Failed States

The modern state is based on territorial integrity. Here's the cartoon version: we divide the world into regions with clear borders, each region with a government. The government of a region are the only ones allowed to use force in that region. If the government of a region uses force on another region, that's called a war.

But what if a government can't control its territory? What if the people of a region use force on another, without the permission of the government? This describes much of the conflict in the world today. Huge swaths of the world are failed states, areas where no government has control.

Think about what that means for a moment. Civilization as we live it is only possible because life is made predictable. The government guarantees my security, unless you do certain pre-defined things. That allows me to gather wealth without worry about it being stolen by someone with more guns than I have. That in turn allows me to have leisure time, lets me invest, get an education, and not spend every waking moment worrying about bandits taking everything I have and killing me. Removal of chaos improves quality of life. Failed states lack that guarantee.

Further, what if a group in a failed state wants to attack another state? Terrorists, militias, drug cartels, such entities threaten other states. But the usual means of handling such situations don't apply. If you don't like what the Taliban is doing (and who does?), negotiating with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is pointless. They don't control the relevant territory. Similarly, the Palestinian government may not be able to prevent all Palestinians from attacking Israel, and the Mexican government clearly can not shut down the cartels shipping drugs into the United States.

The concept of failed states is one of the great geopolitical problems of this century. Their very existence challenges all the rules we've put in place to deal with states. But how do you change it? If other armed groups can challenge the local government, how can this be resolved? Someone has to end up the biggest fish the pond again. Either the borders are redrawn, or one side defeats the other and takes the whole state. The former is usually the kind of civil war that ends up in tens of thousands of deaths, and the latter rarely ends in functioning democracy. Dictatorship may be stable in the short term, but in the long term you can't deprive a populace of what they want forever. Trying leads right back to violence. So unless your state lucks out and gets a particularly enlightened dictator who can successfully transition to democracy, you end up with a succession of dictators and civil wars. (See the above map.)

Surely there must be a better option.

For a region to be successful, security of the people in that region must be guaranteed in a predictable fashion. That guarantee can only be made by a stable power with definite rules, and sufficient force to take on all potential adversaries. In short, an area needs rules and force. Either can be developed internally or externally. Failed states, by definition, can not control their territory with internal force.

What about external force? Well, if an external force enters your country and starts enforcing its own rules, we typically call that an invasion and colonization by an empire. Frowned upon these days. But what if an external force enters a country and starts enforcing local rules? What if you've got (at least by historical standards) a quasi-benevolent empire? That would be state-building. We've seen this happen in a number of cases, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's a dismal failure, but it can work.

So take the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany after the second World War, probably our most successful endeavor. I suggest the world should use that example as a base for a long-term project to restore civilization to these chaos regions, one small sliver at a time. It may take centuries, but it may be the only way to build up a failed state into a successful one that can stand on its own. Someone comes in, kicks out all the armed gangs from one city or small region, and secures the area long enough for economy and infrastructure to be put in place.

So how would this happen? If there's enough government to ask, we can go by invitation. ("Hey, we'd like to come spend a hundred billion dollars fixing your country for the next three generations. Good by you?") But if there's no government to negotiate with, it has to be by external consensus. The UN would have to agree that a region would benefit from (mostly) peaceful intervention, and there would need to be evidence that the local populace would respond positively. Only then would intervention be considered.

But who provides the force? There are two prongs to this, after all. You send in construction workers and educators and bureaucrats and whoever else it takes to train a populace to modernize. But you also have to send military force, because security was the original concern. That force could operate under the UN, but they don't have much of an army. The actual force is most likely provided by nearby neighbors able to spare the materiel. This runs into problems with areas the size of Africa, where it would take literally centuries to work from the outside in. But this is envisioned as a very long-term project.

So either we go in by invitation, or the UN gets together, declares some area to not be part of a functioning state, and takes over administration, security, education, etc. How do we get out? There has to be an exit strategy, a definite series of steps towards internal democratization, with more and more being taken over by locals over the years. There have to be definite metrics and milestones, constant improvement every year, or people will stop believing in the goals. It will start to look like an unending occupation.

Now, there are a lot of failed states. How do we pick one? The one with the richest neighbor? The one with the most destabilizing impact on the world? North Korea is an obvious choice by those criteria, being close to South Korea, China, and Japan. But good luck with that! Haiti is another obvious choice, being practically on the USA's doorstep. Or perhaps the US and Europe should go for broke and fix Somalia, which has been near the top of the list since anyone started keeping track.

Okay, so this is crazy. I know it. But think about it this way: we spent over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, and half that destroying Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, including thousands of our own. And what have we bought with all that blood and treasure? Nothing. We are no safer. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are no safer (excepting Kurdistan, they're almost certainly better off). We could have taken that money and multiplied the GDP of Haiti by a factor of ten, and that's just by throwing money at the problem. Education and infrastructure would give vastly better returns than that. That's ten million people whose lives would be permanently improved, instead of millions ruined.

Here's my point: if we're going to spend that much on another country, let's get something for it. Let's be a force for good in the world. Let's build things, instead of destroying them.

Of course, I'm not saying we should spend that much on another country. I'd sooner see us spend it here. That will be my next series of posts.