One of the most interesting speakers at the recent Chatham House conference which I mentioned here, was a guy I hadn’t heard of before called Philip Wilkinson. Wilkinson had a long background in the army, including the commandos, paras, and special forces, before specialising particularly in counter-insurgency and supporting the development of peace in post-conflict situations, including in Afghanistan, advising the UN, and he is now an associate fellow at Chatham House itself.

He said a number of things of interest to me, but what really grabbed my attention was what was I think his central theme, that in the twenty-first century politics and the military have become too separate. He argued powerfully that because politicians and those engaged in the political dialogue generally rarely now have personal experience of the military, they have a wrong understanding, mostly an exaggerated one, of the sorts and scale of problems that military action can solve. They forget that while military action can certainly be useful, it needs to be fitted within a policy context, with defined political and strategic objectives. The obvious examples to demonstrate this are Afghanistan and Iraq: it’s all very well sending in the military to defeat the government already there, but there’s no point doing that - and indeed you will fail - unless you have some idea what it is you’re actually trying to achieve and what you’re going to do there once the guns have fallen silent.

Of course in general this point - as his adducing of Clausewitz’s familiar point that “War is the continuation of politics by other means” to support it showed - is not new.

But he does seem quite right that this is very relevant now.

For as intervention in other countries has come on to the agenda since the end of the Cold War, this point does seem to have been often forgotten.

The prominence with which Bush and Blair’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone wrong will perhaps help to ensure that we do learn some of the necessary lessons: specifically that when you are intervening in another country, you ensure that once the conflict is over you give the local population what they really need, most of all the rule of law but also the basic commodities of life, and that you do so pretty sharpish.

And we do need to make sure we learn these lessons. For it seems to me that, notwithstanding Iraq, the slow impetus in favour of the general principle of liberal interventionism which has been developing over the last twenty years, has not stopped. (I have commented on Blair’s view of this, and I think his famous 1999 Chicago speech was along the right lines). The growing demand in the West for active intervention in Darfur seems to show this.

Personally I think this is a good thing: the growing post-Cold War view that Westphalian principles of non-intervention in another state should not stop us taking action to defend individuals even against actions done by their own government, is both right and (in a British and philosophical sense, rather than only an American sense) liberal.

But clearly if we are going to do this then we need to do it right.

And I was less sure of one of the places that this argument took Wilkinson - or perhaps rather it was more complex than the point I understood him to be making.

For he also made the point quite strongly, and - by the standards of debate at Chatham House - even quite trenchantly, that when it comes to certain sorts of action (he gave the example of peacekeeping operations), senior military commanders, after Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the Balkans, not to mention after decades in Northern Ireland, have far more experience and success on the ground under their belts, than people in Whitehall, and specifically than politicians. But yet it is the politicians who seek to direct operations, according to political criteria and on terms which are part of political rather than military discourse. It is, he suggested, quite wrong to have these kinds of decisions taken by “inexperienced junior ministers” rather than experienced senior military commanders.

Of course at one level, we can all see he is right: generally speaking if you want something important done well then you ask people who know what they are doing to do it, not amateurs.

And it struck me that this claim for military decision-making is much the same as that made by, say, teachers on education policy or health managers and doctors on health policy. They also can often be heard insisting that policy be made properly by people trained over years to be professionals, rather than simply politicians who by the nature of their role are necessarily not experts in that area.

As I say, obviously at one level they are right.

But they are also at one level wrong. For one of the features of democratic control of any system, is that it should ultimately be under the control of ordinary people - mediated through the people that they select at the ballot box to make decisions on their behalf.

This can of course be immensely frustrating for anyone working in a professional area - from deciding the best way to structure a health service, to town planning. And, we should be clear too, it will lead sometimes to less than the most efficient decision being made. But the over-riding deal is that we accept that under our system - democracy - it is more important that the decisions are made that command support, than those which are regarded as right by the technically expert. And of course within the political dialogue the voice of the expert carries a lot of weight - although this is perhaps one sense in which the position of the military differs from that of, say, teachers: teachers are very used to making their voice heard very clearly in public when they think something is wrong, whereas the military traditionally have a different culture - though this is something that we have seen changing this year, particularly in the hands of the current Chief of the Defence Staff.

In fact of course within our relatively advanced democracies we have perfectly good ways, when we want to make them work, of drawing a line between the technical, the sphere of the professional expert, and the strategic choices which are properly the concern of the public and politicians. Whether the public want a hospital locally and are prepared to pay for it, for example, is a political choice; the treatments that patients within it should receive, however, is clearly technical and not decisions that you would be well-advised to seek an uninformed amateur opinion on.

In Philip Wilkinson’s fifteen-minute presentation on a range of things, I wasn’t able to discern exactly where he was arguing the line should be drawn. Clearly there are decisions about how best to implement peace-keeping which are of a technical nature, and where politicians should not be interfering in the experience of the commander on the ground. But it is also clear to me that there are areas where, however, our system requires that strategic objectives and choices be made by people accountable to the public, and not only by professionals.

This does however bring us back to Wilkinson’s previous point, about the divorce of the political dialogue from the military, and the need for the one to be better informed by the other. And a few other contributors also went out of their way to agree with him that the senior military are now seriously worried about this cleavage.

He certainly seems right that the respective responsibilities of professional and political decision-making needs to be clearer, and that there are times, on the experience of the last few years, when politicians should focus less on involving themselves in decisions of professional detail, and more in being clearer in their proper arena of the strategy and policy objectives they want out of a particular intervention.