UN's new Afghan envoy tough critic of the West

British politician and diplomat, known for his controversial views on Western conduct in foreign countries, appointed to powerful post

There is worry in some Afghan circles, not to mention in the UN and NATO, that he will be seen not as a uniting force but as a reminder of the country's dark colonial history.

But for a man of such imperial bearing, Mr. Ashdown is in many ways the precise opposite: a controversial and outspoken critic of Western arrogance in foreign adventures.
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Mr. Ashdown spoke frankly of his fears: that Afghanistan has become a disorganized disaster, that we are repeating the worst mistakes of the Balkan Wars, that we are on the verge of a loss that, he has said, would be even more dire than the West's defeat in Iraq.

"Our failure relies on the fact that we believe, for some bizarre reason, that we have such a unique system of government in our own countries - by the way, not a view shared by many of our citizens - that we believe we have a right to impose it lock, stock and barrel, along with the values and everything that goes along with it, on other countries with the use of B-52s, tanks and rifles."
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he believes that the failure in Afghanistan is far more political than military.

"We are losing in Afghanistan - and rather than militarily, we are losing the political mission - and in large part we are losing because there has been a complete failure of the international community to co-ordinate its efforts," he said.

For a UN appointee, he is especially harsh on the organization's approach to nation-building. He says that the UN is a very poor manager of military and executive action, and that it functions far better as a subcontractor of national forces and a "legitimizer of international action." And its values, he says, are far too heavily devoted to democracy at any cost.

"There is this bizarre idea that the one thing these people are dying for is gender-sensitivity training, human rights in our model and our systems of government," he said. "These guys want something much more simple than that. Look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They want security. Actually, I think democracy is what people choose when they have enough prosperity that they want a system of government that will protect it. The big thing about democracy is not that it's efficient, but that it's the best means of protecting what you have. I think you let them choose what pace they want to do it."

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For a man so outspoken in his criticisms of both the military and the civilian arms of the West's nation-building apparatus, and so pessimistic about Afghanistan's prospects, Mr. Ashdown maintains an overriding faith in the ability of the world's wealthy nations to change troubled countries for the better.

"The reality of it is, for all its failures - and Afghanistan and Iraq are particularly painful ones - international intervention has halved the number of wars in the world since the end of the Cold War. It's massively reduced the number of war casualties in the world as a consequence. The world would be a much more dangerous place today if we hadn't intervened in many of these places, and in an increasingly interdependent world, it'll be much more dangerous in the future if we now give this up."

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