Why the U.N. Is No Quick Fix

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Why the U.N. Is No Quick Fix

October 26, 2001
Reprinted from the Washington Post
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There is a growing sense of urgency in Washington and other capitals about resolving the military operation in Afghanistan and finding a political solution. These imperatives are driven by the imminent arrival of the harsh Afghan winter and the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the probable collapse of the Taliban regime and pressure on the U.S.-led coalition that will grow more intense the longer the military campaign lasts.

But simply handing off all or parts of the country to the United Nations once the bombing stops, as administration officials have debated in recent days, would be a terrible idea. It is reassuring to know that President George W. Bush now feels that the United Nations has a legitimate role in so-called nation-building: picking up the pieces and getting a country back on its feet after the implosion of its government, typically as a result of war. But the ability of the United Nations to do those things rests on certain conditions being met -- conditions that the United Nations itself lacks the capacity to produce.

What are those requirements in Afghanistan? First, the existence of a viable political framework, guaranteed by Afghanistan’s neighbors and the major powers and enshrined in a U.N. Security Council resolution. Second, a willingness by all parties to back it with sufficient military muscle against the inevitable challenges, in all likelihood including guerrilla attacks by hard-core Taliban forces.

Afghanistan is not East Timor, where the United Nations faced little internal opposition to providing a transitional administration. Nor is it Kosovo, where NATO and other forces are responsible for security while the United Nations takes the lead on the civilian side, helping the Kosovars build their own political, judicial and administrative institutions. Afghanistan is a difficult place to govern under the best of circumstances. Its politics are tribal and its coalitions unstable. Hostility to outside intervention is strong. The terrain is forbidding. And the country is awash with arms, many left over from the war against the Soviet Union.

Why can’t the United Nations step up to this challenge, now that President Bush is favorably disposed? Because it is severely limited by its member states in the kinds of military operations it can undertake. Governments voluntarily supply U.N. peacekeepers, or not, once the Security Council adopts a mission. The different national contingents that show up in the field have never trained together. Their officers do not know one another. The equipment they arrive with varies enormously in quantity and quality, and is typically incompatible. The United Nations lacks the resources to do serious contingency planning before a mission begins, and the staff to fully backstop militarily demanding missions once they are launched.

There has been no bigger impediment to rationalizing this state of affairs, even modestly, than Congress. For example, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1999, I explained to Sen. Jesse Helms, then committee chairman, why it was important that the United Nations have a rapidly deployable mission headquarters. Small teams of national military officers would be stationed at U.N. headquarters to do serious planning. They would become the core of a field command staff once the Security Council approved a mission, and would hit the ground running.

Sen. Helms allowed that this might make military sense. Nonetheless, he remained adamant in opposition because he viewed it, not as a practical solution to a pressing world problem, but as a harbinger of "world government."

It is hard to imagine that countries would ever endow the United Nations with sufficient military capability to tackle an Afghanistan-like situation. But true to the old saying that we cannot reap what we do not sow, if the Bush administration wants a United Nations that is better equipped for robust peacekeeping even short of that extreme, it will take time, resources -- and a change of heart on Capitol Hill. For Afghanistan, a solution other than U.N. peacekeeping must be found.

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