The University Times

As the 9/11 attacks fade into the history books, America is starting to move on. A host of new problems in the past decade have refocused American political attention The financial collapse of 2008 and the recession that followed have had a more direct impact than terrorism on the lives of ordinary people. America’s fraying social cohesion has refocused the 2012 election toward political gridlock in Washington, lost jobs, insurmountable debt and catastrophic spending. At the Ames straw poll in Iowa, Republican cheers rang as Ron Paul called for the troops to come home.

America is desperate to cut its losses after a wretched decade; the costs-of-war project at Brown University puts forth a “very conservative” estimate of 137,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars have created more than 7.8m refugees in these countries, at a total cost to the United States of nearly four trillion dollars—equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010. An Osama bin Laden conducting a posthumous review of the last decade would have cause to feel satisfied. America has been successfully drawn into ‘bleeding wars’ in Muslim lands. Some 6,000 American soldiers and many of its allies’ soldiers have lost their lives in grinding wars of attrition.

Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic errors of judgement and subsequent embarrassments to the Bush and Obama administrations, but the world will worse of when an exhausted America concludes that it can never again proactively intervene and retires to domestic statecraft. It has been a truism of American foreign policy since 9/11 that, in the words of President Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, ‘we are threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’. The Obama administration has been consistently criticized for not developing a failed states policy that would allow for preventative development measures whilst limiting international involvement. Thinking on such monolithic terms is impossible- no policy could outline a set of choices of use in countries as varied as Haiti, Yemen and Somalia, facing vastly different internal problems and of varying strategic significance.

Some state failures pose a genuine threat to the West and some do not. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some 5 million people have died in horrific civil wars since the mid-1990’s. The consequence to the West has been some volatility in mineral prices. It’s hard to think of anything else. Islamist militants in definitively failed Muslim states like Somalia and Chad have thus far posed a threat mostly to their own societies, and are surely less dangerous to global security than moderately functional Pakistan or Yemen. A distinctive divide exists between states like Somalia and Afghanistan, incapable of formulating or executing a state policy, and those like Pakistan or Sudan, where exploitative state policy has precipitated a collapse of infrastructure.

The invasion of Afghanistan as a state was spectacularly misdirected as a means of fighting terrorism, whilst Iraq, defendable only tenuously as a defense of human rights, was underconsidered- the result of an American political matrix that demanded a strong response to 9/11. Addressing the ‘root causes’ of state failure and terrorism sounds like a systematic, sensible course of action, but few agree on what those causes actually are, nor is there any consensus on the best mode of treatment. Social and economic development are effective on a broad social scale but do little to address the idiosyncratic motivations of the small number of individuals who join terrorist organisations. It is often argued that failed states can be reconnected to global communities and markets, but the benefits are unlikely to accrue to citizens. The junto of generals running Burma, for instance, will make sure an expanding economy performs only to their benefit, exploiting outside help for their own purposes.

The fixity of self-destructive states can be overwhelming- it is impossible to escape domestic politics or political will. The few rays of light would seem to support military intervention- Liberia and Sierra Leone have been pulled back from the brink of utter chaos in recent years- in future, the same may be said of Cote D’Ivoire. The inference to be drawn is not that the solution to failed states is to send in the Marines, but that the use of force to topple leaders deliberately exercising self-destructive policy can bend the trajectory of failing states.
The vast majority of weak, failing and failed states endanger their own citizens and beyond that, their immediately neighbours; what happens in the poorest, most marginalised and dysfunctional places only rarely comes back to bite the developed world. Even in places that pose no meaningful threat to the West, a moral obligation to relieve suffering demands that those who can help do so. It is within the capabilities of organisations like the UN and NATO to stem flows of drugs and arms, bolster regional authorities like the African Union, and, where necessary, use military initiatives to prevent violence spilling over into neighbouring countries.

Countries exploited by their leaders need our help. Both intentionally corrupt and hapless states are settings for mass violence against their civilian population, including situations that might merit active intervention. 9/11 worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction by inducing corrosive military action and shattering America’s self-confidence, the calculus by which America interacts with other states has been torn apart. Since 2001, America has vacillated between paranoia and isolationism to contend with the threat of global terrorism, but future danger cannot be averted simply by declaring victory (or accepting defeat) and retreating behind a Great Wall of America. Afghanistan and Iraq remain catastrophic errors of foreign policy, but should not distract from the proactivism allowed by large aid and military budget. America’s greatest mistake has been to retreat into its shell following the perceived embarrassments of Afghanistan and Iraq. We retain an enduring interest in alleviating suffering, reducing poverty and nurturing legitimate representative governments. And, after all, it’s the right thing to do.