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May 23, 2005

Outsourcing War: the United Nations Troops Get Some Muscle

Today, United Nations "peacekeepers" in the Congo are rolling through the bush in armored vehicles, hunting down renegade militias who want to carry on that country's murderous civil war. And when the new breed of peacekeepers finds those renegades, they shoot them. If you think of United Nations peacekeepers as useless twerps who meekly stand aside to let genocidal thugs kill civilians, you're out of date. A recent RAND study calls UN peacekeepers more successful than American troops at nationbuilding. Sooner or later, the Pentagon may try to call UN troops a good alternative to Americans for occupation duty somewhere. In the Congo today, UN peacekeepers are simply called heroes.

Today's United Nations troops look a lot less like ceremonial Boy Scouts with guns, and a lot more like the developed world's new Foreign Legion. UN troops are being sent against bad guys in the low-intensity wars that are too dull, too dangerous or just too prolonged for America and Europe to commit their own troops. They're not up to American or German standards, but the UN contingents are skilled and equipped enough to overwhelm thugs with guns, and "thugs with guns" is exactly who fights a lot of these nasty drawn-out wars. UN troops are shaping up to be a useful part of the "arsenal of peace" we'd like to have to keep another terrorist-haven Afghanistan from taking shape. They're getting better. And yes, we may even see UN troops in certain roles in Iraq.

Two big changes have transformed the United Nations "blue helmets" from wimps into fighters. First and foremost, the peacekeepers know they'll be shot at, and are ready to shoot back. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies always tried to at least pretend to respect the United Nations forces -- after all, the USA and the USSR each wanted to protect their reputation. But the Serbian thugs in Yugoslavia's civil war had no reputation to protect when they pushed past United Nations troops to kill Bosnian Muslim men and rape Bosnian Muslim women. Ten years' experience of thugs' wars has retrained the peacekeepers. Today the UN commanders and their sponsors know better: they know the thugs will sometmes shoot, and they have their troops ready to show the thugs the difference between a gang that kills the unarmed and an army that trains to kill gunmen.

But there's also been an important shift in which countries lend their soldiers for the more dangerous "robust peacekeeping" missions. The key contingents no longer come from the developed countries, who aren't comfortable sending their soldiers to actually shoot and possibly die under UN command in some country most of their citizens couldn't find on a map. The troops also don't come as much from nearby ultra-poor countries, who always loved the pay their soldiers got on UN missions, but didn't always have the training to fight. These days, the heart of UN peacekeeping in Congo and elsewhere comes from semi-developed countries like Pakistan and India, where the armies are solidly trained and the governments figure the prestige of helping save the world outweighs the public distaste for sending soldiers into distant lands of dirt and danger. So the UN peacekeepers of today, unlike those of the 90s, have the training and the will to fight and win against the the thugs and near-thugs of the world's "brushfire wars."

The United Nations peacekeeping contingents are still hobbled by one key limit: they're only as committed as the consensus in the United Nations Security Council. That rules them out for anything as big and controversial as Iraq is today. And the UN troops can't do much against a serious national military without backing from American or other high-end forces, which rules out sending a UN force to stop the slaughter of non-Arabs in western Sudan -- the killers there are getting occasional help from government helicopters. Even in the Congo, the UN force has stood aside from stopping Rwandan government interventions -- and let's not even talk about the sex abuse cases. So the United Nations peacekeepers are not an instant answer for all our low-level wars today.

But if what limits United Nations troops today is the absence of consensus among the leading nations, it's equally true that UN troops may become very useful to the United States in future years. It's not impossible to rebuild the sense of common mission among the world leaders. Even Iraq is not as controversial as it looks: no major government wants Iraq to remain an unlimited powder keg. So we may well see more cooperation again between America and Europe and Russia and China. If we do, that will also mean more ability to send UN troops to do the dull and dirty work that so often comes after America's wars. (Or the dull and dirty work of peacekeeping to prevent wars from becoming a problem for us in the first place.) We'll always have to remember that multinational missions mean more room for problems (as in Somalia). But if we do a good job at diplomacy and coordination, America's future tasks of repairing liberated countries could be done by someone else's soldiers, wearing blue United Nations helmets.

[E1] More on this at Belgravia Dispatch and Democracy Arsenal.
[E2] Mudville OPL.

Posted by danielstarr at May 23, 2005 03:27 AM

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