Why sticking our noses in the affairs of the Third World is a bad idea

Since it's Sunday morning [early too! Ed.] I'll start with a text. This is from the chapter entitled "Recovery", in Butterfly Mind, by Patrick Brown (Anansi 2008). (More about the author and the book later.)

Intervention almost never works out as predicted, and it is almost never executed with sufficient thoroughness and commitment. The decision to intervene, either for humanitarian reasons or because a regime has become intolerable, are often made haphazardly, and the results almost always are disappointing. Those decision deserve care and attention proportional the blood and treasure lost when bad decisions are made.

I have been in Afghanistan many times since the Taliban left. I have watched a growing number of foreign nation-builders and peacekeepers lose their lives in the dusty hills of a country that once again produces 90 percent of the world's heroin.

NATO countries that are still willing to provide troops insist on à la carte deployment, picking and choosing where their forces are deployed and what they do. Countries that have put their troops in harm's way, like Canada and Britain, are naively stirring up a hornet's nest. Pacifying Afghanistan and improving its living standards rapidly would have taken much larger numbers of well-equipped troops, and an intensive and expensive development effort.

Those words were written in 2008, before the US-led "intervention" in Afghanistan had officially failed, yet the author refers to it (in the last quoted sentence) in the conditional past -- "would have taken". The conditions for success were never met, perhaps never could have been met. Six years after Patrick Brown wrote those words, even the greatest apologists for Obama's war have no choice but to describe it as a failure.

Thus endeth the lesson... Sad to say, the lesson has still not been learned by the Prez and other Leaders of the Free World (TM). If it were otherwise, why would be, at this very moment, making the same mistakes in Iraq and "the Levant"?

The failure of Western intervention in Afghanistan was hardly unique. During the 1980s, Patrick Brown was a foreign correspondent, reporting on the collapse of Communism, revolutions, wars and humanitarian disasters in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lebanon, East Timor, Burma, Cambodia and Korea. Western meddling, he observes, never solved the problems it set out to. Too frequently, our intervention only made things worse. As an interviewee told him, "WE have to solve our problems by ourselves."

There is more to Butterfly Mind than a potted history of Western failures in the third world. Patrick Brown is a recovering alcoholic. He speculates on the link between alcoholism and journalism. Perhaps journalism drives one to drink. Or perhaps alcoholics become journalists because it's a natural métier for garrulous drunks.

With professional help, Mr. Brown won -- or is winning -- his battle with the bottle. The beginning of his recovery coincided with his move in 1989, to China, where he now makes his home. In Butterfly Mind, he skillfully interweaves his personal story with his observations of Western engagement (to use the latest buzzword) with the Third World, and draws comparisons and parallels with the policies and politics of Communist China.

He writes of the efforts of several Chinese "freedom fighters", including several of those profiled in Out of Mao's Shadow, reviewed here a month ago. He concludes that if change -- regime change and/or social change -- is to come to China, the Chinese will have to bring about that change by themselves, without "help" from the West.

Patrick Brown wishes the Chinese good luck. Walt agrees and extends the same wish to the writer himself. And Walt recommends Butterfly Mind -- good reading as we approach the Chinese New Year.