Lecture 5 - Failed and failing states: will they keep us busy in the next 20 years as they have during the last 20 years?

Welcome back to the Institute for European Studies and Happy New Year to all of you. Happy New Year also to Jamie, we are all so happy to see you back in the last but one of your lectures here at our Institute, this time – on failed and failing states. The next one will be next week, on Thursday, and will be ob cyber crime, but today – failed and failing states. The floor is yours.

Shea: - Anthony, thanks very much and also to all of you belated but nonetheless sincere Happy New Year. I know that for most of you who stayed in Brussels over the Christmas holiday the problem was more failed transportation system than failed or failing states, but fortunately things are moving again and therefore – welcome back.

When I prepared today's lecture I was sort of struck by an inconsistency – this is lecture number 5, as Anthony said, the penultimate of the series, and yet when I think of my own personal life over the last 15 or 20 years, when I think of what NATO has been doing and when I think of the security challenges that we've been talking about in this series, it does perhaps strike me as a little bit illogical that failed and failing states should be “number five” and not “number one” because the obvious reason is that as anybody knows who has been dealing with security policy over the last 20 years, the international attention, the debate on security, the deployment of armed forces has been overwhelmingly focused on this issue of failed and failing states.

We've had, as you all know, a massive, almost an explosion, of peacekeeping and peace support, stabilization missions, not only by the United Nations, but also by NATO, by the European Union. We've had the emergence of regional organizations, such as the African Union or the Organization of West African States and, if you look around the world today, in 2010, there are at least 40 such peace support operations ongoing.

Virtually every week, the UN, as this week with Haiti, calls on the international community to provide yet more peacekeepers. In the case of Haiti – 3,500 in order to deal with state failure or a type of natural disaster, like an earthquake or a massive hurricane or a flood, which, if left undealt with, could in fact destabilize a state and lead to a failing status as well. And, of course, if you also look at the casualty statistics, although I spent some time talking about terrorism, if we look at the United States last year 14 people alone (still 14 are too many), but 14 people alone died from terrorist attacks, most in one single incident, which took place, if you recall, at an army base in Fort Hood in Texas, whereas there were 14,000 murders in the United States last year.

But failed states for the last 20 years have been producing on average 2,000 deaths a day, a day! From the various civil wars, that are often the consequences of state failure, and the vast majority of these people are, of course, civilians and, indeed, women and children. So, failed states is still the largest cause of violent deaths in the world today and that scenario is likely to be true for the foreseeable future.

What we also see is that there is direct correlation between what the Oxford economist Paul Collier calls the “bottom billion” - the one billion of humanity, of course, that live in absolute poverty and political instability and failed states. According to some recent research done by Collier and his team – 73 per cent of the poorest people on this Earth live in lands where civil wars are ongoing or have recently terminated. Seventy six per cent of the “bottom billion” live in states characterized by bad governance, 29 per cent of the “bottom billion” live in states where there are resource conflicts ongoing and 30 per cent of the “bottom billion” live in states, which have hostile or, as he calls, bad neighbors.

At the same time, what we are witnessing, and this, of course, is well documented, is a gradual shift in geopolitics from wars between states to wars within states. Between 1946 and 1959 there were on average 4 major wars a year, but only 11 minor civil conflicts a year. Then, between 1960 and 1991, -- the height of the Cold War, there were on average 17 interstate wars a year and 35 minor. Today, since 1991 the average has worked out at 5 major wars, but 27 minor conflicts. Now the good news, if you like, from this particular picture is that therefore state failure is less likely to lead to the involvement of the great powers and a general war than in previous times in history.

We don't need to worry any longer about the Sarajevo syndrome of an assassination on a street corner in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist leading to the involvement of the great powers and WWI. But, of course, for the “bottom billion” or the two billion people, indeed, about one-third of the world's population who live in failed or failing states, obviously, the news is not so good in terms of human security and the propensity to violence.

Now, this, of course, this situation has produced an agonizing question that NATO and most other international organizations, most of the Western countries have faced over the last twenty years, which is essentially “to intervene or not intervene”. A few years ago, a well-known American strategic scholar Edward Luttwak wrote an incendiary article in Foreign Affairs Magazine saying “let wars burn”. Luttwak's thesis was that we should not intervene because if we did intervene we tended a) to be the enemy. Every liberation force risks ending up as an occupation force, as you well know.

Secondly, Luttwak argued all we did was freeze the conflict rather than resolve the conflict or we prevented the winner from winning and we stopped the loser from loosing so the frustrated winner was angry with us, but the loser believed that he could fight on through a Western intervention and did not realize that he had lost and therefore was not prepared to make peace.

Therefore, Luttwak was very much arguing that “let wars burn” was the best approach because you would only have peace when you have the absolute victory of one side over another. Well, this could be an interesting academic thesis, ladies and gentlemen, but I think that all of you and particularly those of us in the bureaucratic policy-making circles would argue that this is simply not an option.

We have both moral imperatives and strategic imperatives to do our best with the resources we have not to let wars “burn” but to stop conflicts. Now, the moral reason of course, has been this shift in international law that we've seen over the last two decades, towards security of countries giving way to security of people, security of individuals, defense of populations as the focus, rather than defense of territory.

The Great British Prime Minister William Gladstone pronounced in a famous speech in 19th century that the security and the liberty of the tribeswoman in Afghanistan was as sacred in the eyes of almighty God, as yours or mine. In other words, the sense of a common humanity. In those days, in the days of Gladstone this was probably simply good political rhetoric, but today the evolution of international law has not only created a right to intervene, personalized, of course, some years ago by Bernard Kouchner – Le Droit d'Ingerence Humanitaire, as it became known in French, but indeed a duty to intervene since 2005 the United Nations General Assembly has approved the Responsibility to Protect.

In other words, state sovereignty is no longer absolute, it's conditioned all upon state's behavior. For example, not committing human rights violations, refraining from genocide, not playing host to terrorist organizations or not illicitly developing weapons of mass destruction and the United Nations Security Council, be it with some exceptions, which we will mention in a moment, has been increasingly willing of course, to mandate either the UN itself to mount those interventions or – alternatively – to give the sub-contracting role to an organization like NATO, or the African Union or the European Union and others.

The “CNN factor” has obviously contributed enormously to this phenomenon as well. The one thing that we no longer can claim is ignorance. The days when Wickham Steed, the Times correspondent in Bulgaria could witness the atrocities committed by the Ottomans and it took nine days for his article to work its way back to the Times in London, in the age of instant communication, blogs, Twitter and so on that's impossible. We know immediately. And often governments are driven as much by the pressure of public opinion – we must stop this – into intervening, as by a calculus of their own strategic interests as well.

At the same time, alongside the humanitarian motive we've increasingly become aware that failed states are not simply something that we condemn morally, but that we feel we don't need to do anything about, but we increasingly see the link with our own security. I mean, Afghanistan is a primary example: the failed state turned into a black hole, which played host to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, to terrorist training camps. It became a sanctuary where these groups were, of course, able to organize attacks, which then in a joint-up globalized world rapidly produced the results in New York or Washington or London or wherever.

And of course, today the focus now is that those groups have transformed, have taken themselves to the north-west provinces of Pakistan or alternatively are now establishing themselves in Somalia or Yemen in particular or other countries as well.

So, the sense of the humanitarian imperative to help suffering people is increasingly aligned with the strategic imperative that these interventions are kind of “forward Article 5”, if you like, to use NATO's collective defense clause, a way of dealing with the threat at source, so that one therefore does not have to suffer consequences on one's own territory.

So, as a result interventions are not easier to implement, but they are certainly easier to authorize than they would have been in the days of the Cold War when state sovereignty enshrined in Articles 2.4 or 2.7 of the UN Charter was considered to be absolute. But this has posed three particularly difficult questions.

The first one is whether to intervene. Of course, here one needs first of all mandate, as I've said, from the United Nations, most cases given, but when NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999, as all of you know, it did not have an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council, not because the majority of the UN was against NATO, far from it, but because one country in particular, which also is a veto member of the Security Council would not have given its approval.

Nevertheless, NATO intervened and all countries in NATO had to reassure Javier Solana, the Secretary General, that they had a sound legal basis. Of course, the legal basis could have been different, for some it was previous UN Resolutions, for others it was the Genocide Convention for instance, or Conventions on the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as well, or Basic Humanitarian Law. I mentioned this because it has created a debate, which I think is going to be with us for some time, which is: is something, which, maybe, from a technical point of view is illegal, or is it legitimate?

I do believe that NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was both legal and legitimate, but it does raise the question of whether international law as such is keeping up with the precedent of practice, as we go from one intervention to another? Incidentally, this is also the case with the responsibility to protect. It's a good principle, but how do we implement it? We know that the responsibility to protect applies to demonstrated genocide, but would it also apply, for example, to what happened in Burma a couple of years ago with the floods, when the Government of Burma dragged its feet in terms of allowing international aid agencies access to help those people who were displaced by flooding. It was not genocide, there was not sort of systematic persecution going on, but would the Government's refusal to accept responsibility activate the responsibility to protect?

So, “whether to intervene” I think is still going to be largely dependent upon how one determines legitimacy in these cases.

Secondly, it will also depend on factors, over which we have little control in advance. For example, like leadership, the mobilization of public opinion. I well remember a meeting with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former Secretary General, some years ago, of the United Nations in New York in 1994 where Boutros-Ghali was frankly very angry with Manfred Worner, the then NATO Secretary General, because the Allies, though not NATO at that time, but the individual Allies had about 35,000 troops in Bosnia where Boutros-Ghali was claiming that very few people were actually dying, he said - fewer than 9 a day, and they had put no troops in Angola, where according to Boutros Boutros-Ghali at that meeting, 10,000 Angolans were dying every month from the civil war that was going on.

More, he expressed frustration for not being able to find anybody to go on a peacekeeping mission to Mozambique. It was the sense of unfairness that the West was fully prepared to intervene on its doorstep, where Europeans were the victims, but was not prepared to intervene where other groups, Africans in particular, were suffering far more. Was this the case of cultural, political double standards?

Of course, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, whether to intervene is probably going to never be quite satisfactory. We will never be totally consistent, we will probably sometimes do the right thing in one place, but as in the case of Rwanda a few years ago, not then do the right thing in another, but the question would always be because we cannot intervene everywhere, does this mean that we should not intervene at least where we can?

The second question is how to intervene. Here, of course, the question is always do we intervene basically with a transformation agenda? In other words, that we are going to build Switzerlands in Afghanistan, or in Kosovo, or in Bosnia, or in Chad or wherever, that we are going to affect a root and branch political transformation, which is what the United States attempted after 2003 in Iraq? -- To leave behind a transformed state like Germany or Japan after WWII, which would then become an ally and never again an adversary.

I think, in the wake of Kosovo and Afghanistan and the difficulties, we are increasingly backing away from that very overambitious agenda, which anyway makes the mistake in believing that we can impose a Western model on cultures, or religions, or countries that fundamentally want something different and want to go their own way. But on the other hand, we also know that the quick-in-and-quick-out approach to interventions, such as that we saw in East Timor a few years ago where the Australians went in, but left very quickly, often means that the war restarts.

Academics have shown that about 50 per cent of all interventions give way to a new round of civil war within a decade. And the Australians then had to go back in to East Timor, for a second time, which they did successfully and to stay a lot longer. So, how transformative should our agenda be?

Secondly, of course, there is this whole issue of “do you intervene with very large forces”? Do you take over the state and run it, as a kind of international trusteeship, similar to what we had with the mandates of the League of Nations between the two world wars, where the international community takes all of the decisions and keeps all of the power to itself exemplified by Lord Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia a few years ago, who had “the silver bullet clause” – the absolute powers to hire and fire, or do we go in with a very small footprint, a modest force, giving the ownership to the locals, as we've done in Afghanistan, to show to the people that we are not an occupation force and to give them responsibility for their own affairs?

We've discovered that neither solution, either the big footprint or the small footprint, is totally satisfactory and then finally – when to intervene? I think the problem here, as we've discovered over the last few years, is that if we wait for a moral mandate, in other words if we wait for genocide to have taken place or massacres to have occurred, if we wait to be absolutely certain that the situation is becoming very bad and we have a moral mandate, yes, nobody questions our intentions, but it's often too late: the fighting has started, the hatred is intensified, political leaders have decided on military victories, territory has been seized, which nobody is prepared to hand back, the ethnic cleansing, as in the Balkans, cannot be reversed, you cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again, as he once was.

On the other hand, it's very difficult to convince politicians that something might go wrong in a certain country next week and they should intervene now. The UN in fact has conducted very few, very, very few preventive deployments in its history. One notable exception was in 1994 in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, but that still, as I said, is the exception rather than the rule.

So, we then have to first solve the questions – whether to intervene, how to intervene, when to intervene. Next, of course, we have to address this problem of the incessant demand for international security forces. The United Nations between 1945 and 1990 authorized only 16 peacekeeping operations, peacekeeping wasn't even thought of in the UN Charter. Since 1990, in other words since the end of the Cold War, the UN Security Council has authorized 48, and I think with Haiti last week, the figure is now 49, peacekeeping operations. The cost has escalated from about 1.5 billion dollars in 1990 to around 8 billion dollars a year that the UN now spends for peacekeeping forces.

In January 2008 there were over 100,000 UN blue helmets in the field. This is an increase of 600 per cent over the last 20 years. Indeed, if you look around, what is remarkable is that in 2007 no fewer than 117 states in the world out of a total of 192 were contributing to a peace support operation, whether under a NATO flag, or as the coalition of the willing or under the UN or EU or some other organizations and others have become involved. In the ten years of the European Security and Defense Policy the EU has launched 23 missions and since it began intervening beyond its territory in 1992, NATO has launched 15 operations and, as I mentioned, other structures have become more involved.

At the same time, the cost of these interventions particularly when done by the West, which is 4 times more expensive than the UN by the way, the costs have escalated. This week something very significant happened in the United States. The costs of the Iraq conflict and Afghanistan went above the 1 trillion dollar mark for the first time. In other words, the United States has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment and in proportionate dollar terms about half of what it spent winning the Cold War in the period from 1945 to 1989.

A few years ago Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice-President of the World Bank, brought out a book called “A Trillion Dollar War” as predicting these costs and everybody accused him of gross miscalculation. The latest figures from the Congressional Budget Office is that the US is likely to go towards 2 trillion dollars a year before these operations have effectively ended. And this year for the first time Afghanistan is now costing the United States more than Iraq. It's running at about 300 billion dollars a year. The cost of deploying one US soldier in the surge recently decided by President Obama is calculated at about anywhere between half a million and 1 million dollars per soldier per year. Therefore, the cost of the 30,000 extra troops is going to be in the region of about 30+ billion dollars.

These are incredible sums and one of the questions that I want to try to ask in a while is to what degree having to pay such enormous costs for interventions is sustainable in the long run, if we are going to stay in this business and if there are cheaper options for doing these things quicker and more efficiently on the table.

Nonetheless, what is clear is that the phenomenon of failed states is going to be with us for some time to come. The Foreign Policy Magazine, which I am sure you're all readers of, does every year an index, composes an index of failed and failing states. It monitors 177. It basically concludes that about one-third of this number (60) are failed or failing states. The top seven for the last few years have not changed too much – Somalia, no surprises, Zimbabwe, Sudan (4 million internal refugees from the conflict between North and South in the past decade), Chad, Congo (where the UN estimates about 5,4 million deaths, 5,4 million deaths since 1998!), Iraq, although one could argue that that probably is now increasingly stabilizing and notwithstanding all of the good efforts of NATO and other organizations since 2003 – Afghanistan. On the watch-list, as rapidly failing and going from failing to failed states we have Cameroon, Guinea, Yemen, which incidentally has the world's fastest growing population, but where one half of the population of 23 million lives on less than 2 dollars a day, a state, which is running out of water and which gets 90 per cent of its revenue from its oil. The problem is though that it's running out of oil as well. -- Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. In other words we have 40 to 60 chronically failed or failing states, which, as I've said earlier, represent two billion people.

Now, this, of course, brings us to the question of where these failing states are likely to be positioned. We have seen – in fact, this is interesting – since WWII a shift in the focus of world poverty away from Asia and increasingly towards Africa. Africa has 10 of the world's 20 worst performing states - ten per cent of the global population, only 1 per cent of the world trade. And this is despite the fact that in the last 20 years 0,5 trillion dollars of aid have been invested in Africa alone. We still have a situation where 3,000 of children die every day of malaria and 40 million children don't go to school. If you exclude South Africa and Nigeria from the equation, the World Bank estimates that the African economy is the equivalent of this country – Belgium. And I think that one of the things that we are going to see is an increasing focus of international peace support operations and peacekeeping over the next few years in favor towards Africa.

Now what explains therefore the phenomenon of the failed states, as in Africa today? First of all, we have, of course, demographic pressures, population pressures. World population, as you know, is currently 6 billion. It's calculated to stabilize at around 9 billion towards the end of the century. That is not in itself the significant figure. The significant figure is that there is this disproportionality between enormous growth of population in the poorest parts of the world (I’ve just mentioned Yemen) and the stagnation, of course, in the developing countries. And most, of course, of these poor people would increasingly be focused in cities. Sixty five per cent of the US population lives in cities, but their average income is 13,000 US dollars a year. If you extrapolate this to the weakest, the “bottom billion” states of the world you see that also today 65 per cent live in cities as well, but with an average income, which goes from 400 to 1000 dollars a year.

Take another statistic. Some of the countries in the bottom part, but not all, of course, because if you take Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey – combined a population was 242 million in 1950. Today, it’s 886 million and by the end of the next decade it's calculated to rise by another 475 million. In the meantime, if you take the six most developed largest countries in the world the rise is only estimated, including with immigration, to be 44 million.

So, in other words it's not the absolute population figures, which are important here, but it's the fact that demographic pressures are increasingly in the urbanized areas of the poorest countries of the world and that, of course, is fertile breeding ground for despair, extremism, terrorism and whatever else.

So, that's the first problem. The next problem, of course, is the existence of refugees and internally displaced people. The third element in failing states is ethnic grievances. Those states in Africa, like Tanzania under President Nyerere, that have made a major effort over the years to create a national identity and national language, have been much more stable even with fewer resources and lower poverty levels than those states with very large resources, but which have had far greater social inequalities.

I recommend all of you who are interested in a study here to read a Michela Wrong's book, which is called “It's Our Turn to Eat” where she basically sees the economic problem as one group wanting to capture power in order to have access to all of the economic resources, including through graft and corruption that the rival group has had in the past access to – in other words “it's our turn to control the resources, it's our turn to eat” and governments, of course, quite openly push all of the resources to that particular group, which is their group and which has voted them into power. So, that too, I think, is an explanation of what has happened.

Economic grievances are rivalries as to who controls the resources. We have uneven development, of course, we have the state as deligitimized, as not being able to provide essential services, it's calculated that an average Kenyan pays 16 bribes every year and you may have seen even this week coming out of Afghanistan an incredible report, which is that one quarter of the Afghan GDP, 2,3 billion dollars a year, goes in bribes and an average Afghan pays 9 bribes every single year. So, the inability of the state to deliver basic services, corruption and then, of course, finally the consequences of an outside intervention as well.

Now, governance, of course, is therefore key to success. Between 1960 and 1992 it's calculated that 60 per cent of Africa's rulers left office early, and often not through democratic means. So, establishing proper governance is the key and that doesn't mean just having elections. In fact, Paul Collier, to quote him again, the very famous economist from Oxford, calculated that the elections in the absence of the rule of law, for instance, or in the absence of anti-corruption can actually harm a state's ability to function and deliver rather than help.

We have, of course, the effects of climate, but then again, Asia too has hot climates, but it still has been able to develop. We have, of course, issues, like colonial inheritance. That's true. Many economists argue that Africa, for instance, has too many countries because state effectiveness is easier in large countries, rather than small countries, but that, of course, is the consequence of colonial inheritance. We have, of course, resource greed and rivalries. Congo has particularly suffered from this when 11 other African countries have been dragged into Congo's conflict since the year 2000 and 85 per cent of Congo's diamonds have been exported illegally and illicitly by many of those other countries as well.

It was said in the United States, you remember some years ago, when Bill Clinton was on his first election campaign: “It's the economy stupid”. And that applies to failed states as well and I will speak about this in a minute. We often speak about peacekeeping, we speak about the development of a civil society, we speak about organizing elections, for example, education – yes, but the key factor in determining state failure or state rehabilitation is the ability to establish a proper functioning economy. This is why – I come to my next point – there is no fatality about failed states. There is often a sense of hopelessness that the state, once failed, cannot be rescued, that poverty is, if you like, an endemic condition and has to be accepted.

But Asia was as poor as Africa in 1950 after WWII. In 1940 Argentina was richer than Italy. Or think of Ireland, which in the 60's had a GDP, which was only about 40 per cent of the EU average. Today, notwithstanding the financial crisis, the GDP of Ireland is 140 per cent of the EU average. I am not, of course, trying to pretend for one minute, ladies and gentlemen, that Ireland is an equivalent to a poor African country at the moment, but I think the example of East Asia where 30 million people have been brought out of poverty in the last 20 years as a result of globalization does show that even countries, which do not have natural resources, can still grow at remarkable rates.

For example, absolute poverty in East Asia dropped in the last 25 years from 58 to 15 per cent, according to the World Bank, in South Asia form 52 to 31 per cent, in Latin America – by 10 per cent, but in Africa absolute poverty increased by 50 per cent. That can't just be explained by malaria, or climate or the absence of the air conditioning that allowed Southern states of the United States to start taking off 20 years ago economically. Yes, geography, climate, resource levels are important, but they in themselves do not determine whether states are destined to succeed or fail.

So, I think we have to look at the experience of Asia to realize that it is in fact possible to rescue definitively failed states. It's very much a matter of leadership, it's very much a question, as Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize Economist has pointed, out of moving from aid to economics of anti-corruption, of opening markets, of welcoming direct foreign investment, of the rule of law of this kind of things. Even in Africa you have states, which have similar geographical circumstances to others. One thing is Botswana, for example, but which have still quite remarkable success stories in achieving growth levels.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if there is a problem of failed states that is going to be with us for a long time to come and if there is a security interest, if there is also an optimistic scenario that putting these countries back on their feet with the right leadership is in fact achievable then what lessons can we draw from our interventions in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and elsewhere over the last few years?

Well, I would say that the first thing is that peacekeeping can in fact work. I mentioned that 40 per cent that lapse back into violence, but this does mean that 60 per cent don't lapse back into violence. Economists have calculated that, indeed, if peacekeeping is done in the right way for every one dollar spent on peacekeeping 4 dollars worth for growth and development accrue to the state in question. In other words, it does make economic sense. So, therefore what have we learned about how we can do this better?

I think lesson number one is that we have to have do a better job of intelligence and warning. Paddy Ashdown, I mentioned him earlier, has written a very interesting book called “Swords into Ploughshares”. He looks at 14 instances of failing states and he shows, I think convincingly, that in only two – Croatia in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001 – it was impossible to predict that the state was going to fail. In every other case, 12 out of the 14 there were lots of warning signs along the way that we could have acted upon. And therefore improving not simply our sort of classic intelligence, but improving our assessment, our early warning, our knowledge -- I think it's going to be key.

Let's say, the case of Yemen when Yemen became just over a couple of weeks suddenly the focus of all of the international attention, it was revealed that the State Department had only 2 or 3 people who knew anything about Yemen, whereas Dick Holbrooke who, as you know, is currently the Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has 30+ people alone just working for him on his staff. Although that is the United States, the situation is undoubtedly the same in many other capitals. We finished the Cold War with 99 per cent of all of our intelligence services and our analysts focusing on the Communist world, on the Soviet Union. We had lots and lots of Russian-speakers, but almost nobody who spoke Arabic.

I remember very well after the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11 that the United States wanted to go on Al-Jazeera and explain its view, they had nobody who could speak Arabic well enough to appear on TV. They had to recall a retired Ambassador back to service to do those things. And this is the country, which has American Somalis, American Yemenis, American Saudis and has a very diverse population that could contribute to that type of analysis.

So we have to do a much, much better job of knowing about these places and figuring out what's going to happen. We've even had in NATO an interesting case in the last few weeks where the Assistant Director of Intelligence in NATO has written a paper pointing out that we use our intelligence sources to look at what the Taliban are doing, whereas for our peacekeepers it is much more important to know what the local population thinks of you and what they want and what their aspirations are and there is almost a complete blank, because we do not devote resources to that.

So, lesson number one – we need to anticipate better. Lesson number two – we need to use diplomacy more. If the military go in, it's a failure of anticipation; it's a failure of prevention. It's also increasingly expensive. I said earlier, will we have the money to do expensive after-the-crisis interventions in future? Not everywhere. It's key. And therefore we have to have diplomats, senior representatives of the UN, going in, trying to negotiate solutions trying to avoid a crisis. For example, the role that Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the UN played in averting a disaster in Kenya, after the stand-off between the Kikuyus and the Luo in the wake of the recent elections could have avoided or probably avoided a very major clash with massive bloodshed, the role of the UN in brokering a peace agreement between the Northern and Southern halves of Sudan, although that's now quite fragile, is another example as well.

We cannot, I think, ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century be in the position that we were at the end of the 20th century where, for example, the United States was spending nearly 0,5 trillion dollars a year on its military, military (!) budget and only 8 billion dollars a year on the State Department running all the embassies in the world. The balance between political diplomacy and the military has to be a much more even one.

The third thing I think we've learned is that nothing works without security first. If you are unable to create an effective security environment, then don't expect to see any development happening very quickly. Now, what are the lessons that we've learned here? Well, I think the first lesson that we've learned is that we have to use the “golden hour” better. The golden hour is the honeymoon period – when you first enter a country where you're seen as the liberator, naturally, where your enemy is now defeated and hasn't yet reorganized, or re-grouped or re-equipped to oppose you, you have support of the population, you have good will, people have expectations of what you're going to bring them. It's very important to use this period productively before disillusionment sets in.

Now, what does this mean? I think it means in the Alliance we are going to have to have a major debate about how we can increase our military assets for these tasks. In my country, the United Kingdom, this week we've seen a very interesting debate between, on the one hand, General Sir David Richards, the Head of the British Army, who is arguing that the lesson of Afghanistan is we need to buy fewer nuclear submarines, fewer Tornado or Typhoon Eurofighter jets or joint strike fighters, fewer tanks, fewer aircraft carriers and we need to put far more resources into educating our soldiers in order to deal with multicultural environments. We have to put more resources into drones for intelligence collection, to put more resources into helicopters to move around, we have to put more resources into strategic aircraft, logistics and this kind of things. He argues that for the price of one joint strike fighter you can operate several more infantry battalions every year in a place, such as Afghanistan. And he is, no doubt, right.

On the other hand of the equation though we have Admiral sir Mark Stanhope, also a former NATO Commander, who is the head of the fleet, who is arguing: “Well, you know, we should not put all of our eggs in one basket. Afghanistan may not be the paradigm to come, we may have great power war once again in the future and therefore we should make sure that we continue to invest in heavy war-fighting capability, such as ships or tanks or aircraft or aircraft carriers. The problem is that with the talk in the UK about 20 per cent budget cut, rightly or wrongly, with many other NATO countries cutting their budgets in the wake of the financial crisis, it's going to be increasingly difficult to do everything. We don't want to be a “Jack of all trades, but master of none”, but clearly when it comes to security making the right decisions as to where we invest in our military capabilities is going to be absolutely key, if we are going to be able to generate the forces we need to apply effective security.

You've all heard the stories from Afghanistan about deficiencies in the number of helicopters, troops without body armor, under-resourced units, which are not able to operate at night or old aircraft blowing up in the sky because they are 40 years old and haven't been replaced and the like. I think if we send our troops on these missions we owe it to them to provide the best equipment that we can.

The next thing, I think that we've learned, ladies and gentlemen, from these failed states interventions is that we need a better comprehensive approach. The military are frequently being left doing civilian tasks, for which they are ill suited. The military security has not been backed up by development, by investment. We haven't had, if you like, at the beginning the joint planning between the civilians and the military so that they can coordinate their efforts in a more effective way. We've tended, naturally, to focus on winning the war and far less planning has gone into what do we do afterwards, but finding out that this is often the tricky and the more difficult phase: winning wars has become comparatively easy. So we need a better comprehensive approach.

The next thing is that, clearly, and I think this is going to be one of the big developments in security – we need more civilian capabilities. You can't win these conflicts with the military alone. And yet, it's easy to find soldiers to deploy, as the EU has found and others, it is very difficult to deploy civilians. They can be even more expensive than the military. We, in the UK, for instance, we have a list of civilian elements – judges, teachers, policemen and so on. The trouble is that 80 per cent of them do not work for the government and therefore they cannot be mobilized, like the military. They could say: “Thank you, but I don't want to go. My wife's having a baby next week, it's not a convenient time” or “I'd rather go there than there”.

A lot of effort now in the United States and in the UK is going into what can we do to create in the military (in the army) the civilian equivalent, if you like, of military forces, deployable police units. For example, in the British police should we have a career structure, which is not to be on the beat in London, but to be deployed as police on training missions? In our civil service, should we not put into people's contracts “you may be deployed to Kandahar or Helmand or to a Provincial Reconstruction Team as a normal part of your career.”? Should we not have a kind of equivalent of the territorial army or the national guard of civilian reservists, who like in in the United States get a second pay packet, but accept to be deployed because they have civilian skills, like running elections or fixing highways or running nuclear power stations or whatever it is. I think this is going to be a significant growth area, because here we are deficient.

I think we need to sort out also aid and development. It's quite clear that we spend large amount of money, but we don't get the development that we expect for that investment. Kai Eide, the UN Envoy in Afghanistan in a speech in Kabul this week said interestingly that there were 18,000 aid projects ongoing in Afghanistan today, of which 15,000 involved less than 100,000 dollars. In other words, they weren't having a strategic impact – they're too small. They have quick reaction, they make governments feel good when you see in television “Look at this road, which my country has built with its development agency!” It's a good photo opportunity, but does that road lead anywhere? Does any trade go along that road? Often, no. So, we need to look far more at how we use the aid in larger projects, infrastructure projects, economic projects, but which are part of a long-term development strategy.

We need also to develop a bigger regional approach. It's very difficult to stabilize a place, like Afghanistan, if you do not have the involvement of the neighbors in a constructive way. We were only successful in the Balkans when we persuaded the Croats and the Serbs to cooperate to stabilize, for example, Bosnia. And therefore we need to pay more attention to establish regional groupings and to get the neighbors involved in a constructive rather than negative way. And then, finally, we have to have a realistic plan and a realistic end state. It's not just what do our capabilities allow us to achieve, but what is the kind of end state that we can achieve, which is consistent with a) what the population of this country wants and b) which is consistent with our own strategic aims. It would help, by the way, if we have just one end state instead of what we often have, which is a whole variety of different explanations or motivations for being there, which seem to change all the time.

Finally, we need to build a better institutional structure to manage these interventions in the future. I've said, the UN will be the first responder. It has the most legitimacy, it has the most experience, it does the nation-building, as well as the peacekeeping. It's cheaper than NATO and the EU by far. And it often, let's face it, goes to places where many of the Western countries do not want to go, as Dag Hammarskjold, one of the great Secretary Generals of the UN once said: “The purpose of the United Nations is not to take man to heaven, but to save him from hell”. That's true, but the UN needs help. It needs help with funding, it needs help with training, it needs help with transportation, it needs help with equipment.

The hybrid, as you've seen in Chad or Zaire, or as you see with UK in Sierra Leone a few years ago, the hybrid where Western forces helped the UN peacekeepers with various functions, I think is increasingly going to be the way ahead in the future. We need also much better planning among these organizations, including starting at home – between NATO and the European Union. If we actually have a plan in advance, it helps.

I often consider that sometimes these interventions are handled rather like a holiday in Spain before the Internet. You're too young to remember holidays in Spain before the Internet, but basically what happened is that you booked your holiday, you arrived in the middle of the night to discover that all the cars had gone from the car hire or it was closed, you had to wait for a bus to take you to your hotel, you discovered that the hotel wasn't finished and you had to go miles away to another hotel, you then discovered that the beach was miles away and when you got there people have already put their towels and deckchairs. In other words, you spent 90 per cent of your holiday organizing your holiday. And when you are just about got yourself organized, it's time to come home.

Now, with the Internet, that problem doesn't exist any longer! You go on the Internet, you book your flight, you have the photo of the hotel, you book your room, you book your beach pass, you hire a car, you arrive – ready to go. Everything has been integrated from the outset. This is what we need to do with interventions. We need less improvisation after we've arrived, more knowledge in advance of what the tasks are, who is going to contribute what and the ability to work together.

So, ladies and gentlemen, in summary – what are the golden rules for being successful in intervening in failed or failing states? Number one. Avoid the conflict if you can, so it's going to be cheaper that way, but if you can't avoid the conflict then remember that it's not over when the fighting is finished – that's when the interesting part begins. Therefore, spend as much time planning the peace, as you do in preparing for the war or the conflict that precedes it.

Make sure your plan is based on proper knowledge of the country itself, know what you're getting into. Don't do what Napoleon used to do when he said “on s'engage et puis...on voit ” – you jump in and them you find out. Sorry, Napoleon was a brilliant general, he could afford that luxury, we are not so brilliant, we need to know in advance.

Don't try to fashion the country in your own image. It's about what they want, not about what you want. Leave your prejudices at home. Don' lose the “golden hour”, that honeymoon period when you have the population on your side. Peacekeeping is the same as love-making: first impressions count. You have a very short life span before you go from an army of liberation to an army of occupation. So, use the “golden hour”.

Dominate the security space from the start, because if you don't provide security, you don't allow NGOs or the civilian reconstruction agencies to operate and the public become disillusioned when the benefits of peace don't arrive. Then, and I think this is true, don't worry so much about organizing elections. Yes, you want democracy. It's statistically proven that democracies have higher growth rates than autocratic states. Democracy is not just good, it's also more efficient, but sometimes it's better to get the economy moving and have the rule of law first before you have elections than to simply have an election where warlords come back in or the winner takes all, or one ethnic group, you know, sort of gets its revenge on the other ethnic group, simply takes away resources. So, yes, you want elections, but you don't have to have them the day after you intervene. So, be sensitive to local traditions and customs, speak with the same voice, coordinate your effort and, of course, you know, do not overstay your welcome. Your role is to create a sustaining peace, not a model society and as soon as the peace is sustainable – leave and let the locals determine their own future.

Those are not my conclusions, I have to say. Those are the conclusions of Paddy Ashdown, Lord Paddy Ashdown, from his experience of the Balkans and he certainly would have applied them to Afghanistan had he gone to Afghanistan as the UN Representative, but I can think of no better series of laws and lessons, which I think are universally applicable to the extent that we will continue to be involved in failed and failing states.

Thank you very much.

Q: - I've got a question. Thank you for your speech, it was great. I was wondering are we considering, as long as the state is stable, that it's not a failing state and we do not need to go into it? Is that what I've understood correctly from your speech?

Shea: - Yeah, absolutely. There are, of course, a number of states, whose foreign policy we disagree with, but that, of course is not a reason to intervene. We have to deal with those problems, for example, Iran's nuclear program, or North Korea's nuclear program or whatever, we have to deal with those issues through other means, for example, reference to the UN Security Council that in the case of Iran at the moment plans to sort of tighten up sanctions, particularly against the members of the regime and so on and so forth. There are other methods to deal with that and, of course, we all know that unless you can form a viable coalition of partners who support you, those sanctions or those pressures are not likely to be effective. As far as failed or failing states are concerned, and interventions, we are dealing with the situation where it is clear that a government is committing mass human rights violations against its own people or the government is incapable, because it has collapsed, of dealing with those massive violations against its people – where not to intervene is likely precipitate into a much greater humanitarian crisis, for instance, or where the overspill of refugees could destabilize another country. For example, Kosovo in 1999 I remember very well that one of the worries of NATO was that all of the, literally millions, of Albanians, Kosovar Albanians coming out of the country would totally destabilize the neighboring country, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or Albania and therefore we will have a wider crisis in the Balkans.

Now, your question though is a good one, because it has to be said that this “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which was agreed by the UN, is not universally supported as the least that can be said. There are many countries that still believe this is a violation of sovereignty and that there are no circumstances, in which sovereignty can be justifiably violated, it remains absolute. So they agreed, if you like, with the principle, but not to the specific implementation. We saw with Burma, for example, and others where members of the Security Council have literally said “no” to any international plan to intervene. So, I think one of the key tasks, and I mentioned earlier this problem of legal versus legitimate. I think one of the key tasks for the international community in the years ahead is going to take this sort of this theory of the “responsibility to protect” and try to figure out a kind of a guidebook, a manual for where you apply and where you don't, in which situations you intervene.

Gareth Evans, by the way, you remember the former Australian Prime Minister who was here in Brussels for many years as the Chairman of the International Crisis Group . He was all clear, he has written a very good book called “The Responsibility to Protect” that one of the problems is that we gave many countries the impression that interventions are only military, only military. And I sense that one of the tasks and I've spoken I have to say today, yes, essentially about military interventions, but I think in all fairness I have to stress that one of the ways, in which we will have the responsibility to protect accepted by non-Western countries will be by showing that it can be done by other means – economic means, sending civilian envoys, you know, asking a country like Burma to accept that it has to receive a UN envoy – they refused to receive the UN envoy, for instance, who came to mediate; because one of the problems we do have at the moment – I think this question is a good one – is that we convey the impression – that it's “all or nothing”, a massive military Iraq-style force coming in or nothing at all and we have to try to use other means as well.

…Sir, yes, at the back.

Q: - Thank you very much for this lecture. My question relates to NATO and the new Strategic Concept that is ongoing. Regarding interventions and the Comprehensive Approach that more and more people are talking about, what would you see or foresee as being the future role of NATO?

Shea: - The first thing I would say is that we've got to make it clear in the Strategic Concept to our publics that interventions are not going to stop with Afghanistan. At the moment, as you know, there is a great deal of weariness with Afghanistan – let's be frank, everybody knows that. There is the sense that the Balkans was comparatively easy in the 90's. The problem for NATO was to decide to use its military capabilities. Once we used the military capabilities, couple of days later – Dayton in Bosnia, in Kosovo a couple of days later war was over and then we had peacekeeping where, as you know, in the Balkans we rotated about 1 million NATO soldiers in 1990's – not one was killed. Not one person killed. The danger in the Balkans was jogging or traffic accidents, not hostile fire, in the 90's there was a sense: “this was the war without tears”. It was easy, technology on our side allowed easy victories, the population was happy to see us, pain painless.

Now, of course, with Afghanistan, I hardly need to tell you – it's all very different. Last year we had nearly 600 casualties – deaths in the NATO forces, that's 40 per cent up on the year before and you see every day we have casualties and the costs, I mentioned – uppermost. And therefore there is in some circles the sense: “OK, we can’t leave Afghanistan, we are in, we've got to finish the job, it would be a damage to NATO's credibility to leave. But once we finish Afghanistan, then – no more interventions. You know there is this famous WWII movie called “A Bridge Too Far” and many people think: Afghanistan – that's a war too far. Let's stop. And you have people in the security circles, who say: let's have a different tactic. Let's pull up the drawbridge; in other words – let's spend all this money that we are spending on Afghanistan on border security, you know, on having databases of potential terrorist suspects, stopping them from coming into our countries. Let's give all the money to the intelligence services, to the police, so it's like football, you know, where you've got a team which is trying to attack the other goal or “no, no, let's just defend our goal”. That's it.

I personally think that one of the things we must do in the Strategic Concept is to get the message out. Look, Afghanistan is difficult, but the lesson is not to stop doing these missions. The lesson is to learn to do them better through some of the things that I mentioned in my lecture – we've got to be more effective. We've got to have, as I say, better joint planning, better Comprehensive Approach, more civilian assets, more realistic plan – all of those kinds of things, because if you look around the world and the prevalence of failed or failing states it's clear that Afghanistan will not be the last intervention, there are going to be many, many others. And so, to my mind, that is a political objective to first get the message out that there will be other “Afghanistans”, this is the paradigm for the 21st century that these extremist organizations would exploit these situations, as failed states.

We also have an impact of climate change, droughts, freak weather conditions, population movements, like Haiti, hurricanes where these states clearly are going to need some international intervention to assist and so this, to my mind, despite all the emphasis on terrorism, or energy security or climate change - the things that we were talking about in previous lectures – failed states, to my mind, will remain the dominant paradigm, the dominant issue, the dominant problem and so that's the answer - we have to learn to do it better and therefore obviously try to do our best to make Afghanistan, and for NATO, on a positive note so that our public opinion would be more ready for countenance other “Afghanistans” in the future rather than believe that we can sort of protect ourselves, like isolationists “pulling up the drawbridge”, because I don't think we can.

We've seen in the United States that with all of the massive spending on intelligence, with all of the lists of suspects even with lots of warnings terrorists still find the way of getting through our armor. And therefore, to, sort of, deal with the problem at source is still, to my mind, the best security policy.

Q: - First of all, thank you, Mr. Shea, for the lecture today. My question to you would be - do you believe for Afghanistan we need a refurbished strategy, redefined mission, purpose and value so that we can more effectively approach Governments in Berlin, London or elsewhere and can stimulate more cooperation and input to Afghanistan?

Shea: - I think the strategy from the beginning has been the right one. The problem has been the lack of resources. Often what happens is that when there is the lack of resources, people think that it is the strategy that needs to be revised, but you spend a lot of time revising your strategy, you come out with exactly the same objectives, as you had before, because they are fairly self-evident: you need to build Afghan Security Forces, you need to build an effective government structure in a country, like Afghanistan, with different very strong local traditions, and different groups, tribal groups, ethnic groups you need a higher degree of centralization, you need cooperative neighbors, I mean, this is not rocket science, frankly.

You know it's like me. I know I have to lose weight, it's obvious the questions is not do I come up with a new strategy, but do I have the willpower to stop eating and take exercise and I think it's really been a questions of trying to do it on the cheap, under-resourcing. You know when NATO came in 2003 we went in with 3,000 troops, essentially to Kabul, we left large amounts of the country without any international presence for many years.

We underestimated the strength of the Taliban – because they disappeared we believed that that meant they were defeated, but disappearing doesn't mean that you're defeated and you've got a way, as we are now discovering. We were too slow, probably in engaging Pakistan and many of the regional neighbors.

We were too late in starting the training program for the Afghan National Army, for the Afghan National Police. We gave ownership to the Afghans, yes, but perhaps without sufficient monitoring of what they were doing to make sure that they were actually capable of running economic programs, delivering aid, that they were fighting narcotics or corruption and the rest. So, to some degree we're doing now things that, to my mind, we could have been doing, we should have been doing from the outset in 2003.

We largely sacrificed that famous “golden hour”, of which I was speaking. But you know, better late than never, better late than never. I think that the military situation will be much better because you can do a lot in terms of presence with 30,000 troops, but I think the key thing is obviously going to be the mobilization of the civilian resources. We have one single command structure on the military side, but not a single structure on the civilian side where there are different players and different actors. There is a conference in London next week and I think the key thing there is going to be to actually rationalize the civilian side and have one person who is responsible for the coordination. I generally believe that these missions were best when one person is a supremo who is in charge, everybody answers to that person. He or she sets the priorities, brings the various actors together every day behind a common strategy, a common message, and is, if you like, the focal point in dealing with the local government. We haven't had that and President Karzai quite rightly often complains that every day he has 30 different international envoys all giving him a different message, that there are 14 different programs in Kabul dealing with reform of the judiciary and so on. This is a very, very fragmented effort indeed. We need to bring that together.

I think the third aspect of doing a better job is to make sure that now that President Karzai has been re-elected that he really does deliver on his promises, not just good speeches, but there is real delivery on promises in terms of appointing good ministers, fighting corruption - all of these things, much tougher conditionality, if you like, on the Afghans themselves.

So, I sense that we have the right answers, but we just have to be better organized in delivering what we promised the Afghan people that we were going to deliver to them.

Just one thing – an opinion poll shows that despite all our mistakes, and they are many, and despite the frustration of the Afghan people – an opinion poll last week showed that 80 per cent still want ISAF to stay, still support the West. Only 2 per cent want the Taliban to come back. So, it's like Churchill on democracy: “the worst of all systems, except for all the others”.

Thank you very much.