Quotes of the Day

President Bush, on his recent Africa trip, expressed concern to help rescue Liberia from its catastrophic civil war, but on the understanding that U.S. role would be limited and finite, and also that the region's political actors would honor their pledges — the combatants would cease firing, President Charles Taylor would go into exile, and Nigeria would lead a West African peacekeeping force into the war-torn country. None of those pledges have been kept, thus far, but the humanitarian situation in the West African nation is growing more desperate by the day. Hundreds of innocents have been killed in the past week, alone, as rebel forces fight for control of the capital, which is running out of food and drinking water. Responding to the mounting crisis, and the expectation of U.S. action encouraged by President Bush's earlier statements, the President on Friday ordered American warships to deploy off Liberia's coast. He stressed, however, that the U.S. military would be there simply to facilitate the arrival of the West African peacekeeping force sent by the regional security body ECOWAS: "Our commitment is to enable ECOWAS to go in," the President said. "And the Pentagon will make it clear over time what that means." The UN, he added, would be expected to relieve American forces "in short order."

Bush's emphasis on the limits in scope and duration of any U.S. involvement is hardly surprising. He came into office eschewing the idea of using the U.S. military on open-ended peacekeeping and nation-building operations, and to many in Washington Liberia looks like a slippery slope. "It's not a pretty situation," Joints Chiefs chairman General Richard Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. "It's not going to give way to any instant fix. Whatever the fix is going to be is going to have to be a long-term fix."

Military planners are concerned that the idea of a limited mission is premised on a cease-fire between the government and rebel forces, on Taylor's immediate departure and on ECOWAS shouldering the bulk of the peacekeeping burden — and that each of those premises could prove to be faulty. If so, then the world's superpower will face growing moral pressure to use its forces on the ground to take a more direct, and more open-ended role. Liberian expectations of U.S. help were raised to euphoric proportions by early signals of U.S. concern, and this week outraged Monrovians have been piling the bodies of slain innocents outside the U.S. embassy in the capital to underscore their anger that "big brother" has not come.

The repeated breakdown of cease-fire agreements has raised troubling questions over the nature of the peacekeeping mission both for Washington and for the ECOWAS. The mission was conceived on the basis of an agreement brokered in Ghana by West African diplomats between Taylor's government and rebel forces seeking to overthrow him, but fighting resumed more than a week ago with each side accusing the other of treachery. The latest rebel assaults on the capital marks the failure of a new cease-fire announced by rebel leaders in Ghana on Wednesday, raising questions over whether the are able to ensure compliance among their field commanders and troops. On Friday, the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) announced its third cease-fire since June 17, but warned that its fighters would aggressively defend the advances they made on the capital in recent weeks.

Taylor, meanwhile, has tarried in Monrovia, regularly changing the date and the conditions for his departure. Although he's been indicted for war crimes by an international court in neighboring Sierra Leone, he has been offered asylum in Nigeria. But he has maintained throughout that he won't leave before peacekeepers arrive to protect the capital, and has also hinted that he's feeling growing pressure from his supporters to renege on his agreement to leave. Rebel commanders, meanwhile, scoff at Taylor's promises to leave, and some have previously warned they'll fire on any foreign troops who arrive while Taylor remains in power.

Nigeria has moved slowly and cautiously over deploying its forces in Liberia, particularly while there has been no peace to keep. Right now, the mission may look a lot more like peacemaking than peacekeeping, requiring a more robust confrontation with some of the combatants. The current plan is for a battalion of 770 Nigerian troops currently keeping the peace in Sierra Leone to be sent to Monrovia one week from now, to be joined later by a second battalion. In that time, of course, thousands more civilians could die in the crossfire or of hunger, thirst and disease. Or rebel forces could capture the capital, setting off a chaotic wave of violence and retribution.

Having signaled its desire to help, the U.S. has created high expectations in the region at the same time as the mission itself has become more difficult and open-ended. Liberians and their neighbors can't understand why the superpower is hesitant to confront a lightly-armed rebel force that could be easily put to flight by a couple of hundred Marines. And while Washington insists that the primary responsibility rests with the West Africans, in the eyes of ordinary Liberians, the military prowess the U.S. is exhibiting in many parts of the globe right now works against its insistence on playing second fiddle to the Nigerians. Liberians' expectations of American help can quickly turn into resentment, and even domestically, African-American politicians are already attributing the administration's hesitation on Liberia to racism.

But General Myers raised three key concerns on Capitol Hill that give pause to the administration, and to lawmakers: Is the mission clearly defined; is there a clear exit strategy; and will sufficient force be deployed to accomplish the mission? The mission may be clearly defined, in the administration's mind, as simply aiding and abetting a West African peacekeeping force, but it's not difficult to imagine circumstances that force a U.S. contingent on the ground to greatly expand its role — and with such expansion, also raise the troop strength required to ensure security. Regarding the exit strategy, General Myers' warning that there's no "quick fix" for Liberia's problem refers to the sociology of West Africa's civil wars of the past decade. Many of the architects of these wars — none more so than Taylor himself — have amassed fortunes by using their armies to accumulate resources. (Sometimes, even Nigerian peacekeepers have been accused of doing the same.) And many of the footsoldiers of those civil wars are young men recruited in their teens for whom warfare has provided a way of life — a community, an identity and a way of making a living in a torn and impoverished society, in which their prospects for civilian employment are negligible. Without a long-term development program, the peace in West Africa is always going to look tenuous.

Advocates of intervention disagree with Myers' gloomy assessment, saying Liberians have exhausted themselves at war and the example of neighboring Sierra Leone shows the power of even a limited intervention by professional troops from abroad — several hundred British troops have played a key role in ending that country's vicious civil war, and maintaining stability over the past three years alongside West African peacekeepers.

Relying on Nigerian forces may pose problems of a different type, particularly if the situation is volatile. In previous peacekeeping missions both in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nigerian troops didn't always fight by the Queensberry rules, with numerous allegations of corruption and human rights violations. Just this week, Human Rights watch published a report charging that the Nigerian army and police had summarily executed a number of their own citizens on the streets of Kaduna last November, as they moved to subdue riots sparked by the Miss World competition. The U.S. military will want to avoid being tainted by association if things turn ugly, but at the same time the Nigerians are the only regional power capable of wielding forces capable of doing the job.

Some Republican lawmakers are skeptical of the U.S. becoming embroiled in a country in which it has no direct strategic interest, although advocates make the case that instability tends to jump West Africa's borders, and that the U.S. oil interests in the wider region, and the need to combat al-Qaeda's stated intention to make it a base of operations, give Washington an interest in preventing the collapse of any of the states of the region. That may be why the administration is now moving to help, but on a strictly limited and conditional basis. The fear, however, is that if the U.S. accepts to responsibility for helping out and the situation continues to deteriorate, the expectation is already there that the U.S. will do more. After all, there's no question that it's well within America's military capability to enforce the peace in Liberia. But that may be precisely what has Washington worried.

• Tony Karon
• Humanitarian crisis threatens the West African nation, but the U.S. fears being left holding the baby