Essay - UN Unable to Address Modern Conflicts

[M-A Lagrange]

After several years, more than a decade in fact, working with the UN, sometimes for the UN, I came to the conclusion that UN will never have military capacity for the following reasons:
- contributing states want to make money and loose 0 combattants,
- nobody is accountable to anyone for doing or ot his job,
- Troops contributing countries do not have modern armies. And when they have one, they keep it home because they busy fighting a modern conflict (like Pakistan and India for exemple)

It is not a question of understanding or not the local context, the regional context, the political context or even the international context. It is not because they have no intel, no contacts with parties of the conflict, no military capacity (well sometimes it's the problem too)... In few words, it is not because the machine design on paper is not capable.

UN are able to address modern conflict... On paper.

[McArthur]

This could quite possibly be the last copy. Too much going on with other assignments and projects, not to mention I kick off on a big field exercise in two days.

M-A Lagrange, after reading the previous posts and deciding to narrow my subject a bit more, I came to similar conclusions as yourself. The one part you hit on which I completely missed was a potential lack of accountability within the UN system. Very good point.

TheCurmudgeon, as somebody who is likely to make a career out of both soldiering and as a student of security studies, it would not be right for me to simply be regurgitating whatever my professor has fed me. While I do need the grades, my own credibility and honor takes priority over that. I have never been one to align myself with my professors for the sake of earning some easy credits. Last year I was asked to write an essay on whether or not war was less likely as a result of increasing economic interdependence, and I was to argue for either a Realist perspective (Increased trade increases chances of war) or the Liberal perspective (Increased trade decreases chances of war). Out of several hundred essays, mine was the only one which directly challenged the professor and said "No. Neither theory is correct, and I abhor the idea that you can simplify war down to that level" and I went on to argue that neither theory was right or wrong. I guess I'm not an easy student.

Some of the others who bought up points might notice the influence they had on this essay. I sorely wanted to include Entropy's point about sovereignty, and if the word limit was increased that would probably be a point (or paragraph) I would be discussing.

Would like to say thanks to all who provided feedback and debate. It is appreciated very much. Hopefully one day I can provide back to the community with some work of my own.

Regards,

Mac

[McArthur]

Here it is.

UNITED NATIONS AND MODERN CONFLICTS

The United Nations has had a troubled life so far. The international organisation of states was founded in 1945 as a method of facilitating cooperation between states and the advancement of international security and peace. Sixty years on the UN does not appear any closer to this goal than it did at its conception, and the UN has continued to become increasingly incapable of addressing modern conflicts. The post-Cold War time period has been notably difficult for the UN. With the demise of the Soviet Union, it was asserted that this was the UN’s opportunity to take on it’s role as the “guardian of international peace and security” now that the Soviet Union was no longer hampering efforts. The rhetoric was described as being “euphoric, utopian and short” . The following two decades saw a notable increase in the number of UN peacekeeping missions – with a massive financial and human expense and very few positive results to show for it.

One of the issues faced by the United Nations now, however, is that the nature of conflicts has changed drastically since the Cold War days. First termed by Mary Kaldor, The New Wars Theory suggests that there is a quantifiable difference in warfare before and after the end of the Cold War. Whereas “Old Wars” revolve around the struggle to control territory, resources and the expansion of a state’s ideology, “New Wars” focus on the struggle to control the identity of the state and its people New Wars are low-intensity conflicts that involve a vast range of transnational connections, non-governmental actors and new strategies of warfare.

The UN has only recently been able to put itself in a position where it is capable of handling Old Wars. It has taken the UN over thirty years of effort to even define what interstate aggression really is, and even now the UN is sporadic at best when it comes to condemning cases of aggression between states . The UN is acknowledged as being least effective in disputes when the two belligerents are non-aligned states, where there is a high international acceptance of these conflicts to continue without external interference. Conversely, the United Nations is generally the most effective in cases where the belligerent is a Western state (The big exception being the United States) initiating a dispute with a non-aligned state . If the UN is still struggling to piece together how to best deal with State vs. State aggression, it is difficult to believe it will be capable of keeping up with the rapidly changing dynamics of modern warfare. The UN, founded in the age of state vs. state conventional warfare, is now faced with conflicts it was never designed to handle where there are “No fronts, no campaigns, no bases, no uniforms, no publically displayed honors, no points d’appui (starting point), and no respect for the territorial limits of the state” .

This means there is a critical issue within the United Nations Peacekeeping program, where there are often no long-term solutions in place by the time the peacekeeping force arrives. The UN peacekeeping solutions are often “short-term Band-Aids on deep wounds that have been festering for generations” . By the time a peacekeeping force has had boots on the ground long enough to truly understand the issues involved, they are almost at the end of their operational deployment . This means that there is a failure for the UN peacekeeping forces on the ground to truly understand any of the issues at stake at any level, and they will struggle to help solve conflicts that have their causes rooted in deeper grievances or issues than a simple land grab.

Compounding the inability of the United Nations to administratively and conceptually deal with New Wars, the UN lacks any sort of hard military power necessary for peacekeeping operations. Many states simply refuse to contribute military power to the UN missions out of a general distrust to the UN and NGO’s in general. It has been noted that UN peacekeepers “are traditionally too lightly armed to outfight the combined forces of every regional warring faction in the mission area. Consequently, they exercise no real coercive or punitive power” . The top contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions are in fact Bangladesh (10,736 personnel), Pakistan (10,691), India (8,935), Nigeria (5,709) and Egypt (5,458) . This is an interesting situation, because the top military contributors to the UN are states that are very rarely known for their military prowess. It has been suggested that most major contributing states are not doing so for the sake of the UN mission, but are doing so for the financial reasons and for the diplomatic benefits of earning prestige within the UN system . The UN pays out a set amount of money to contributing nations for each soldier contributed, which poses two challenges. Firstly, a number of poorer states may deploy personnel to UN Peacekeeping operations as a method of turning a profit, as the UN pays states $1,028USD per soldier . The second suggestion is that with such a meager compensation from the UN, more wealthy countries will be unwilling to contribute professional soldiers to peacekeeping operations.

The United Nations has also been heavily criticized for it’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. Roméo Dallaire was the Commander of the ill-fated UNAMIR mission to Rwanda in 1994, where an understrength contingent of UN peacekeepers was unable to intervene during the Rwandan Genocide because of its limited jurisdiction and mandate to act. It took the UN Security Council six weeks to adopt a resolution which provided aid to the UNAMIR force, but by that stage it was too late, and a failure of the UN to act quickly resulted in the mass murder of up to 800,000 Rwandan people. Dallaire has been particularly outspoken in his criticism for the UN, which he describes as being completely different to any he had ever encountered in the military before:

"He told me the UN was a 'pull' system, not a 'push' system like I had been used to with NATO, because the UN had absolutely no pool of resources to draw on. You had to make a request for everything you needed, and then you had to wait while that request was analyzed...For instance, soldiers everywhere have to eat and drink. In a push system, food and water for the number of soldiers deployed is automatically supplied. In a pull system, you have to ask for those rations, and no common sense seems to ever apply."

During the Sierra Leone Civil War, failure on the United Nations’ part to act resulted in the Sierra Leonean government hiring a Private Military Company called Executive Outcomes to contain and prevent the human rights atrocities being committed by the RUF during the war . Despite it’s huge successes, Executive Outcomes was forced out of the country due to political pressure from the UN. It is worth noting that the largely successful Executive Outcomes was costing Sierra Leone (And by proxy, the International Monetary Fund) $1.8 million a month. By comparison, the failed UNAMSIL Peacekeeping mission cost $51 million a month . When EO left the country, it left the largely untrained, unprepared and unwilling UNAMSIL contingent in sole charge of the conflict. What followed was a brutal rout in which the RUF seized control of the country, humiliating the international community and the UN. It was not until the return of the private soldiers and the British military that the UN mission was fulfilled.

Simply put, the United Nations is incapable of undertaking military action under it’s own banner as long as the contributing states can only provide poorly trained, equipped soldiers who have little understanding or direction in the conflict they are ordered to contain. UN operations have a history of being hamstrung by bureaucratic inefficiencies and an inept military force. While past conflict involved clear distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, the UN is now facing situations where there are no distinctions at all, and warzones are rife with criminals, paramilitaries, terrorists and mercenaries. The UN has not proven to be able to rapidly evolve to meet the changing dynamic of warfare, and as a result it is an outdated state-centric organisation is a very different environment. The UN is better suited to act as a forum for international diplomacy and cooperation between states rather than as an international interventionist military force.

[davidbfpo]

Compounding the inability of the United Nations to administratively and conceptually deal with New Wars, the UN lacks any sort of hard military power necessary for peacekeeping operations. Many states simply refuse to contribute military power to the UN missions out of a general distrust to the UN and NGO’s in general. It has been noted that UN peacekeepers “are traditionally too lightly armed to outfight the combined forces of every regional warring faction in the mission area. Consequently, they exercise no real coercive or punitive power” . The top contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions are in fact Bangladesh (10,736 personnel), Pakistan (10,691), India (8,935), Nigeria (5,709) and Egypt (5,458) . This is an interesting situation, because the top military contributors to the UN are states that are very rarely known for their military prowess.....

Your judgement is very harsh. The UN peacekeeping missions are that peacekeeping and 'hard military power' is not a requirement. If the mission is peace enforcement then the military needs are different, which can explain why some missions fail when the mission changes and rightly you cite Rwanda as an example.

In some places peacekeeping missions have been had 'hard military' components alongside the traditional blue berets, the UN mission in Eastern Slavonia was one. There the Jordanians provided a mechanised infantry battalion; less certainly in Cambodia IIRC India provided a QRF.

Other missions, notably Southern Lebanon began as a traditional blue beret ceasefire monitoring body, as the conflict developed - with every faction and Israel involved - the UN became harder by appearance, with marginal impact on its mission. Remember the Fijian compound shelled by the IDF?

The nations you cite Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nigeria and Egypt are contributors who volunteer, unlike many nations that are:

known for their military prowess'

In what I have read both Pakistan and India are very capable, respected armies, who have for over forty years paid a price for their commitment. Nigeria has a different reputation, mainly due to its non-UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement in West Africa. Nor should the Egyptian infantry battalion in Sarajevo be overlooked, IIRC the only Arab or Muslim country to contribute in the early years of the Bosnian War (alongside the French & Canadians).

As for:

The second suggestion is that with such a meager compensation from the UN, more wealthy countries will be unwilling to contribute professional soldiers to peacekeeping operations.

UN payments to wealthier countries is not a factor in their decision-making. Far more pertinent factors are involved, force protection, likelihood of casualties, length of engagement, command structures, the mission itself and the ROE. Look at the composition of the UN in Cyprus, there the length of the commitment has simply bored contributors; it now has a Chinese commander.

Some wealthy countries have ended up with simply bizarre UN deployments. To cite two, Argentina in Cyprus and Ireland in Chad.

My only caveat now. I have not closely watched UN missions for many years so my points do not account for places like the DRC.

[M-A Lagrange]

Compounding the inability of the United Nations to administratively and conceptually deal with New Wars, the UN lacks any sort of hard military power necessary for peacekeeping operations. Many states simply refuse to contribute military power to the UN missions out of a general distrust to the UN and NGO’s in general. It has been noted that UN peacekeepers “are traditionally too lightly armed to outfight the combined forces of every regional warring faction in the mission area. Consequently, they exercise no real coercive or punitive power” . The top contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions are in fact Bangladesh (10,736 personnel), Pakistan (10,691), India (8,935), Nigeria (5,709) and Egypt (5,458) . This is an interesting situation, because the top military contributors to the UN are states that are very rarely known for their military prowess.....

I believe that focussing on the military capacities is a bias. Not that it does not count but because it is not the real issue. Cause, as I wrotte before, it works on paper.

The problem is not really the troops’ quality. The main issue is the distance between the mandate and its application. The first problematic is the chain of command. Troop contributors’ countries do not surrender over the UN their chain of command. Therefore you have a UN chain of command with troops who obey to their national chain of command. And because it is a sovereignty issue no one is questioning the non implementation of the mandate by X, Y or Z. You just deal with it. Therefore you lose immediately nearly 90% of your combat capacities. (When they want and there is political will, Indians and Pakistanis are very effective. Bangladeshi... It's another story.)

Talking about DRC, when a 6 battalions (including armored infantry, special ops and paratroopers with air support and artillery… from India and South Africa mainly!) strong force tells you: they cannot defeat 300 armed men… Then you know it is political and not military.

I have witnessed several UN/blue helmets deployments and there is a pattern in how they become ineffective on the ground:
- 1st phase you send for 3 month (max 6 month, if it is high profile domestic issue) highly trained troops from western countries to settle the dust. (works most of the time. Or it is skipped because UN are too slow and NATO already did it)

- 2nd phase, you send troops with average/good military capacities with a clear mandate adapted to a political and military situation. (all ready you have lost most of your combat capacities and you count on deterence only. Mainly because you fright the other parties with your equipment.)

- 3rd phase you change nothing in the mandate, what ever changes happen in the political or military context. (You do not adapt therefore you are obsolete)

- 4th phase you send crappy troops because there no one to go in that mud place and you give them a weak mandate. (you're plan is to leave as soon as possible so you task your force with no mission, may be patroling with armored vehicles, to be able to report a success. Sucess = I reported I did XX patrols in a month so I completed successfully my mission. I do not even have to actually do the patrols, just to report I did it.)

I witnessed that in DRC, Chad, Sudan… In the end, it’s a circus.
I once worked with a Navy commander who was fresh from naval academy in a semi desertic area, commanding conscripts from Army with lieutenants from Air-force. How do you expect such force to do something else than show of force? (That was Sudan by the way)

A Canadian friend of mine was telling me they call the UN missions “Gucci missions”. It tells what it tells: it’s comfortable camping is a crappie place with or without guns.

And as David rightly pointed: it's peace keeping missions, not combat missions. (Even peace enforcement are not combat missions). The last time the UN fought wars, it was Korea and Shaba in Zaire. In the end they won. But it was neither peace keeping or enforcement missions, at that time the mandate was just: win the war.

[davidbfpo]

Came across a review of 'Interventions: A Life in War and Peace' by Kofi Annan, by a former UK envoy to the UN, Christopher Meyer and he ends with:

This is a book which, though well-written, often with a light touch, is in its detail unlikely to have much appeal for anyone except aficionados of diplomacy and the United Nations. Its interest for others is in the bigger picture that Annan draws — of a world where, in the vortex of competing national interests, the scope for getting agreement on effective peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention is extraordinarily limited.

The UN is better than the League of Nations, but not by much. Kofi Annan is a well respected man, and deservedly so. But you have to conclude that the world being what it is, the career of a UN secretary general, like that of a British prime minister, always ends in failure.

Link:http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/868...r-with-itself/