The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (37 page)

To both French and British doctrine writers – seeking to draw wider lessons in the aftermath of the operation – the events represented a form of ‘impartial enforcement’, that is, a decision to respond forcefully to violations of UN mandates irrespective of who was violating or undermining it. This is not of course what happened. Instead, the Council – with the US in the lead – decided to take sides in the conflict. The steps that this involved unquestionably cleared the way for a speedier end to the war and were followed by a political settlement and a ceasefire that has proved more durable than many dared to hope at the time. There was
nothing impartial, however, about the role played by external actors in securing this outcome, nor did it represent an option that had ‘always’ been available to UN forces.

The wider lesson here, as the aforementioned case of Namibia also showed, is that the use of force may be necessary to prevent a more catastrophic development from occurring; it may also assist in bringing protracted fighting to an end and is likely to involve politically controversial and often morally complex choices. In the end, Croatia’s military success in August 1995 was crucially dependent on the support of one of the permanent Council members, the US, and the tacit acquiescence of others; by that time, Council members had also agreed to address the vulnerabilities and most obvious weaknesses of UNPROFOR. The moral calculations involved in that decision, or indeed of the perceived alternative of ‘muddling through another season of fighting, are rarely as uncomplicated as they were portrayed at the time and since by advocates of either option.
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There is a final consideration arising out of the Bosnia case. Divisions within the Council reflected deeper disagreements about the origins and principal cause of the war. Was it simply a case of power-hungry and unscrupulous elites manipulating fears brought about by the collapse of the federation? Or was the war better understood as the outcome of ‘ancient hatreds’ and primordial animosities between ethnic groups, previously suppressed under the enlightened despotism of Tito? Did the recognition of former federal units of Yugoslavia in any event turn the war into a simple case of interstate aggression? On these questions the interests and perspectives of Council members differed, at times sharply, and this made discussions about the use of force – difficult at the best of times – especially divisive.
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Still, the experience in Bosnia showed very clearly that continued insistence on adherence to the core principles of classical peacekeeping in the midst of an ongoing war is deeply problematic, especially if the effect of such an insistence is – whether intentional or not – to preclude other more forceful options from being considered. That lesson appears to have been reinforced by the early experience of the UN mission in Sierra Leone when, in May 2000, RUF attacks and mass
kidnappings of UN personnel threatened its complete collapse.
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In response to these events, the UK despatched a battalion of combat troops to the country. Deployed, in the first instance, to assist in the evacuation of British nationals, these troops also provided an effective deterrent against another rebel assault on Freetown (the RUF attack on the capital in January 1999 had resulted in thousands of deaths) and, generally, helped shore up the faltering UN mission. These actions, as was acknowledged by the Secretary-General at the time, played a critical role in avoiding the collapse of the UN operation and the return to full-scale war.

By the mid-1990s, the experiences of UN peacekeepers in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had decisively punctured the optimism so much in evidence at the Council Summit in January 1992. What followed was a period of operational retrenchment and consolidation, greater wariness on the part of Council with respect to non-consensual operations, and, finally, an effort by the Secretariat to draw lessons from recent activities. Two other developments also appeared to imply an acceptance of the limits of the UN ‘peacekeeping’ model. The first of these has been the growing involvement of the organization in the administration of war-torn territories – that is, in the temporary assumption of governance functions over territory (as seen, most notably, in Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo).
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The second is the increased involvement of regional organizations in ‘peace operations’ and the simultaneous move away from UN peacekeeping duties by traditional troop contributors and, in particular, by the two permanent Council members – UK and France – who had, breaking with the historical pattern, provided substantial numbers of UN peacekeepers in the first half of the 1990s.
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The most systematic effort to draw lessons was undertaken by the aforementioned Brahimi Panel. Its report, released in October 2000, followed on from other studies that had examined individual missions, the most thorough and important of which was the investigation into the fall of the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in July 1995.
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The Brahimi report – which continues to provide the main frame of reference for discussion and reform of peacekeeping capacities within the UN – was concerned both with the ‘means’ and ‘ends’ dimension of UN operations in the 1990s. With respect to the ‘means’ side of the equation – that is, how to improve the resources and managerial capacity of the UN to mount and sustain complex field operations – it identified a series of recommendations addressing, inter alia, the need to speed up the deployment of troops; improve pre-deployment, interdepartmental, and contingency planning (i.e. in advance of Council authorization of a mission); ensure a more efficient organization of field headquarters; and internalize and systemize lessons from previous operations. A surprising number of the ideas and mechanisms proposed by the panel – including the pre-positioning of stocks of equipment, the use of ‘Rapid Deployment Teams’ and a so-called ‘premandate commitment authority (PMCA)’ to reduce financial constraints in the critical, early phase of a mission – have been acted upon.
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In the context of this chapter, however, the more fundamental questions raised by Brahimi and his fellow panellists were those addressed under the headings of ‘peacekeeping doctrine and strategy’ and ‘clear, credible and achievable mandates’. These sections of the report engaged most directly with the deeper causes of the peacekeeping failures in the 1990s. Specifically, they drew attention to risks inherent in Council decision-making becoming increasingly, as the mission wore on, divorced from realities on the ground, making the resulting mandates incapable of translation into realizable military objectives for UN peacekeepers. To avoid this, the panel called for Security Council mandates to be ‘clear, credible and achievable’.
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If these conditions did not obtain, the Secretariat would have to learn to say ‘no’ (or to be more precise, it would have to ‘tell the Security Council what it need[ed] to know, not what it want[ed] to hear’).
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In the event of a deployment, the panel insisted that UN peacekeepers had to be ‘able to carry out their mandates professionally and
successfully and be capable of defending themselves, other mission components and the mission’s mandates with robust rules of engagement’.
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In view of the aversion which the Secretariat has historically evinced in relation to the use of force – to the point of making the very vulnerability of UN personnel a
virtue
because it was seen to reinforce the non-threatening character of its activities – the emphasis on the need for more robust forces, able to respond to events on the ground and defend themselves, was an obvious lesson from the 1990s. The aforementioned note on UNPROFOR’s predicament in late 1994 by Shashi Tharoor, obviously not intended for public consumption, depicted precisely the kind of situation that the panel’s calls for a more ‘robust’ UN presence would seek to avoid. UNPROFOR, Tharoor noted, was ‘in many areas, unable to supply itself, unable to protect the delivery of humanitarian aid, unable to deter attacks, unable to fight for itself and unable to withdraw.
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That said, the Bosnia operation also showed that ‘defending mission mandates’, while it sounds straightforward enough, can become deeply problematic when these have multiplied and in the process also become increasingly contradictory. And this goes to the heart of the Security Council’s role in the drawing up of mandates, a key concern of the panel. The conclusions reached in this respect are neither surprising nor new – a fact that does not diminish their importance or make them any less true. They echo the conclusions reached by writers after the Congo experiences of the early 1960s and similar calls that were made as UN involvement in civil wars deepened in the early 1990s. As one report of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons concluded in June 1993, success depended on ‘a practicable mandate and the support of the Security Council’ and peacekeepers should not be deployed ‘unless there is a reasonable chance of success’.
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Indeed, the report added, ‘it may be necessary for the Council to resist demands, demonstrate that conditions are not propitious, and insist that some method other than peacekeeping should be used.’

In Namibia, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Central America, unity of purpose among Council members did not guarantee success but was a ‘propitious condition’ that helps explain the relative success of those missions. The real difficulty in other cases has arisen when divisions among key member states about how best to respond requires awkward political compromises to be made for mandates to be agreed on at all. In such situations, Saadie Touval’s comments on the
inherent
difficulties for the UN in assuming a mediation role apply equally to the back-and-forth of mandate formulation. ‘Intergovernmental organisations’, as Touval perceptively argues, ‘adopt only those measures on which consensus is possible’.
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As for learning to say ‘no’, this has, unsurprisingly, proved easier said than done. Since the publication of the Brahimi Report, the only mission where the UN Secretariat has successfully argued for a more modest role than that envisaged for it by some Council members was the UN mission to Afghanistan following the (temporary) rout of the Taliban in 2001. In making the case for a limited UN role, Brahimi, fresh from his assignment as panel chairman, played an important role. Appointed special envoy to Afghanistan in October 2001, Brahimi resisted calls for a large and complex peacekeeping force to be sent to Afghanistan, arguing that the Council should ‘not “rush” into Afghanistan with a peacekeeping force that lacks the political and financial support required to succeed’, and expressing the hope that this much at least had been learned from ‘ten years of experience between the Balkans and now.’
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Formally briefing the Council, he recommended against ‘an armed peacekeeping force’, noting that ‘UN peacekeepers have proven most successful when deployed to implement an existing political settlement among willing parties – not to serve as a substitute for one.’
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As the demand for UN operations has again surged, the Security Council has proved less rigorous in applying Brahimi’s criteria of mandate clarity and adequate resource commitment by member states.

While the actions of the Security Council in relation to Iraq in 1990 did much to nourish optimism about the possibilities of a revitalized UN after the Cold War, the prospect of another war in Iraq some twelve years later had precisely the opposite effect. The acrimonious divisions that emerged in late 2002 and early 2003 among the P5 members over the handling of relations with the regime of Saddam Hussein encouraged the view that a period of deadlock in the Council, reminiscent of the Cold War era, would again be the order of the day. Events have turned out very differently. In terms of operational tempo and, more significantly, in terms of the post-Cold War trend towards more complex ‘multidimensional’ missions deployed
in intra-state settings, events in Iraq have, plainly, not had the kind of paralysing effect on the workings of the Council that was widely predicted.
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Since 2003, six new missions have been authorized by the Council, while two existing operations – MONUC in the DRC, and UNIFIL in Lebanon – have been substantially expanded.
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In October 2006, the Secretariat indicated that recent Council activity meant that some 140,000 military and civilian personnel may soon be deployed on UN peacekeeping duties. While these developments have not been accompanied by the kind of euphoria that characterized the early post-Cold War years, they indicate that UN peacekeeping, whether in its more ‘traditional’ or ‘complex’ form, continues to be treated by Council members as a potentially useful instrument at its disposal. In terms of the underlying concerns of this chapter, there are two important aspects to the growth of UN peacekeeping since 2003 that merit attention, as they bring us back to the theme of continuity and break that was posed at the outset.

On the one hand, the Security Council’s involvement in peacekeeping – as evidenced by the mandate(s) given and the resources allocated to a mission – continues to be shaped, for better and worse, by the strategic calculations of the P5 and, depending on the mission, key troops contributors. The reasons for turning to the UN are many, and considerations of power, prestige, and national interest are invariably among them. This reality cannot be wished away and explains why the motives and actions of the P5 in relation to any given operation are rarely straightforward and frequently involve considerations
extraneous
to the conflict which the operation is ostensibly intended to address. The result is often a disconnect, at times glaring, between means made available to UN forces and the proclaimed ends of Security Council involvement.