Problems and Solutions

MAKING A MESS OF THINGS

Today's (July 19) Washington Post carried an insightful column by foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria.

In a discussion of failed states and the U.S. views of and approach to such states, Zakaria says the following:

"Somalia highlights the complexity of almost every approach to failed states. If Washington goes after the militants aggressively, it polarizes the political landscape and energizes the radicals, who can then claim to be nationalists fighting American imperialism. If it talks to them, it is accused of empowering jihadis. The real answer, many argue, is to strengthen the state's capacity so that the government has greater legitimacy and the opposition gets discredited. But how easy is to fast-forward political modernization, compressing into a few years what has taken decades, if not centuries in the West."

He then goes on to quote Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, "We have a limited capacity to influence events in Somalia, to influence them positively. . . . But we have an almost unlimited capacity to make a mess of things."

In short, they give contemporary evidence to something said by, I think, a British economist many years ago. He said (perhaps not an exact quote) that "the existence of a problem does not presume the existence of a solution."

This is a particularly difficult truth for Americans, and others in the western world, to accept. We are given to believe that the existence of a problem presumes the existence of a solution we can engineer. Whether it be solving the reception of calls on an iPhone 4 (get a new case), capping a polluting oil well (try, try again), or by implanting democracy in an inhospitable part of the world where there has never been a democracy, or even a modicum of one--Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind--we can militarily and politically engineer a solution.

The George W. Bush administration advanced that belief as part of the rewards to be achieved by invading Iraq. Plant a democracy in the heart of the Muslim Mideast and it will flower and spread to the neighborhood (Israel excluded). Watching the Iraqis cope with their democratic political architecture has not been encouraging. And their stalemated system exists with our troops still in place. It is difficult to believe that centuries old sectarian violence will not erupt again after our departure, much less believe its "democratic" forms will be ready for export to the neighbors.

Likewise in Afghanistan. If we can't push or even nudge President Hamid Karzai into doing what is right politically, or to crack down on corruption, it is almost predestined that the country will return to the status quo ante after the western troops have left. Once again Afghanistan will become a geographic area run by warlords, living off of expanded opium trade, and renewing their internecine warfare while eradicating any remaining traces of American and NATO influence.

In short, there are plenty of problems out there, among which are failed states. But we should NOT presume the existence of what we think of as a solution to all of these problems. Certainly not a solution crafted to encompass the traditional western values, or we will indeed "make a mess of things."