Military Missions, cont.
With the release of the President’s budget for FY08, future spending and military operations are the natural focus of upcoming policy debates. I’m already aware that the Administration is asking for too little funding to support our share of UN peace operations, setting up Congress to find ways to pay the bills – or get blamed for helping create new arrears to the United Nations. And all this comes as the organization is managing 18 operations, and considering new missions in Nepal, Ethiopia, Chad/Central African Republic and Sudan. Yikes.
Naturally, the budget pushes us to ask what missions US forces should be asked to carry out. Colleagues here have debated this question, offering useful ideas about whether military force is the best vehicle for addressing terrorism (no, says Chris Preble & others) or be expanded in Iraq. How about peacekeeping? That is unlikely under a UN flag, though the US is increasingly embracing stability operations.
But there’s another debate I think we should go back to discussing – how prepared are US forces – are any deployed forces – if asked by their leaders to stop genocide? Or to take action and intervene if civilians come under threat of large-scale violence? Debates over Darfur have theoretically raised this issue, but not answered it. Those questions are often misunderstood as a question just for peacekeepers. While peacekeepers need to know how to respond, the mission to interrupt, halt, disable or defend against violent actors at times shares more with traditional war-fighting. Yet few military leaders offer public plans of action for Darfur (oddly, I hear more proposals from frustrated humanitarians).
The US does not have endless funds or patience for overseas adventures. Neither does the rest of the world. We are seeing huge overstretch in US deployments, in those of our allies, and in the Security Council’s expansive directions for peace operations. Yet acting to stop the most wrenching levels of violence against civilians is not always an act of invasion – it may be a task of some peace operations, for example.
Today at a Brookings lunch, I offered an analysis of how prepared military forces are today – whether deployed through NATO, the EU, the UN, the African Union, or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – to protect civilians under imminent threat. My perspective is based on a book I recently published through the Stimson Center on this subject. Chris made some excellent points at the off-the-record lunch – perhaps we should continue that conversation here? Between the QDR pointing the US in the direction of acting to stop genocide, the increase in NGO activities to take action, and the new budget, it is time for sorting this out.
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Within the general question of “(how) should militaries protect civilians?” I think it might also be helpful to distinguish between protection against relatively large-scale, fairly centralized violence and more “distributed” sorts of violence. As you know, I care a lot about Darfur, but I suspect (hope? fear?) that the violence there, where you have a significant component perpetrated by a halfway coherent group with government direction and backing, may be a remnant of an “old school” kind of genocide. More civilians are killed in situations like the DRC, where there are multiple battle lines, no clear “bad guy” to defeat, and the largest threat is disorganized violence and side effects of conflict (e.g., starvation, disease, etc.). Similarly, many of the 600k deaths the Lancet study of Iraq estimated are not the result of “military” violence but uncoordinated reprisals and the like.
The reason I mention this is that it strikes me that the tactics one might use to counter the two threats will likely be very different. An approach that models itself on war-fighting may be more appropriate for the first type of threat, while tactics antithetic to war-fighting, such as cooperating/coordinating with the “bad guys” (so as to blunt the civilian impact of their fighting, as was done to some extent during the UNOSOM I/UNITAF era in Somalia; or, to co-opt leaders and rein in their more extreme supporters), may be more helpful in the second than trying to defeat everyone.
Comment on February 6, 2007 @ 10:36 am