For example, in the early 1990s, Bosnia’s Muslims wanted their republic to secede from Yugoslavia so that they could establish their own state. However, they knew Serbs in Bosnia and the rest of Yugoslavia, who possessed considerably greater military power, opposed secession, so they initially eschewed secession as suicidal. By 1992, however, the international community had pledged to recognize Bosnia’s independence if it seceded. This led the Muslims to believe that they had a guarantee of humanitarian military intervention if they armed themselves and seceded from Yugoslavia—which they did (with the support of Croats, who mainly hoped to join Croatia). The Serbs retaliated as expected in April 1992, but the international community did not intervene with significant force for more than three years—by which time an estimated 100,000 Bosnian Muslims had been killed and more than 1,000,000 displaced.

A similar scenario played out a few years later in the Serbian province of Kosovo. There the local ethnic Albanian majority sought independence but prudently had hewed to peaceful resistance throughout the early 1990s. Even after an influx of light weapons from neighboring Albania in 1997, most of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, including the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, believed they were no match by themselves for heavily armored Serb forces. However, the rebels expected that if they could provoke the Serbs into retaliating against Albanian civilians, the international community would intervene on their behalf, thereby facilitating independence. The plan played out almost perfectly. The rebels began shooting large numbers of Serb police and civilians in 1997, the Serbs retaliated with a brutal counter- insurgency in 1998, and NATO bombed the Serbs and occupied the province in 1999, establishing Kosovo’s de facto independence. As noted above, however, the intervention also compelled the Serbs to initiate last-ditch ethnic cleansing—displacing about half the province’s Albanians and killing more than 5,000. After Serbia’s defeat, the Albanians took revenge by ethnically cleansing 100,000 Serbs, about half those in the province, while killing hundreds more.

All of this death and displacement on both sides was a direct consequence of the promise of humanitarian intervention. Research in both Bosnia and Kosovo, based on interviews with senior Muslim and Albanian officials who launched the suicidal armed challenges, indicates they would not have done so except for the prospect of such foreign aid. The unavoidable conclusion is that the regime of humanitarian intervention helped to cause the tragic outcomes it intended to prevent, at least in these two cases.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the international community—and especially the United States—has switched its military focus from altruistic humanitarian intervention to a self-interested war against terrorism and proliferation. One unintended side benefit is that rebels no longer expect that they can attract humanitarian intervention by launching provocative armed challenges against states. In today’s security environment, the United States is more likely to view such rebels as international terrorists and to support state retaliation against them. As a result, nascent rebellions by Albanian rebels in Macedonia and southern Serbia have fizzled out, rather than replicating the dynamics of Bosnia and Kosovo. However, when and if the terrorist threat wanes, the international community is likely to pick up the gauntlet of humanitarian intervention once again, and recreate the problem of moral hazard.

A Lesson Learned

The shortcomings of humanitarian military intervention do not mean it should be abandoned as a policy tool. The goal should be to enhance its beneficial potential, while reducing its unintended costs. The conflicts of the 1990s present three major lessons: the speed of violence, the moral hazard of intervention, and the limits of coercive diplomacy. Formulating reforms to address these lessons, however, requires a sober consideration of both the costs and the trade-offs.

The first lesson, based on the lightning pace of the recent violence, is that we need intervention forces that can deploy more quickly. Lighter forces, with fewer heavy weapons and less armor, require fewer cargo flights and thus can save more lives by deploying quicker. However, shedding protective armor and weaponry also would increase casualties among the interveners. Such a trade-off cannot be made lightly.

An alternative is to pre-position troops and their heavy equipment at forward bases closer to where they are most likely to be needed for humanitarian intervention: in Africa. Interventions could be launched from these bases using small military cargo aircraft, which are more plentiful and better able to land at rudimentary African air fields than wide-body inter-continental models. The cargo aircraft could also make several round-trips per day to an intervention from forward bases, rather than one trip every few days from distant US or European bases—radically reducing deployment time from weeks to days. One obstacle, however, is that many Africans oppose foreign military bases as a form of neo-colonialism. An even bigger obstacle is that western states so far have been unwilling to invest in military forces dedicated to missions other than defending their own interests.

In recognition of the West’s lack of will to deploy ground troops to Africa, the United States launched a project in the mid-1990s to train indigenous African forces for humanitarian intervention. This initiative had a reasonable premise—that African states would be more willing to risk the lives of their troops to stop conflict on the continent— but it has several shortcomings. First, there has been little provision of weaponry or combat training, so the African forces are suitable only for the permissive environment of peacekeeping after a conflict ends—and even then only so long as violence does not re-ignite, a common risk. Second, the initiative so far has failed to pre-position heavy weapons, armored personnel carriers, or helicopters at African bases, so that in the event of a crisis such equipment would have to be transported and joined up with intervention forces on an ad hoc, protracted basis. Third, most training has been conducted within national units, so that the few trained forces are unprepared for multi-national coalition operations that would be necessary in any large-scale intervention. In light of these shortcomings, if major civil violence were to break out again in Africa in the future, an all-African force would have little hope of quickly or effectively stopping the killing.