The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

ty responded with the judicious appli- cation of sticks and carrots. These included the ouster of the Serb Republic’s defense minister and the departure of the Serb member of the Bosnian presidential triumvirate, cou- pled with offers to begin a collabora- tive effort to create a smaller, more affordable military under central com- mand and control. The effort harnessed Bosnia’s aspi- rations for joining NATO’s Partner- ship for Peace with NATO’s standards for defense reform. In contrast to eight previous years of cosmetic tin- kering, defense reform succeeded in 2002-2003 because all sides acknowl- edged that this was not an exercise in dumbing things down to a lowest common denominator but, rather, of rising to a bar set by NATO. By offer- ing the implicit security guarantee of possible future membership in NATO, defense reform also gave Bosnians the reassurance that the impending departure of Stability Force peace- keepers did not necessarily mean abandonment by Western Europe and the United States. Dump-and-Run vs. Plug-and-Play The final step in the process is to create a viable exit strategy — a chap- ter which is still being written for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Past interven- tions in Haiti and East Timor suggest that this is where interventions tend to falter, often because the exit stage so frequently becomes the abandon- ment stage. The peace implementa- tion stage and the exit stage require completely different tools and para- digms. Exit does not equal abandon- ment, but rather a type of engage- ment that is different from, but no less important than, the intervention phase. The tools required are mirror images of each other, with interven- tion calling for robust “hard” powers of imposition and the exit stage emphasizing “soft” powers of attrac- tion to create a sense of local owner- ship and responsibility. The objective should be to move through the intervention stage as quickly as possible, before it plants the seeds of future problems. Bene- volent dictatorships — even well- meaning international organizations — are frequently unable to respond to political market signals. In Bosnia, the continued international presence risks perpetuating a dependency culture and instilling a warped political culture with nation- alism as its default setting. The local electorate looks to the “internation- als” to deliver reforms and to nation- alist parties to protect their ethnic interests. This division of responsi- bilities allows nationalists to enjoy incumbency without accountability, and international civil servants to occupy the political space that should be assumed by homegrown, multi-ethnic reform-oriented par- ties. Bosnia is fortunate in that it has a natural home in Europe. With that in mind, we need to recalibrate our reconstruction paradigm from mere- ly “fixing things” and then departing to focusing on ways to reintegrate Bosnia back into the region and, eventually, with the rest of the world. Specifically, we should leverage Bos- nian aspirations to play a meaning- ful role in international fora — the European Union, World Trade Organization, Interpol, the Egmont Group, the Venice Commission, the Community of Democracies and other groups — both to continue to shape and influence events in a posi- tive direction in Bosnia from outside and to help ensure that reforms are not orphaned once the peacekeepers and civilian implementers depart. The objective should be to replace “bad” networks — organized crime, trafficking rings, arms smugglers, black markets and illicit militias — with “good” ones that enmesh Bosnia 54 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5