The capture of 11 British soldiers by bandits in Sierra Leone is important not for any geopolitical effects (the International Herald Tribune thought it scarcely worth recording), but for what it reveals about British foreign policy. We have nearly 300 soldiers in Sierra Leone, some training the country's new army to fight rebel forces, others supposedly protecting the training team. The breakdown of order is such that people who are pro-government soldiers one day may be freeloading bandits the next: this is precisely the case with the West Side Boys, who may well have captured the British soldiers with British weapons. Almost anybody who knows anything about Africa or about military deployment agrees that Britain's intervention is no good at all. The soldiers are too few to defend themselves adequately, and there is no sufficiently stable and substantial civil or military power for them to support. If western countries really want to make a difference in Africa, they must intervene decisively, with great force and at risk of substantial casualties. Otherwise, they should walk away. As Martin Bell told the Commons in May: "We either get all the way in or stay all the way out." But the extraordinary thing is that Britain's toe-in-the-water presence in Sierra Leone is not the result of error, indecision or timidity. It is exactly what the government has decided that our foreign policy should be.

To understand this, we need to turn to a little pamphlet written by Robert Cooper, a career diplomat and now Deputy Secretary of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Originally published in 1996, it has been updated and republished by Demos and the Foreign Policy Centre. It has the usual disclaimer that the author's views are not those of the government. But, as Anne McElvoy explained in these pages last year, Mr Cooper is "at the heart of the charmed circle of prime ministerial advisers".

Mr Cooper's pamphlet explains, lucidly and elegantly, how the emergence of what he calls the postmodern state has changed international relations. The postmodern state (of which EU members provide the purest examples) has no territorial or imperial ambitions and no taste for war. It is willing to share sovereignty, not just in military security, but in law and economics. Other countries such as China and Iraq remain "modern states", some of which still have expansionist ambitions that the postmodern states may need to resist in the traditional way. But much of the world has fallen into a "pre-modern" condition where the state no longer fulfils Weber's criterion of having a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Somalia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Colombia are examples.

How should the postmodern world respond? Here, Mr Cooper's argument seems initially as rigorous as the rest of his pamphlet. "Chaos does not represent a threat . . . One may need to bar one's door against its by-products - drugs, disease, refugees - but these are not threats to vital interests that call for armed western intervention . . . all realistic doctrines of international affairs counsel against involvement . . . The risk here is one of being sucked in for reasons of conscience and then being unwilling either to conquer or to get out . . . the process may be debilitating for morale and dangerous for military preparedness." As a critique of recent western errors in parts of Africa and the former Yugoslavia, that would be hard to better. Yet Mr Cooper then argues that we should reject what he himself calls intellectual coherence. "The postmodern environment is one where foreign policy will be driven by domestic politics; and these will be influenced by the media and moral sentiment." The results of western operations "are not always impressive and are, in some respects, half-hearted. That is because they live in the ambiguous half-world where interest tells you to stay out and conscience tells you to go in . . . Such interventions may not solve problems, but they may salve the conscience. And they are not necessarily the worse for that."

Consider this argument carefully. Does it mean that British foreign policy should be driven by the fickle and fleeting moral concerns of newspapers and television, and by the need of democratic politicians, in a post-ideological age, to convince us that they are more human and more caring than their rivals? Are Africans to be considered no more than adjuncts to the political games of Washington or Westminster? Is the kind of meddling and muddling that we have seen in Sierra Leone actually to be turned into the philosophical foundation of western policy? If so, it is morally odious.

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