Global Policy Forum

By Daniel Bergner*

"Listennnn to me!" the British captain bellowed in a jungle clearing. He stood on a hillside above a thousand Sierra Leonean troops, whose country was being ravaged by a civil war of staggering brutality, with villagers locked into huts and burned alive, with child soldiers hacking off the hands of civilians, then letting them live as the ultimate message of terror. The British had just arrived on a mission of rescue, hoping to stabilize their former colony. That was three years ago.

Today, an era of equally horrific anarchy and violence keeps its claim on neighboring Liberia. Some 2,300 United States marines float on warships off that country's shore — their commitment to peace-building unclear, their presence tentative. Within days, the ships will likely pull anchor and sail away, and Washington will essentially leave Liberia's chances for peace to the United Nations. This is the moment to listen to the story of the British intervention in Sierra Leone — for its lessons on why the United States should remain and assert itself in Liberia. If we don't, there may be a terrible cost, not only for one country, but for much of its continent.

The similarities between the two African nations are countless: from their beginnings (as havens for former slaves and harbors where Britain and the United States could unload free blacks), to their size (tiny) and strategic significance to the West (minimal), to the longing of their people for Western intervention (just as Sierra Leoneans welcomed back "our fathers" when the British landed in 2000, Liberians are calling out to their "big brothers," the Americans who founded their country two centuries ago). And the implosions of the two nations are intertwined. Sierra Leone's civil war began with a rebel army based in Liberia. That army set off a decade-long conflagration, mostly devoid of ideology or even tribal logic, in which Sierra Leonean government troops as well as rebel soldiers raped and incinerated civilians on a massive scale.

Into this madness the British sent about 800 troops. A Nigerian-led intervention force as well as a huge deployment of United Nations peacekeepers — the very same armies that Washington now hopes will establish calm in Liberia and will quiet the calls for the commitment of United States soldiers — had, in Sierra Leone, already failed to bring order. The Nigerians had brought brutality of their own. Ten thousand United Nations troops had brought little more than ineptitude. Just before the British rushed ashore, several hundred United Nations soldiers were taken hostage by the rebels.

The British declared that they would "sort out" Sierra Leone. There was arrogance in that assertion. There was self-delusion. But there has also been success, both in creating peace and starting to nation-build — accomplishments that should be recognized by any Western nation debating whether to stay away or try to address Africa's harrowing problems.

The British captain in the jungle was training a new national army, a force meant to drive the enemy toward surrender, to guarantee the security of civilians, to protect Sierra Leone's besieged democratic president. "Listennnn to me!" was followed by a deafening eruption of British heavy machine guns and mortars. Such displays were a way not only to instill confidence and obedience in the awed trainees but, as word spread, to cow an unsophisticated enemy. Showmanship, in this region where military skill and equipment are scarce, played an easy and effective part in the British effort.

But showmanship was mixed with true engagement. The British beat back a rebel assault near the national airport. They patrolled a buffer zone around the capital and spread upcountry. As I reported on the war, I asked their command whether the British would leave if they experienced casualties, as had happened with the United States in Somalia. The answer was no. Weeks later, 11 British soldiers were taken captive. The helicopter barrage and ground attack that freed them destroyed a predatory militia, but left 12 British wounded and one dead. The British stayed in Sierra Leone. Their resolve, and the perception that they could not be deterred, led to a gradual laying down of arms and to peaceful elections last year. In the end — with Britain's one combat fatality — it hadn't taken much.

Success has been far from complete. The British have themselves run the national police force and overseen the country's finances for long periods during the past few years, yet the rule of law remains a wish and corruption debilitating. The war may be finished, but nothing feels stable. The deep transformations of nation-building, a British colonel who led the intervention wrote me last week, will be a 20-year project, one he hopes his government will adhere to. Still, there is this bottom line: people are no longer being mutilated by soldiers' axes and machetes.

In Liberia, the United States has a chance to bring similar change. With a recent cease-fire agreement and the exile of President Charles Taylor, fighting has stopped in the capital, Monrovia, but the nation is split between three armies that continue to clash with each other and raid villages, extending more than a decade of war. Thousands have fled their homes, fearing widespread atrocities. Speaking of the countryside's rampaging soldiers, one woman told Human Rights Watch: "They catch you and beat you and rape you. The men go hide because when they see the men they cut them in pieces, pieces, pieces." Refugees ask aid groups not to deliver food to their camps, for fear that soldiers, drawn to loot, will do far worse.

If the British experience is any sign, American engagement could steady the country. Yet the United States has kept itself suspended between involvement and disappearance, floating at a safe distance from the coast. It allows about 100 soldiers to operate on land; they do little more than guard our embassy. And it talks of its ships and nearly all its troops leaving the area as soon as this week, with the United Nations starting to set up a peacekeeping operation — as though the Bush administration sees anything in the United Nations' record in Sierra Leone, Rwanda or Congo to give comfort.

By exhibiting such lack of resolve, the United States has relinquished what any Western peace-making mission can easily have on its side in most of sub-Saharan Africa: the aspect of intimidation the British relied on in Sierra Leone. And by involving itself so timidly, the final achievement of the United States in Liberia could well be worse than nothing. For there may be the vague perception of effort on the part of the United States without the reality. So, if full-scale war explodes once again in Liberia, it will seem as though intervention failed when in fact it wasn't tried. The prevailing American sentiment — that there is nothing to be done about Africa's self-destruction — will appear confirmed. More war in Liberia could stir chaos in the volatile countries that surround it, compounding the belief that Africa is a nether world beyond help.

We are, of course, heavily committed elsewhere. But the immediate mission needed in Liberia, a nation where we have historical ties and where the people yearn for our engagement, would be minuscule compared with our role in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Because of Liberia's size and receptivity, the longer project of nation-building might be easier as well.) No, we have no urgent self-interest in Liberia, no reason to deploy those floating troops beyond what the British found sufficient: that it is the right thing to do. Once, in Sierra Leone, I listened to a man recalling the cries of people being burned alive inside a hut. "Heeewh! Heeeewh! Heeeeewh!" was the closest he could come to evoking the sounds. Some of the cries belonged to his daughters. In Liberia, those are the kinds of sounds we could readily stop.

*Daniel Bergner is author of "In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa."

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