Nation-building - post-Cold War: The messy legacy of conflict
Ian Traynor, The Observer, April 6, 2003

For the American military juggernaut, winning the war is the easy bit. Winning the peace is infinitely more complex and challenging, particularly given the Bush administration's short attention span, its predilection for the quick fix, and its aversion to 'nation-building'. Some examples since the end of the Cold War:

Bosnia

Origins: 42 months of war, Serbian ethnic cleansing and Western hand-wringing in 1992-95 climaxed with the Srebrenica massacre by Serbs of 7,000 Muslims

Treatment: Bosnia became an international laboratory for post Cold War nation-building, with not terribly encouraging results. [...]

Kosovo

Origins: Slobodan Milosevic's 1998 campaign of ethnic cleansing of the majority Albanians was the climax of his disastrous Greater Serbia project, finally provoking Nato into its first war after seven years of mayhem in former Yugoslavia. Milosevic was defeated in June 1999 and the region made an international protectorate.

Treatment: Under Michael Steiner, the German diplomat who is international viceroy in Kosovo, peacekeeping troops [...]

Afghanistan

Origins: 11 September precipitated a US war against the Taliban regime in 2001 because of its patronage of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Treatment: The Taliban collapsed swiftly under the US onslaught in November 2001. The opposition Tajik Northern Alliance staggered into Kabul and appropriated the spoils of victory under US protection, while the Pashtun Hamid Karzai ... [...]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 11:02 pm