Whatever British troops are doing in Sierra Leone - and if their role is as limited as ministers claim, it is hard to see why the Chief of Defence Staff needed to be there for four days or why so many Royal Navy ships are hovering off the coast - we should all hope for their early return. Not purely for the sake of our overstretched defence budget or of our soldiers' lives, but for the sake of Africa. Western intervention in that continent - colonial, economic or military - has nearly always been a disaster. Apart from humanitarian relief, we should order the world economy in a way that allows poor Africans, particularly poor African farmers, the chance to earn a decent living; that allows African countries to fight diseases such as Aids and malaria without paying huge sums to drugs companies; and that stops the African climate, which is naturally unstable, from being further disrupted by global warming. Those are daunting enough responsibilities, and we should discharge them as best we may. Anything else - our military forces, our diplomacy or our advice on the wonders of free markets - is both superfluous and dangerous.
To stand aside while innocent people are slaughtered may seem hard-hearted. It seems even more hard-hearted to point out that the undoubted cruelties inflicted by guns, axes and machetes are actually no more cruel than those inflicted by the helicopter gunships, cruise missiles and other "sophisticated" weapons that western armies used in Serbia and Iraq. But the truth is that peacekeeping missions are nearly always counterproductive. This is for a very simple reason. In the vast majority of conflicts, peace can only be maintained for more than a short period if both sides want it, usually after the decisive defeat of one (the Second World War) or the exhaustion of both (the Iran-Iraq war). Outside forces can help to achieve that situation if they intervene decisively on one side. As Martin Bell put it in the House of Commons on Monday: "We either get all the way in or stay all the way out . . . There is no third way." But the instinct of the UN generally, and of western powers particularly, is to get halfway in, to send ill-equipped forces, to lay down opaque rules of combat and to maintain an impossible neutrality. Most important of all, no western government wants to risk the lives of its troops unless vital national interests are involved, and not always then (though attempts to minimise the risk often succeed in putting the troops more in peril).
We have seen the results in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and now Sierra Leone. The last, indeed, provides almost a textbook study of the ineptness of western intervention. The rebel leader (more accurately, bandit), Foday Sankoh, was locked away in Togo after the Nigerians intervened on behalf of President Kabbah's elected government. At this stage, the rebels could probably have been crushed. But under British and American pressure, President Kabbah was persuaded to give Mr Sankoh immunity from prosecution, the position of vice-president and, as minister of natural resources in control of the diamond mines, over which the war was fought in the first place, an income of £60m a year. With masterly understatement, Geoff Hoon, the British Defence Secretary, now says that "we might say that it possibly was not the most sensible decision". Further, the UN troops, who were supposed to run "disarmament centres" where the rebels would surrender their arms (but predictably didn't), were so poorly prepared for combat - "badly trained and badly equipped" in the words of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General - that they were sitting ducks for kidnap.
From this imbroglio, the Americans and British may be thought to have some responsibility to help extricate Sierra Leone, since it is so much of their making. But it is doubtful that, even now, they can be relied upon to do anything useful. As we went to press, it was reported that Mr Sankoh had been captured; but since Washington had already despatched the Reverend Jesse Jackson, amid a shower of bromides about how the rebel leader could "play a positive role" (as, no doubt, Al Capone could have done in Chicago in the 1920s), we must prepare for another botched deal. Then, in all probability, the whole miserable cycle will begin again.
The danger is that the UN itself is discredited, and rendered unfit to discharge its prime role, which is not to hold the ring in civil wars, but to prevent states violating international boundaries. The British and Americans, in the meantime, try to act as the policemen of the world; all too often, they end up looking like the Keystone Cops.
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