Hi Folks,

Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
As I recall, the RCMP was created to conduct what could be called "distant law enforcement" in regions that might not yet have any local government.
Pretty close, Steve. There was also a serious motive to project sovereignty into the former HBC lands that now make up Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, The NWT, the Yukon and Nunuvut. Here's a link to the RCMP history site that goes into some decent detail.

Slaps' points are crucial and need to be pulled out a bit.
  1. The first and most important is what is the law that you intend to enforce?
  2. How do you intend to communicate that to the target population?
These two questions alone show the differences between Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, you had operational local governments that were allies against the Taliban (e.g. the Northern Alliance, various local tribal leaders, etc.). Maybe not very operational, but...

This means that they already had legal systems in place and operational within their areas of control along with enforcement systems. They may not have been "real" for many Western countries, but the certainly existed. So, would they be thrown out in favour of an imposed "solution"? There are some pretty serious political implications to doing that.

Iraq was a different situation, at least initially, and based on conquest (excluding Kurdistan). Martial law could and should have been established, along the German Occupation model, from the very start, and the failure to do so has led to all sorts of problems. "Local" legal systems and enforcement systems evolved in response to the vacuum with all sorts of predictable results (i.e. hit squads, militias, etc.). Without a coherent, communicated and locally accepted legal system in place, the way was open for local soi disant powerbrokers to create their own.

The implications for rule of law and policing are pretty clear - rule of what law? Policing by what means? Also the inevitable conflicts between local "legal" systems and those produced by the central government and/or any proconsuls, etc.