How to build the peace: the King of the Nation Builders reveals all

Paddy Ashdown spent more than three years trying to reconstruct Bosnia. He was asked by Donald Rumsfeld to do the same in Iraq. Here, he tells Matthew d’Ancona that such reconstruction must be at the heart of 21st-century geopolitics You send an ex-Lib Dem leader to the Balkans for three and a half years, and he comes back the King of Nation Builders. Not that ‘nation-building’ is a term much liked by Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

‘That’s something you do to start a nation. This is reconstruction: how do you reconstruct? And let’s not talk about a “nation”, either. Foreigners are not given to creating nations. There are exceptions like Simón Bolîvar, but by and large interveners can only create the state. It’s only the people who can create the nation. So let’s call it reconstruction after conflict. And the story — post the second world war — of reconstruction of states after conflict is the story of hubris, nemesis and amnesia. We have consistently failed to learn the lessons which we ought to have learnt about how to do it properly.’ We are sitting in a small room just off the peers’ entrance of the Upper House. The 65year-old Lord Ashdown of Norton-subHamdon is reclining on a sofa, suffering badly from a cough, but — his craggy features make clear — deeply engaged with the subject which, slightly to his surprise, has become the centre of his political life.

When he visited the Bosnian concentration camps of Omarska and Trnopolje in 1992, Ashdown could scarcely have guessed what lay ahead. A decade later, in May 2002, he was appointed High Representative by the Peace Implementation Council set up after the Dayton Accords. His unenviable mission was to bring together the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Croats in an institutional structure fit for entry to the European Union. Military, police, intelligence, judiciary, customs office, war crimes chamber, public services: all had to be built from the ground up.

In peace, as in war, winning hearts and minds is of the essence, he says. ‘The big thing that helped us in Bosnia was that everybody wanted to go into Europe,’ he says. ‘So I was able to use that end-point to lead the people forward and I’d always have public opinion behind me if what they had to do was uncomfortable but led to that destination.’ Ashdown cites a confidential MoD poll of opinion in Basra that he has seen. ‘When the British troops went in there, there was something like 65, 70 per cent support for them. There’s now 95 per cent against the British troops staying there, believing that they’ve done nothing. Because they haven’t given people the fundamental thing they need to give them, which is security. Reconnect their water supply. Now you cannot win if you have lost public support on the ground; there’s no way you can build a nation by force.’ Ashdown defines success in reconstruction as ‘the fact that within the following five years the state does not go back to conflict and that the end product raises the level of structures of a state to those which are consistent with that which exists in the region’. The criterion of regional comparison is critical, he argues. Until Bosnia boasts a fledgling state on a par with, say, Macedonia or Croatia, he will not judge his work to have been a success.

Even so, there is no doubting the scale of his achievement in the Balkans. ‘The transformation in him is remarkable,’ one very senior Tory told me recently. ‘He has come home a real statesman.’ What is more, Ashdown’s new special subject — how to build the peace — has shifted to the very cen tre of geopolitical debate. The bloody mess that is post-liberation Iraq hovers over our conversation like a malevolent reproach.

Francis Fukuyama has written of the ‘failure of institutional memory’ in nation-building, and Ashdown shares this view. ‘What’s happened is that consistently we go in, we intervene in the country, we learn some lessons in a rather painful way and we fail to apply those lessons in the next stage,’ he says. ‘I greatly fear that as a result of Iraq, and possibly as a result of Afghanistan, the international community will decide it’s never going to intervene again. And if it does that, the world’s going to be a much more dangerous place.’ He has a point: everybody in the West seems to agree, for instance, that the plight of Darfur is a moral atrocity. They all said ‘never again’ after the horrors of Rwanda. But ask them to do something and they run a mile. Send Western troops to Muslim Sudan, and create a new magnet for Islamist insurgents bored with Baghdad? You must be joking. That, broadly, is what you hear in Whitehall and Washington.

Ashdown reflects ruefully on the Iraqi debacle. ‘Rumsfeld asked me shortly after the Saddam statue fell to go into Iraq and advise Bremer [Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority]. Many of the American staff that I was working with and were working with me in Bosnia, went there in the early days to set up the green zone. But, you know, the bottom line is, I went to see Rumsfeld, I think, two weeks after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, and he said to me, “What do you think we should do now, Paddy?” And I said, “Mr Secretary, it’s a bit late.”’ Indeed it was. Would the chances of successful reconstruction have been greater if President Bush had stuck with Colin Powell’s plan to flood Iraq with troops, establish martial law if necessary and entrench basic order before implementing the US State Department’s hugely detailed programme?

‘It was always going to be a very, very difficult case but, yes is the answer to that. I think we would have given ourselves a better chance of success. I cannot say we would have succeeded: I mean a measurably better chance of success. By the way, Rumsfeld was only half wrong. Where Rumsfeld rejected the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, in the battle phase he was right. Powell said you cannot win on this basis. But Rumsfeld proved he could, and he and Wolfowitz [Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence during the war] were correct in saying we can win the battle with much lighter troops, moving very fast. But where he was completely wrong was that he hadn’t got the message that, actually, you probably need more troops after the end of the fighting than before.’ Security comes first, he says, then the rule of law, then — and only then — democracy.

Ashdown is now completing a book about post-conflict reconstruction, to be called The Bandaged Finger. The title is inspired by lines from Kipling’s ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’:

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

So: how to stop the finger of the West ‘wabbling back to the Fire’? His Lordship sets out a series of basic principles, the first of which is to accept that post-conflict reconstruction is not a new burden. The US, after all, first encountered nation-building in the reconstruction of the South after the civil war; engaged in huge projects in the Philippines and the Caribbean before the second world war, and in Japan and Germany after the conflict, and was even trying under President Clinton to codify the lessons of Somalia and Haiti in the long-forgotten PDD (Presidential Decision Directive) 56. The point, however, is that this burden is now becoming one that the West has to shoulder more frequently and more nimbly.

‘The rate of intervention in the world has vastly increased since the end of the Cold War,’ says Ashdown. ‘Up to the Cold War, the United States-led international coalition intervened about once every three to four years on average. The United Nations about once every two years. Since the end of the Cold War the strike rate is once every two years for international coalitions led by the United States, nearly always.’ This means, he says, accepting once and for all that reconstruction must be at the very heart of future military planning, diplomacy and political strategy. ‘It’s not something you sort of tack on, that takes you by surprise. This has now become such a common practice — intervention in order to preserve stability, the world’s stability, in an extremely turbulent and dangerous time, is part of the future. It’s part of the future for diplomats, for soldiers, for politicians and they have to learn how to do it.’ He calls for a ‘seamless garment’ in government, a continuum of strategies ranging from prevention (Macedonia) to potential confrontation (Iran, North Korea).

In the 21st century, he says, we will need fewer troops to make war and more capable of keeping the peace. ‘The force — the kind of forces you need most on day one of the peace actually aren’t the people able to fight the hot war. If your soldiers can change from hot-war fighting instantaneously to the peace-keeping soldiers, which British forces can do — part soldier, part policeman, part social worker — OK. But very few of our armed forces can do it. The classic forces you need to fill that gap between hot war and stable peace are your gendarmerie. Your carabinieri. And that’s why the gendarmerie were so useful, so valuable, in Bosnia. So actually what we need to think about here is not just retraining our armed forces. We need to say: how do you raise the gendarmerie, the people who can sit in the middle — how can you train up your police elements so they can move in and establish the rule of law? It requires a complete rethink to do it properly.’ And for this, Ashdown says, we will need new international structures: the ‘international co-ordinating mechanism’ for post-conflict reconstruction of which Condoleezza Rice has spoken. Not everyone will agree with Ashdown that the EU should be at the heart of this. But he is surely right that individual governments will also have to address this task much more systematically, our own included.

He is critical of the US State Department Office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, ad hoc responses, and what he calls the ‘the prêt-à-porter approach — that you assemble ten diplomats, five water engineers, three military people — stack ’em up in a dusty corner on Whitehall and unleash them in flights on an unsuspecting country when the fighting stops.’ With sadness, he does not believe that Gordon Brown has ‘any sense of this sort of thing at all’. And this leads us on to terrain the former Lib Dem leader is keen to avoid. Is it not ironic, I ask, that the very man who so strongly resisted the so-called ‘Full Monty’ — a coalition of Labour and Lib Dems when Ashdown and Blair were discussing it in 1997 may well have to embrace it himself after the election of 2009? Blair courted the Lib Dems as an insurance policy. Brown may have to do so out of arithmetical necessity.

‘Politics is full of irony. You’re tempting me on to ground I shouldn’t go on to,’ he chuckles. ‘I’ll say this: I think that Blair had a genuine strategy — a strategic plan — and it showed itself in the big tent; it showed itself in what I still believe he wanted to do, which was realign the Left.... Gordon, I think, is John Smith reincarnated. He’s from the Labour party. He has a hegemonic view of the Labour party. But John Smith always used to say to me: “Paddy, if I have to, I will.” Very pragmatic.’ Very well, then, Lord Ashdown: if Gordon, to borrow your phrase, ‘had to’ go into coalition with Sir Menzies Campbell, would you serve in the Upper House as a minister?

‘I would doggedly follow my party anywhere,’ he says, ‘and my party should not be talking about anything to do with coalition.’ Scarcely a fierce denial, is it? Maybe the great nation-builder would still like to have a go at rebuilding this one.