System Administration as a cure for helping connect Gap states might be akin to government fiscal and monetary policy intervention in the economy; it may work best with the easiest and worst-off cases where there is either a functional and legitimate local government to act as a partner or where there is no government to get in the way and the warring factions are exhausted.
The dangerous middle ground of partially failed states is the real sticking point.
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Dan tdaxp:
January 27th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
(Cross posted at Chicago Boys).
The lesson from that economic analogy might be that reviving completely failed states might first require a ” clearing of the board” of local opposition – defeated Germany and Japan, Cambodia, Sierra Leone and East Timor were completely devastated countries that had to begin societal reconstruction at only slightly better than ground zero. Somalia, Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, and Lebanon all contain robust subnational networks that create high levels of friction that work against System Administration. At times, international aid simply helps sustain the dysfunctional actors in their resistance.
This reminds me of some old posts on lakotization / family liberation. The US Army successfully used the same strategy in the northern plain: disrupt the cultures of rebel tribes such that they were unable to oppose US operations.
mark:
January 27th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I agree. Similar principle, different scale – doesn’t even have to be intentional but atomization seems to facilitate connecting up.
Of course on the other end, you have a mostly functional state being helped pro-actively before disruptive elements gain momentum
lester:
January 27th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
do you guys ever talk to girls? or HAVE you ever?
mark:
January 27th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
LOL! Dan can speak for himself butI’ve been married twice lester, finding enough women to talk to ain’t my problem ;o)
I just don’t talk about strategic military theory with most of them. Tends not to be the best icebreaker at parties.
Eddie:
January 28th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Your description of the dangerous middle ground is spot-on and illumanating as a framework to view the challenges states face recovering from civil war and kleptocracy.
In your example states, East Timor is another example of the international aid community prolonging or even worsening an existing conflict, in this case the power struggle between ethnic soldiers and authority figures from the east and western regions of the country.
Re: Belief in the recovery of Sierra Leone on a SysAdmin model, like Liberia, has to be taken with a serious grain of salt because of the continuing troubles in Nigeria and the destabilizing effect they have on long-term development and trade in West Africa in general. As the Nigerian crises worsen, as they likely will with no-qualms Chinese security and weapons assistance, its doubtful progress in the two nations would survive the violent decline of the Nigerian empire-state.
Cambodia, which Chevron has now claimed has a vast array of oil reserves (pending further explanation and details in March-May), is little more than a kleptocracy only marginally better off than more chaotic vampire states like Burma and the Congo. Its environment upon which much of the nation’s economy and livliehood is still much dependent upon is being ravaged by corrupt government officials, organized crime and business officials, clearcutting their way towards ecocide. The oil curse may only seal their destitution.
If it seems I’m making mountains out of molehills, I apologize, but its a sad testament to the sheer enormity of the challenges the SysAdmin model faces and the daunting gap between rhetoric and reality. Perhaps the only true successes of the model in the past 20 years have been Mozambique (which is a unique case largely influenced by local developments and South Africa’s economic imperialism), Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo. Rwanda is in its own bracket because of the genocide and the RPF.
Dan tdaxp:
January 28th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
There’s nothing sexier than comparative counterinsurgent sociological, Lester baby :-p
Pacific Empire:
January 28th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Hi Mark,
I think Eddie has put some needed reality into this discussion of failed states. While I don’t know as much about the situation in Cambodia and Sierra Leone, I do know about East Timor, and it is about as far from a victory for the “sysadmin” as you can get short of all-out war.
I suppose being completely devastated and having to start over might produce some political stability, but this is not the case for East Timor, which throws some doubt on your hypothesis. Timor was thoroughly defeated in conventional terms in 1975, yet the insurgency lasted nearly 25 years despite massacres, reprisals, high-tech equipment and population transfer. It was a clear victory for 4GW Timor’s infrastructure was afterwards wiped out by militia attacks, but I think the effect of that is deceptive in terms of stability – the poverty and lack of infrastructure means infighting is less effective and less deadly. But the government, rebels and gangs face that problem equally, and all have difficulties in using force as a result, and none of them want to kick out the peacekeepers.
East Timor today is incredibly poor, unstable, rebels and gangs operate freely, and the government is torn by infighting between ex-rebels and ex-collaborators (not to mention, different tribes). The only reason it looks like a success is because foreign forces restrain the worst of the violence, and the poverty and lack of infrastructure limits the successful mobilisation of large numbers on any side. It’s certainly not a reason to be optimistic about nation-building, even though it is an example of relatively successful foreign intervention.
mark:
January 29th, 2007 at 4:47 am
eddie and empire,
I appreciate the unvarnished criticisms of my weaker ” case study” examples ( nor had I, for that matter, considered Mozambique or Rwanda at all). You have pointed out superb caveats that can’t be ignored if our efforts are to improve in future cases.
Looking at these states for “lessons learned” is vital as Sys Admin does face a terribly complex task; but the alternatives of doing nothing with crisis failed states have proven morally unpalatable and politically, intervention sometimes is driven anyway (Bosnia, Timor,Somalia) despite policy makers attempting to hew a non-interventionist course.
Anonymous:
January 29th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Mark,
Reading this, I was reminded of Hobbes’ state of nature. It seems, that what you are basically saying is that the state of nature, which is described by Hobbes as nasty, brutish and short, is man’s natural state. At least, in my way of thinking, until men grow weary or exhausted with war, and then and only then allow the SysAdmin to work. That is, state failure is basically men returning to their natural state, where they basically must re-bargain, and re-align that which allowed for the creation of the state in the first place, until they reach a point where they are either so exhausted by war that they choose once again to re-craft a social contract for that state or to disband it altogether and create alternate legitimacy structures.
In our current world, a few states can fall back into the natural state, but there are others such as the US who can wield both a Leviathan force, as well as a SysAdmin force to bring these states back. However, from what I understand you to say, this means that the US cannot do this, until “a clearing of the board” has taken place, or the way I interpret it, until these alternate loyalties (clans, tribes, etc) become so destroyed or exhausted that they allow the SysAdmin to work. Absent that, we may employ a SysAdmin, without achieving any lasting change or improvement in the situation.
This argument gets even thornier once we consider that most of the states we are dealing with are former colonies of Western powers which for the most part, carved them up to suit the colonial power’s interests and without paying heed to the absence of historical bonds between the people united under these new nation-states. Hence, the Cold War acted as a sort of time-freeze for the reordering that needed to occur following the end of colonialism because it pitted the US against the Soviet Union and in that conflict, you were either with one, or with the other. The system, although allowing some corrections, essentially was frozen until the end of the Cold War. It was at this point that the peoples under the old colonial boundaries could challenge the system imposed on them by their old colonial masters. Because the US is the guarantor of that system (post-WWII, post-Cold War), anti-americanism comes naturally. Normally, the US without an existential threat would try to let these wars burn, until that time when the parties involved exhausted by war no longer had an option but to either cooperate with one another in a new state, or agree to separate, such as the former Yugoslavia.
That, however, is not the case. Thanks to Islamism (which takes this anti-system, anti-American opposition to a new level) the US is faced with an existential threat, once which we must confront and defeat. The danger in this, however, lies in viewing every conflict (particularly in Africa, and the wider Muslim world) solely through the lens of the GWOT without understanding the natural re-aligning that must occur within these regions to right the wrongs of the colonial past.
Following that logic, it is easier to see how the big bang was supposed to work. Mainly, by creating such chaos that the re-alignment was jump started by American actions, but not controlled by America, and that is the mistake the administration (and many of us) made. The President was right when he said that change needed to come to the region, and he began it, but we could not control it (as the administration tried to do) at best, we could simply guide it, and that is where we failed.
Getting back to the original subject of the piece, this also demonstrates (again, following the logic of the argument) that Barnett’s SysAdmin cannot work even when we go into one of these situations (state-failures) until such time as the parties doing the fighting become exhausted, or one side is defeated. Given that because of the GWOT we will feel a need to get involved (because global guerrillas naturally seek these as bases of operations), we risk both exacerbating the situation, and strengthening the push to overthrow the very system we are trying to protect. This, I guess would be the dangerous middle-ground you describe in your post.
Well, at least this is where my thoughts led me after reading your post. If you think I’m missing something, please feel free to point it out.
mark:
January 31st, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Anon wrote:
“That is, state failure is basically men returning to their natural state, where they basically must re-bargain, and re-align that which allowed for the creation of the state in the first place, until they reach a point where they are either so exhausted by war that they choose once again to re-craft a social contract for that state or to disband it altogether and create alternate legitimacy structures.”
That would be a good characterization, yes. State failure 2.0 would be having the additional problem of negative dynamics – a scale-free network of paramilitaries for example – preventing the new social contract from being written.
The other end of the spectrum you might call preemptive Sys admin, innoculating basically functional but at-risk states with Core connectivity and support before the descending spiral can gain momentum
I think your description of this problem as ” thorny” hits the mark.