively easily, relatively quickly, in a matter of sometimes days, sometimes weeks. And there's a good reason for that. We have restructured our entire defence forces in order to give us what is called the expeditionary capacity, in order to be able to project military force. We can do it rather well.

But we fail completely in far too many cases when it comes to the period after the war. You can fight and win your war in a matter of weeks, but building the peace that follows is measured in decades. We've been at it 38 years since I first marched into Belfast as a young Marine at the end of the 1960s, and we're just reaching peace now. In Bosnia it's been going on for ten years. In Cyprus we remained on the island for, what - 25, 30? And so on. It takes time to build peace.

So, lesson number one is: spend at least as much time planning the peace, which is longer, more difficult, will require just as much, probably more resources, as you do fighting the war than precedes it. 

Secondly, if we have learned how to project military force by restructuring our Armed Services by giving them an expeditionary capacity, why don't we learn how to project influence? Why don't we learn how to project the creation of the rule of law, the creation of the rule of good governance, the creation of modern economic structures? Because we're hopeless at it. 

Thirdly, whatever you do, remember that straight after the war finishes, what the people of that country want is security. If you want to know what to do after the war ends, take a look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not at the prejudices which you might have got about exporting your own ideologies, including by the way democracy, let alone your own systems, into another country far away. Take a look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What people want is security. If you can't give them security, they will turn to somebody who can. So look at these two factors.

In Bosnia we came in with 60,000 troops for a population of three and a half a million. There was no question that we were there to be able to give people security. That was what happened, and nobody sought to counter-balance. There hasn't been a single foreign soldier or a single foreign diplomat killed in Bosnia Herzegovina. 

In Iraq, whereas Rumsfeld was right in saying that he could use light level forces to overturn Saddam's forces very quickly (Powell was wrong and Rumsfeld was right), Rumsfeld was completely wrong in believing that we could actually give the people of Iraq security after the war with such light-level forces. You actually probably need more troops on the ground, and there's a formula for how many, to build the peace than you do necessarily to win the war. And of course you massively compound that if you disband the entire Iraqi army and the entire Iraqi security forces. Then people don't have security; looting takes place; you lose the “golden hour' after the peace is established; and people turn to those who will give them security which is the local warlord, or the local militia, or the local insurgent forces. 

Priority number one, from moment number one, after the midnight hour in which peace has been established, is security. And as soon as you've established that – if necessary by military law, if you have to do so in the early hours, because you ain't got no policemen, you want to get them in as fast as you can, but you haven't got any at that stage – is to transfer that, translate that as quickly as possible into the rule of law. The rule of law is your priority number one. In Bosnia Herzegovina, I didn't make it, we didn't make it priority number one until I arrived in 2002, seven years later. 

And the rule of law doesn't just mean creating policemen, we actually did that rather well. It means the whole of the sector: it means changing the judges, getting rid of the corrupt judges, which is what we had to do; it means re-writing the criminal codes; it means of course having a proper police force; it also means a proper prosecutorial body, capable of prosecuting the cases that are going to come up; and it means that you're going to have to restructure your penal system. But without the rule of law, you can't hold safe elections, you can't build a decent economy, you can't give people what they need which is security on their streets. That's priority number two. 

Priority number three is rebuild the economy. By the way, you won't do that by bringing massive amounts of international aid in. You probably need them to rebuild the houses. But what you need to do is strip down the barriers to business, you need to liberalise the economy, you need to create circumstances in which enterprise and self-employment can grow, which is what we did in Bosnia in 2002. And by the time I left, we had the economy growing at the fastest of any of the Balkan economies, albeit from a very low base. 

And then you need to start building the institutions, and then you need to start building a clean political state. The wise, bright and clever amongst you, perhaps some of the liberals too, will have spotted that amongst that list of things I've just said, one of them isn't elections. And there's a very good reason for that. When we went into Bosnia, we actually had seven elections in six years. We had only one policy and it was elections. But without the rule of law, elections do not actually elect democracy, they elect the criminals who were in charge during the war into the process of the government. That does not give you a Western style democracy. What it gives you is a near criminally captive state, which is what it was when we arrived there. 

Actually, remember, democracy consists of more than elections. It consists of checks and balances necessary for a proper government; it consists of freedom of the press; it consists of the civil society; it consists of a broadly clean political state. Elections should come late on in the process. Sometimes they can't. Sometimes you're fighting a battle for legitimacy, which is the case in Iraq. If you're fighting against insurgents, you have to hold your elections earlier. But your elections should be held as late as decently possible, as late as you can get away with. Because until you have created the other attributes of democracy, elections will probably have the effect of anchoring into the political system the criminal forces that ran the country during the war. 

By the way, in Germany, we didn't have national elections until 1949, four years after the war ended. We had local elections before that, and the institutions of the state had been created. 

A sort of almost final point – there are two others I want to make, picking out the main issues of this – is that you probably can't rebuild a state within that state alone. You cannot solve Iraq within Iraq. There's a kind of rule of thumb that you need to involve the neighbours. Now that means you're speaking to some pretty unpleasant people: Milosevic and Tudman were not very nice people. But if we wanted to create peace in Bosnia we had to engage the neighbours. We started to get chances for peace in Northern Ireland when we understood that Dublin had a role to play. If in Iraq you seek to build peace within Iraq by building borders around it, from which you exclude the neighbours, or even worse you deliberately go about making an enemy of the neighbours, then don't be surprised if you're not going to be very successful. So that's the next point. 

The almost last point that I want to make at this stage is: please understand that this is going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time to build peace. There are two aspects to the state. And one is what I call the hardware of the state: its institutions, its police force, its army, its customs services, its judicial institutions.

But then there's the software of the state which is what goes on in here, in people's heads. You can build the institutions of a state, if you're lucky, and you have a bit of a following wind behind you, in let's say 10 years.

In the four years that I was there, we created an entire VAT system, the fastest ever brought in, let alone in a country which had such chaotic divisions. We unified the Army and put it under state control. We unified the three intelligence services, and made them subject to parliamentary scrutiny. We created a single state customs service. We unified the city of Mostar. We created a proper judiciary which was unified across the country, operating to a single code of law, and so on. You can do that, if you have the kind of power which sometimes go with this. But it's going to take a lot longer to change what goes on in here. And this is the crucial bit, in a way. It takes a lot longer to unstitch the enmities of war. 

Somebody said the other day that it took something like 250 years to unstitch the enmity of the English civil war. If you go to America today, you will still find reverberating around America, some of the left over backwashes of the civil war in the United States. You will not be able to resolve that issue in a matter of ten years. That takes a lot longer. You can build a state, but you can't build a nation, as an intervener. You have to give that time. Time is the great healer. 

Now there's a lot I've missed. But I want to end up with one thing that I knew but didn't know I knew before I wrote the book, which is what I call the concept of the seamless garment. What happens, and if you look in British terms at the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, which is a kind of little bureaucratic add-on that we've stuck on the side of the Foreign Office and DfID (Department for International Development), what happens is that we tend to always get surprised by the fact the war's ended and, whoops, we're left with a country to rebuild! 

Actually what you have to do is to think through the war into the peace phase. Actually what you have to do is to begin to treat these three phases (the prevention phase, the conflict phase and the post-conflict reconstruction phase) as a single seamless garment. What you have to do is to spend a lot more energy preventing the war from happening. 

We did it brilliantly in Macedonia, and saved arguably the worst of the Balkan tragedies. By the way, I didn't think it could be done. And I go in the book into my own personal experiences of trying to prevent the war from happening in Macedonia. I didn't believe it could be done. But the fact that we did it saved us from incalculable costs and blood later on. 

So spend a lot more time trying to prevent the war in the first place. But remember that what you do in the prevention phase will influence the war phase that follows if you have to fight it. And above all, what you do in the war phase will influence the post-conflict reconstruction phase. And what we have to do is start thinking of this not as three separate phases, but start thinking of this as a single seamless garment that you assemble. So that your policies and your messages stay the same right the way throughout the process. And it's that rethinking, with considerable consequences on what it means for the structures of our state, of the Foreign Office, of DfID, of the Home Office, which is again the subject of the book. 

Final point. Please read Rupert Smith's book called The Utility of Force, which I think incidentally is one of the most seminal books to be written on military strategy probably since the days of Liddell Hart. In fact, somebody said to me the other day that this book was a sort of twin piece for it.  He arrives at a conclusion which I have also arrived at, which is that modern warfare, and post-conflict reconstruction, is successful or fails according to whether or not you win the battle for public opinion. Rupert Smith says that the battlefield for modern warfare is the battlefield of public opinion. You cannot build a state at the point of a bend, against the will of the people. You have to bring them with you. As the intervener, you can only do what the public will allow you to do. 

I had massive powers in Bosnia Herzegovina, but I could never use them, because in the end my use of my powers depended on the consent of the people of Bosnia Herzegovina. If I'd ever done anything which was against their will, my powers would have vanished the day after tomorrow. I was accountable to them, I wasn't just accountable to the international community. And I couldn't succeed unless I could articulate a project that would carry the public with me – sometimes to carry them with me in order to overturn what some of their politicians wanted to do, who wanted to hang onto their own centres of power. And I had to be acutely sensitive to that process. And unless you understand that as an intervener, it doesn't matter how much force you have, it doesn't matter how many tanks, unless you can construct a project which has the people coming with you, you cannot succeed. 

By the way, and here I end, the Ministry of Defence does regular opinion polling in Basra. When British forces marched into Basra, they very nearly were, in Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, greeted with flowers on the streets. The population of Basra according to the opinion polls were in support of what we were seeking to do at the start of the Basra operation by some 75 per cent in favour of what British troops were trying to do.

I've seen the latest opinion polls in Basra. They're now 95 per cent in favour of the British troops getting out because they can't do anything more. You cannot win from that position. And gloomily I have to tell you, I've been watching the opinion polls in Afghanistan and already they're beginning to come over the top. 

The fact is that an army of occupation has a very short shelf-life, and unless you make use of the early stages to do the things that are necessary, to rebuild the country, to reconnect the water supply, to give the people the benefit of government, the benefit of the rule of law, you will lose their support. I remember very well as a young soldier in Belfast being greeted by the Catholics with cups of tea and sandwiches. Within a year, we had become their enemy. 

And by the way, the job of the Army in these circumstances is not, as I hear our Minister of Defence believes, to go out and kill Taleban. You do not measure your success according to whether you win the military battle. The job of the military is to hold the ring while you reconstruct inside it. If you can't manage to do that in the whole country, you do it in small areas and build out from there. 

It's absolutely crucial that you give people a stake in peace rather than a stake in war, and that means win their support. The facts that matter in Afghanistan, it doesn't matter how many Taleban you killed, it's how many water supplies you're reconnecting, how many people you're giving back security to, how many people you're giving the prospect of a job to. And that's the key element.

The battle is won or lost on the battlefield of public opinion. And if you cannot carry the people with you in the country in which you're intervening, you cannot succeed. Full stop.

This is a slightly edited version of a talk given at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues in Westminster on 12 June 2000, and transcribed by Wendy Conway Lamb.