Why the U.N. Is No Quick Fix

Why the U.N. Is No Quick Fix

by John G. Ruggie
October 26, 2001
Reprinted from the Washington Post

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.

John Ruggie is the Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs at
Harvard''s Kennedy School of Government and affiliated with the School''s
Center for Business and Government. From 1997 to 2001 he served as
U.N. assistant secretary general.