I was over at the UK's international development department (DFID) today, talking about the current British attempts to 'join up' military and civilian efforts in world trouble-spots.

As I was looking at these questions with both the benefit of years of insider experience and now the irresponsibility of non-office, it occurred to me that any given policy is based upon geological layers of assumptions. Some of these go unquestioned, partly because even to question them opens unfathomable new complications (see Kurds/Iraq/Turkey passim), but also partly because we have forgotten they are there at all.

So lots of attention is being given now to 'failed states' - eek, how to stop them failing? See William Hague's significant recent speech on Conservative foreign policy themes. 

But what is the right question here? Is there a case for accelerating their failure, to set up something totally different? Should states which can not manage internal ethno-religious rivalries without massive violence simply be divided into whatever new smaller units might have some prospect of being run coherently, or taken over in whole or part by their more stable neighbours?

Another basic philosophical issue is the role of local 'strong men' (and they almost always are men, not women).

Do you try to cut deals with them as the only realistic chance of getting some local stability, a pre-condition for any sort of development emerging? And perhaps too as the only way to 'contain' a problem, if one has concluded that resolving it is simply too difficult? That tends to be the view of other Asian countries towards the Burma regime.

The problem then is that the Strong Men end up oppressing whatever passes for the local moderate forces, with their legitimacy undeservedly boosted through our engagement with them. The territory tends to stay nasty and brutish indefinitely, and perhaps not in fact much more stable anyway? See Zimbabwe.

But if you decide to tackle the worst Strong Men, what if it turns out that they are stronger than you thought and can fight better to defend themselves and their interests in and around their territory than you can? And/or they expect that you will want to give up and go home eventually, leaving things still in their favour? See the Milosevic example. Or Belarus/Cuba. And Iraq. 

Hence the latest ideas being floated that in Afghanistan 'we need to talk to moderate elements of the Taleban', and the parallel idea of talking to moderate extremists within Hamas ranks.

I wrote about the Afghanistan angle back in March as Holbrooke reappeared on the scene.

You have to make the best of a bad job in coping with the problems caused by these dismal countries. If that leads you towards a broad lowest common denominator policy of 'containment', so be it.

But don't be surprised if the moderate Talebans turn out to be pretty irrelevant, unable by virtue of their very 'moderation' to bring along with them into peaceful nation-building the numbers of hard-core fighters needed to make a difference.

Or the moderates quickly end up dead.