Swords and Ploughshares by Paddy Ashdown

Can foreigners - whether soldiers, lawyers, engineers or administrators - contribute anything useful to the reconstruction of damaged societies? This basic question needs to be addressed in the wake of all the recent experience of latter-day colonialism. In the post-Cold War years, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq have all witnessed outside presences intended to help them to build stable and benign government. Has any of this really worked?

Paddy Ashdown is an unusually attractive political figure, and well qualified to address this question. He is no political theorist, whether of state-building or international administration, and does not pretend to be. But he has experience of such issues not just as a politician but also in other aspects of his life. Coming from Belfast and of mixed Catholic/Protestant parentage, he is sensitive to issues of nationality and identity. As a soldier, he served with the Royal Marines in Kenya, Kuwait, Borneo and Northern Ireland. As a Liberal Democrat MP and then as UN High Representative in Bosnia, he was directly involved in the issues addressed here. In short, this book is a distillation of experience, and all the better for that. Its factual errors, of which there are worryingly many, do not detract from its basic strength.

What makes Ashdown attractive is his down-to-earth approach, his independence, and his frankness. He admits that in 1992 he got involved in Bosnia because he was bored - the period immediately after General Elections being a honeymoon for governments, and most deadly for opposition politicians. During the war in Bosnia in 1992-95, he achieved something: he regularly travelled there, reaching the clear conclusion that a stronger UN and Nato policy, backing up words with deeds, was needed. He then helped in a modest way to bring about a changed Western policy in summer 1995, which contributed to the ending of the war and the Dayton Accords.

Similarly, when in 2002 he was given the glorious title, straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan, of High Representative for Bosnia, his approach was clear-minded and practical. The irony of the situation did not escape him. Here he was, a leading liberal politician, who never held government office in his own country, in a position of unelected quasi-power in a small Balkan state. He spent a great deal of time travelling around, talking with people, explaining what he was trying to achieve and listening to their concerns. In other words, he acted as a politician, not an administrator, and a good thing too. He was less concerned with papers than with getting things done.

This book is his opportunity to say what he thinks about international administration, not just in Bosnia but generally. He recognises that he has an uphill task: Iraq has mercilessly exposed the hubris and stupidity of much American and British thought about spreading beneficent political ideas to oppressed peoples. He is properly scathing in his account of the US failure to plan for the administration of Iraq. The question any citizen must ask today is: has anything of this colonial role in any post-Cold War intervention worked?

Here, at a time when we in Britain might be at risk of swinging from Blair's excess of interventionism to an equally damaging extreme of endemic non-interventionism, Ashdown sets down clearly some important propositions. The first and most fundamental is that there remains a need for international efforts at state-building. He is consistently clear that outside powers cannot simply ignore problems of state-failure and post-conflict reconstruction. If such problems are left to fester, the results will return to haunt us, as they did in the case of Afghanistan when left to its own (and the Taliban's) devices after the departure of the Red Army in 1989.

Ashdown's second key conclusion is that some valuable results have been achieved by international administrative assistance. East Timor is one such case: despite the setback in 2006 when the UN had to authorise a re-intervention, the role of the UN and Australia in assisting the creation of a new state was positive. Similarly in Bosnia, the extensive - albeit ill-planned - role of outsiders since 1995 has helped to prevent a reversion to war, and has started a deeply divided community on a road that leads, potentially, to EU and Nato membership.

The third and most important conclusion is that international assistance in state-building needs to be stripped of lazy political rhetoric and cultural blinkers. Ashdown is scathing about the shallow Western belief that holding elections is the key proof of advance towards democracy. He reminds us that, in occupied Germany after 1945, it took four years to lay the groundwork for the elections. Indeed, elections can be damaging if they do not take place in a framework of honest institutions and an impartial judiciary. They may merely reinforce the cronyism of government and the depth of ethnic divisions in a society.

For a liberal politician, Ashdown is notably tough in his criticism of Western liberal assumptions: "Huge amounts of money were wasted in Bosnia importing well-meaning Guardian readers from Hampstead Garden Suburb to set up NGOs and civil society organisations. They made precisely no impact apart from creating handy employment for the middle classes." Lawyers are particularly criticised for failures of imagination: "When I arrived in Bosnia I found a young group of committed, hard-working, highly talented international lawyers writing the new criminal codes for the country based on English common law. Their product... had no connection whatsoever with the established traditions of Balkan and ex-Yugoslav law, or with the European legal system into which the country's judicial structures were going to have to fit."

From all this follows the book's central conclusion: that planning for the post-conflict phase is no mere add-on, but should be an integral part of all political and military planning for international action in divided communities. There should be no models or templates; every divided society is divided in its own way. There must be involvement of neighbouring states. There must also be an attempt to get agreement of local and regional partners about the goals of the international assistance. All these lessons were shockingly ignored in Iraq - but it may not be too late to take them into account in other cases, including that key case where they have been applied in part but not as a whole: Afghanistan.

Adam Roberts is professor of international relations at Oxford University