From Chechnya to Kosovo

I spent most of last week in Kosovo, where my Centre is going to help run a project on behalf of the UN. Needless to say, going to a place that came out of a major conflict only a few years ago was always going to be an intense experience. On the one hand, it was heartening to see how hard people are working on making the best of Kosovo’s uncertain future. Small business is booming, and the countryside is full of building sites. On the other hand, it is clear that none of this would be possible without the presence of thousands of international peacekeepers and civilian staff from various UN agencies, the OSCE and the European Union. As much as the locals have come to resent the presence of the ‘internationals’ for merely keeping the lid on, most of them realise that – were they to withdraw tomorrow – Kosovo would quickly turn into a haven for organised crime, with rampant corruption and chronic ethnic tensions. Arguably, this is where post-conflict reconstruction and nation-building become part of the fight against terrorism. Unlike the Cold War, when terrorist groups were sponsored by states and used as pawns in the great game between the two superpowers, terrorists nowadays have the means to do it all on their own. Indeed, they can become as effective as their Cold War predecessors when they have a 'weak' or failed state in which to settle down. Just consider Osama bin Laden’s network. Mobile phones and the internet made it possible for him to maintain control of an elusive network that moved its headquarters across continents. Money came from individual donors and, thanks to globalisation, could be transferred all across the globe. By the end of the 1990s, with Al Qaeda entrenched in Afghanistan under the Taleban, rather than state sponsored terrorism, one had a terrorist sponsored state. The lesson is simple. If we want to avoid that nightmare from recurring, we better watch out for potentially weak states such as Kosovo. They are breeding grounds for terrorism, not because their inhabitants may be susceptible to the terrorists’ ideology (which I don’t think the people of Kosovo are), but because they can provide the terrorists with a territorial base from which to plan and plot. If those states also happen to be centres for organised crime, the combination can – literally – be explosive. The worst case scenario is Chechnya. In the mid 1990s, when jihadists moved into the Russian Republic – hijacking what had essentially been a separatist struggle with few, if any, religious connotations – they were surprised to discover that this was not only the site of a vicious conflict, but that it had been allowed to develop into a major centre for drug and arms trafficking. A UN official once told me that, if he was a terrorist bent on getting hold of a nuclear weapon, Chechnya would be the place to find it. Kosovo, of course, is far from becoming a second Chechnya. But this remains true only as long as the ‘internationals’ are holding the ring. Once they leave – and indeed, at some point there will have to be an orderly transfer of power – Kosovo will rely on its own. In the case of Kosovo, this means that the ‘internationals’ need to switch – rather quickly, one may add – from keeping the lid to becoming serious about building capacity for good government. The more general point is that fighting terrorism cannot be divorced from the wider political project of helping troubled places like Kosovo develop into stable, well-governed entities. If we fail in that mission, the consequences will come to haunt us.