History is never a matter of clear turning points – great events are usually preceded by other, smaller developments without which they would not have been possible – but the decision by the British politician, Paddy Ashdown, to withdraw from his appointment as United Nations super-envoy to Afghanistan is of great symbolic importance. It may turn out to be the moment at which the West’s fantasies about democratic nation-building came up against the buffers of reality.
 
On his own, Ashdown is of no importance. A vain poseur who never won elected office in spite of his decades in British politics, Ashdown cultivated the image of an action man to compensate for his political impotence. The former para is almost certainly a fully paid MI6 agent. Why else would a relatively unimportant British politician, and an opposition one at that, have made so many trips to the Balkans during the 1990s, including visits to the main players in the Yugoslav wars, such as Slobodan Milosevic, to whom Ashdown brought important messages from the British government?
 
Instead, the successful opposition to Ashdown’s appointment by the puppet president of Afghanistan, the equally vain Hamid Karzai, is an indication that the sort of play-acting in which Ashdown indulged for four years as High Representative in Bosnia & Herzegovina is unwelcome in the very different, and much more difficult, environment of the Hindu Kush.
 
Play-acting? Ashdown was appointed High Representative to Bosnia & Herzegovina in 2002. It was on the basis of his record at this job that he was mooted for Afghanistan. The position itself is the tribute which the modern world of globalised politics plays to the otherwise lost art of pantomime. Just as in the old Soviet Union, employees joked, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, so in the post-modern, post-national future which the international community has spent over a decade, and countless hundreds of millions, constructing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the people of that state pretend to live in it, and to be governed by its central institutions. The reality is that the state exists on paper only to the extent that it has no existence in reality.
 
To understand this situation, and the mindset which created it, one has to go back to the conditions in which war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991. The European Union was at that very stage moving towards a post-national future by planning to introduce the euro and a quasi-federal structure. The EU summit at which the Maastricht treaty was decided was the same summit at which the EU announced (under German pressure) that it would recognise the secessionist states of Croatia and Slovenia. Having tried to micro-manage the Yugoslav crisis from the very beginning – it had sponsored the Brioni agreement of 7th July 1991, within days of the end of the war in Slovenia – the EU’s announcement of recognition ensured that the secessionist states knew they could count on international support for their secession. This in turn therefore delivered the coup de grâce to any hope that the institutions of federal Yugoslavia themselves might be used to broke an agreement between the republics and thereby ensured the destruction of that state.
 
From that point on, the EU and the West’s policy was as surreal as only post-modern politics can be. On the one hand, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was excoriated, and the nationalist movements in Slovenia and especially Croatia – which explicitly constituted themselves as mono-ethnic states – were regarded as the European future. On the other hand, Bosnia-Herzegovina was elevated to an icon of multiculturalism by the New Left in Eastern and Western Europe, which replaced its Marxist faith with a new internationalism, that of “Europe”. Yugo-nostalgics tossed Yugoslavia itself aside as soon as the Serbs started to complain about the 1974 constitution, which significantly and artificially weakened that republic, and they adopted instead Bosnia-Herzegovina as their model of a tolerant, multi-ethnic state: mini-Yugoslavia. Anyone opposed to the sudden appearance on the European map of a new political entity which had never existed in history – the Serbs for instance – was anathematised as reactionary and dangerous. Bosnia was welcomed precisely because, like the EU itself, it was a purely constructivist project, with the fact that its government was Muslim adding an appealing radical chic to the whole idea.
 
For the next three years, the West insisted that the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia-Herzegovina remain united, although it had agitated for the destruction of the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia. As a result of this fundamental contradiction, the war in Bosnia lasted three years whereas it might have been over in three months or three weeks if Bosnia had been allowed to collapse. Even after the fighting was over, the West continued with its make-believe that the intervention in 1992 had been successful and the multi-ethnic Bosnia had a future. The Dayton agreement forced on the three parties in 1995 consisted in getting everyone to agree to remain inside the new bogus state on condition that they were not, in fact, governed by its central institutions.
 
They are governed instead by the unelected High Representative who has the power to pass laws by decree and to sack elected politicians. Although this power is considerable, and shocking in a regime which is supposed to be ensuring Bosnia’s transition to democracy and EU membership (for which, incidentally, as a bogus artificial state governed by bureaucrats and subsidies, it is perfectly suited), the fact is that the regime created at Dayton bears as much resemblance to, and has as much connection with, the actual daily life of people in Bosnia as did the British Raj in the 1930s, so hilariously described by the great journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for The Calcutta Statesman for a while. Muggeridge describes the way the entire administration withdrew to the cool hill-station at Simla during the summer, a sort of colonial version of Thomas Mann’s magic mountain. Muggeridge wrote,

I doubt if any government has ever existed so cut off from the governed as the Government of India nestling among the Himalayas in Simla. Up there, we might read of rioting, or famines in the plains below, or – as happened when I was in Simla – a ferocious earthquake in Quetta but these disasters were far, far away and scarcely impinged on us. For researchers into the nature of government, Simla provided a unique opportunity for studying one in isolation; examining it, as it were, under the microscope; without any confusing involvement in side issues, such as people, or demagogy, or armed forces, or taxes. It was government pure and undefiled; endlessly minuting and circulating files, which, like time itself, had no beginning nor end but just were.

 
This is what Ashdown wanted in Kabul, just over the mountains from Simla: a latter-day Raj in which he could do what, according to a Bosnian Serb journalist I met in Banja Luka, said he had done in Bosnia: nothing except commission a report saying how well he had done. Unfortunately, as Napoleon’s armies discovered in the Peninsular War (1807-1814), there is very little that a highly organised, technologically advanced fighting machine like the Grande Armée in Spain or NATO in Afghanistan can do against dedicated irregular partisans: the word “guerrilla” dates precisely from this period. The Afghans have demonstrated the terrible truth of this ever since, defeating every invading army from the British in 1842 (when they murdered over 10,000 British colonists, leaving only one wounded doctor, William Brydon, to limp in to Jalalabad to tell the tale) to the Red Army in 1988.
 
The difference between Bosnia and Afghanistan, in other words, is that Bosnia was actually at peace from 1995 onwards, while Afghanistan is still at war. That makes all the difference – but it is a difference overlooked in the fairy-tale world of Western political operators like Ashdown in particular and the West in general.