Lakhdar Brahimi Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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When we talk about failed states and failing states, we focus a lot on the situation on the ground, which is justified, but what you're suggesting is a failure on the part of the international community to get its act together, to decide, "We want to do this, we want to do it now." When they decide to do it, there has to be an openness, because wherever it is, it's a new situation, and you don't know everything, as you've just said.
Yes. I think a failed state is the responsibility of the people who have made that state fail, and those are generally the people of that country. They cannot escape their own responsibility. But when you decide that this needs fixing, that you, the international community, feel a responsibility to help, then you should go ahead and do it. You should do what it takes to do it. But very often we don't. It's always too little, too late.
In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars. At the end of the day, not only had we 800,000 innocent people killed but we spent probably five hundred or six hundred million dollars just to clean the mess. That we might have prevented if we had done the right thing at the right time.
The processes that are at work in the aftermath of a conflict are multi-track, and one of the key problems becomes coordinating and raising the money to get outside resources to ensure basic security, the police function to establish security, the whole question of reconstruction and creating a process where people feel that justice has been done, and so on. One gets the sense that there is great difficulty in coordinating these things and that what we seem to have confronted, in Iraq especially, is a situation where the military technology that enabled the winning of the war, whether justified or not, does not create the conditions, or does not necessarily involve the planning for all that must come afterward in terms of stabilization.
So, the metaphor, as I'm listening and thinking on my feet here, as you describe your own process, is it's almost as if one finds a tumor, one removes it, but then one has to work on the body to heal the wound, to seal the place where the surgery [cut]. Help us a little to understand that, because it's a very complex process that someone like you, as a negotiator on the ground, really has no control over.
Iraq is a different situation, really. Iraq is a country that has been invaded. It's not a failing state that you want to help. It's a country that was functioning good or bad, with a horrible dictator, but you have invaded. So, it's a different situation.
But you are absolutely right that when the international community decides to help in a meaningful manner a country like Afghanistan, then coordination between the various actors that are involved in these processes is very, very difficult indeed. Some of those difficulties are objective, are unavoidable. I think quite a few are avoidable.
One of the things that I am talking about more and more is the excess of international personnel that descends literally on a country in situations like this -- we, the UN, to start with. There very often are too many of us. And then the NGOs, the international NGOs, every single NGO will rush because there is money to be had. If we could find a way of controlling that, then we will diminish the pressure and the difficulties on coordination. It is generally accepted that the United Nations is the party that is qualified to ensure or attempt that coordination. Everybody pays lip service to that role of the United Nations, but you know, neither the NGOs nor the bilaterals pay real attention to this. I think we are getting better, and in Afghanistan it worked, I am told, reasonably well; and definitely, the role of the United Nations as the chief coordinator was certainly accepted there.
You raise an interesting point, this last point, because one can assume that many of these people who want to come in and help, whether through organizations or individually, are well motivated.
Absolutely.
But there is the corrupting element of power, even as one tries to do good.
Yes. You see, there is first what you might call the pride of the flag. "Yes, I am interested in helping Afghanistan but I would like my flag to be seen." So, if you [say], "Why don't you join a group under the UN flag?" that's a little bit difficult to accept. No. That's where egoism will play.
But there is a little bit more than that. There is this scramble for resources. You see, the donors are the same. The people who give to UNICEF are the people who give to the small NGO from the United States, or France, or Britain. So, you'll want to go and get your share. Whether it's the tsunami, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, if you are there, you have a better chance of having a piece of the cake. That is, at least for me, a little bit difficult to accept.
I guess the problem becomes aggravated when it's a state that has an ideology that says, "We will transform this part of the world in our own image and in our own definition of what freedom is, what democracy is."
Yes. You know, that is all right. After all, if you think that your system is very good, there is nothing wrong with telling people, "Look, it's working with me. Why don't you think of trying it? Maybe it will work with you as well." That's not the problem. The problem is when you go somewhere and say, "Look, you are stupid. You've destroyed your country. Now move aside. We are going to do it for you." That's not only unacceptable, it doesn't work. It won't work. Unless the people do it for themselves, unless the people are themselves satisfied that this is what is good for them, it won't take root.
Somebody was asking me the other day -- President Bush is now talking about freedom for the Arab world. I say, well, that's great. I was talking about that fifty years ago. So, if President Bush is talking about it now, that's really good, that's most welcome. I'm sure he doesn't think that we never heard of freedom in the Arab world. We did hear about it. And we even tried to do something about it in one state or another.
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