The case for warlords

Washington Times:

Warlords may be getting a bad rap.
Amid a furor over suspected U.S. payments to local militia leaders battling Islamists in Somalia, some policy analysts are arguing that not all warlords are created equal, and some may even be vital in advancing U.S. foreign policy goals.
John C. Hulsman, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, and Alexis Y. Debat, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, go even farther, saying some of America's most glaring recent policy reverses can be blamed in part on the failure to work with local warlords.
"When looked at in the glare of reality, America's state-building record in the post-Cold War era is dreadful because of our reflexive antipathy for warlords and our unwillingness to co-opt them," they write in an essay for the journal "The National Interest," to be published next week.
In Haiti, they say, support for U.S.-backed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, installed in 2001, quickly crumbled because of the regime's failure to draw in the leaders of the island's other powerful factions.
In Iraq, the pre-war U.S. tilt toward exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi over Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani -- described by the authors as a "spiritual warlord" in Iraq -- crippled early efforts to build a legitimate post-Saddam government.
By contrast, in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led war in 2001-2002 against the Taliban relied heavily on backing from Afghan warlords in the Northern Alliance and elsewhere. The new government of President Hamid Karzai, while fragile, has "a genuine chance for stability that the Bush administration cannot even afford to dream about in Iraq," the analysts write.
Warlords have had a poor reputation with policy-makers, human rights activists and political scientists since the term was first coined to describe the regional power barons who divided and dominated China in the early decades of the 20th century.

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They did bring King John to heel in England too, producing a document that stated certain rights that the king had to recognize.