Events in Afghanistan should mean the end of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ principle

The damage done by ill-judged military interventions intended to break, rather than repair, an existing order has surely been proved beyond doubt, writes Mary Dejevsky

Militia gather with their weapons to support security forces against the Taliban (AFP/Getty)

There are times when Joe Biden sounds more like a crotchety old man than the president of the United States. His most recent defence of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was an example. He seemed to say: maybe you didn’t hear me properly the first time, so I’ll tell you again – the US is leaving Afghanistan and I stand by that decision, whatever the horrors that now unfold. No amount of media coverage or special pleading will make me change my mind.

Sometimes, though, crotchety old men with a wealth of experience and a lifetime of standing on the sidelines watching the consequences of bad decisions are right. And Biden is right about Afghanistan – for all the almost unrelieved condemnation that is emanating not just from his political adversaries in Washington, but from the UK.

No, it is not noble to back away from support you have promised, no matter what. But was it really so noble to give that undertaking in the first place? To raise expectations for a level of peace and stability that the people of that country could not, and demonstrably cannot, sustain by themselves, even after 20 years of assistance and several thousand coalition lives lost?

It remains to be seen how the intervention will be judged in a longer perspective – as having hastened or stalled, or perhaps had no effect at all on, Afghanistan’s progress. But one result that I, for one, hope it may have is to bury the idea of supposedly benevolent foreign military interventions once and for all, or at least as long as memory endures.

It was in April 1999 that Tony Blair delivered the speech in Chicago that has become a defining text of his premiership and essentially codified “the Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). The central idea was that a country had the right to use force to protect people in another country in the event that their lives were threatened. It is a concept that overrode centuries of accepted definitions of national sovereignty, gave humanitarian cover to invasions, and effectively sanctioned the idea (for some select countries) that might is right.

Lauded by many for its high ethical intentions, I believe it has been one of the most destructive innovations in international relations since the Second World War, destroying the – yes, in many cases, deeply compromised – stability of other countries and ruining the lives of many of the very people it was intended to save. In one of her clearer-eyed moments as prime minister, Theresa May pronounced its demise. Speaking in Philadelphia near the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, she spoke of the “failed policies of the past” and declared that “the days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over”. Still, R2P struggled on. Mercifully, Afghanistan looks likely to be its last gasp.

Of course, like so many misguided initiatives, it sprang from the best of intentions. It has to be seen in the context of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for which France, in particular, drew censure for not having heeded warnings of impending carnage. As many as 800,000 ethnic Tutsis lost their lives in the bloodletting that followed the downing of the (Hutu) president’s plane. A year later ethnic slaughter came to Europe, when thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed in Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serbs. After both atrocities, western leaders wrung their hands, arguing about how such loss of life could be prevented. R2P seemed to offer an answer.

It remains to be seen how the intervention will be judged in a longer perspective – as having hastened or stalled, or perhaps had no effect at all on, Afghanistan’s progress

In fact, by 1995 Nato forces were already engaged in the former Yugoslavia, mounting bombing raids on Bosnian Serb forces who had laid siege to Sarajevo. And by 1999, Nato planes were again in action, this time over Belgrade, with the aim of forcing the Serbs to halt their eviction of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

This bombing campaign was approaching its height at the time Blair gave his Chicago speech. Against this background, it reads less like an initiative from the blue than an attempt to clarify the terms on which outside military intervention could be permitted. To the extent that the principles he set out were largely adopted by the UN six years later, the speech can be considered a success.

But principle and practice, ideals and reality, do not dovetail so easily. And military interventions that may be credited with saving the lives of many Kosovans and subsequently ending the decade-long Sierra Leone civil war could not be replicated with the same success elsewhere. Worse than that, R2P seemed to embolden the United States and the UK, in particular, to believe that they could, and they should, act to resolve not just disputes between countries, but disputes within other countries’ borders, to the point of overturning – yes, despicable, but still stable – regimes.

It seems to me there is a big difference between mustering an international force under US command to reverse Iraq’s grab for Kuwait – an intervention that restored international norms – and what happened in Iraq and Libya and might have happened in Syria, had the UK parliament, the US Congress and other legislatures not refused to authorise the proposed intervention. This did not, regrettably, prevent the use of airpower or special forces in Syria, but it limited the damage and warned over-ambitious governments that voters would accept the deployment of their troops in other people’s conflicts only up to a point.

Now all sorts of mitigating factors can be cited as to why R2P gained the support that it did – and still, remarkably, enjoys. Modern communications make it possible for people on the other side of the world to see wars, and atrocities, as they happen, fuelling demands they should be stopped and afterwards that justice should be done. In the past, it was only afterwards, perhaps long afterwards that such events would have come to public attention, when the opportunities to “do something” would mostly have long gone. It can also be argued that all manner of internal conflicts have implications for other countries’ security, whether it be the use of Afghanistan as a base for al-Qaeda in plotting the cataclysm of 9/11 or the civil war in Syria in precipitating an exodus of refugees.

But the damage done to both sides by ill-judged military interventions intended to break, rather than repair, an existing order has surely been proved beyond doubt over the past 20-odd years. Iraq and Libya are only now starting to emerge from the chaos. Syria has spent nearly 10 years in which the west has agitated for a similar regime change. And an intervention in Afghanistan, designed to pre-empt any new 9/11, then set this war-ravaged country on a path to stability via a new constitutional settlement, has failed.

Afghanistan is a country in its own right. The US, the UK, Nato had no “responsibility to protect”. The foreign troops became targets in a civil war that their intervention had artificially stalled. If they were protecting anyone, it was an elite and an army that may well be too fragile to survive without them. The country’s whole future hangs in the balance. A large swathe of the Middle East has been destabilised; Kosovo has its independence in name only and still depends on its outside protectors.

The principle of Responsibility to Protect was ill-conceived at the start. It has harmed almost everything it has touched. Just short of its 25th anniversary, it has had its day.