Your colleague is wrong to say that East Timor should sort this out themselves — the reason they asked for foreign aid is that they can’t! — but needing foreign troops for what seems (to me) a relatively straightforward case of civil unrest does raise some worrying questions.

I agree with you entirely that we should be helping East Timor out. But I think the crux of the concerns of many people, myself included, is that we should have focussed on other forms of help, like improving education and promoting stable government, so that they are able to deal with their own problems. It worries me that East Timor is no less poverty-stricken now than it was in 1999, for instance …