By Richard Gowan
Center on International Cooperation, New York University

As the public has become aware of the horror of the conflict in Darfur, one question has been asked repeatedly. How is it possible that the experience of Rwanda has not taught the international community the imperative of humanitarian intervention? Morally, it is a very powerful question – especially given the growing emphasis on the Responsibility to Protect peoples from genocide. But it may not be the most important question to ask.

Darfur has actually demonstrated that the moral lessons of Rwanda have not been completely forgotten. In 1994, Kofi Annan (then in charge of the UN’s peacekeeping department) and Bill Clinton responded the news of an African genocide with equivocations – France even appeared to protect the genocidaires. By contrast, 2006 saw Annan, George Bush and EU leaders unite to demand that a UN force deploy to Darfur.

The hardest question that Darfur poses may not be moral but strategic. Even if there is a consensus on the need for a UN force in Darfur, are the resources available to sustain it? And this is a challenge not because the international community has given up UN operations, but because it is already heavily engaged in such operations worldwide.

Today there are more than 70,000 troops, 20,000 civilians and nearly 10,000 police deployed in twenty UN peacekeeping operations. This is five times greater than ten years ago and higher than the UN’s previous peak during the Bosnian war. If all current UN mandates were fulfilled, its global presence could grow by almost another 50%. Meanwhile, the number of peacekeepers deployed by other organizations - from the African Union in Darfur to NATO in Afghanistan – is also growing, surpassing 70,000.

What has driven this growth? Although there are significant numbers of peacekeepers as far apart as Haiti and Timor-Leste, the answer lies in two regions: the broader Middle East and Africa. The multiplying conflicts of the Middle East have resulted in the deployment of two of the biggest recent peace operations. Over 30,000 NATO troops are struggling with the Taliban in Afghanistan, while 12,000 UN soldiers are meant to contain Hezbollah in Lebanon (neither my figures nor my definition of peacekeeping include Iraq). Nonetheless, the primary theater for peace operations remains Africa.

There are over 55,000 UN troops in Africa, in addition to the 7,000 AU personnel in Darfur. They have been deployed to stabilize two areas – the Great Lakes region of central Africa and the West African coast – emerging from brutal inter-connected wars of the 1990s. Those wars saw mass killing on scale even worse than Rwanda: three million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone. The international community failed to halt this slaughter. But it has now finally accepted that major peace operations are needed to stop huge parts of Africa remaining trapped in cycles of violence.

And the peacekeepers sent to Africa undertake increasingly demanding missions. The small UN presence in Rwanda was simply meant to observe a peace agreement. Its current force in the Congo (MONUC, with 18,000 personnel) has not only overseen a constitutional referendum and presidential elections across the vast country, but also conducted robust anti-militia operations in its east. And while the UN was tragically ill-resourced in Rwanda – the Canadian government refused to send Armored Personnel Carriers because the insurance cost was thought too great – MONUC boasts sixteen infantry battalions with over three hundred combat vehicles and seventy helicopters.

Operations like these defy clichés about the passivity of UN peacekeeping. After the Bosnian tragedy, many European and American officers refused to believe that UN forces would ever take tough, decisive action. Yet today cautious European governments have placed controversial restrictions on the risks NATO forces can take in Afghanistan, whereas Indian and Pakistani units are ready to go on the offensive for the UN in the Congo.

But sustaining these large-scale, robust operations creates huge logistical and resource problems. The UN typically finds it fairly easy to raise pledges of basic infantry for new missions, although the quality is often mixed. But it is far harder to pull together more specialized assets like helicopters, engineers, riot police and Special Forces. And, for non-military tasks, experienced civilian mission managers are also in very short supply.

The case of Sudan demonstrates both kinds of problems: although the UN has yet to deploy in strength to Darfur, it has been building up a mission in South Sudan since March 2005. But by December 2005, only two-fifths of the projected force was on the ground, and Kofi Annan told the Security Council that “les moyens aériens, les unités de génie et les équipes de démineurs sont très en retard.” By late 2006, the military situation was better, but the mission had just thirty-one political officers to conduct complex negotiations and civilian staffers were leaving faster than replacements could be hired.

So it was hardly surprising that in October 2006, the UN’s Under-secretary for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guéhenno spoke at a press conference of the problems of “overstretch” for the UN. Many UN officials made little secret of the fact that they did not believe that they had the capacity to mount an effective operation in Darfur. The region presents particular operational problems: it is so arid that planners predict it would take six months to dig the wells necessary to supply a force of 20,000 troops with water. For similar reasons, there has been considerable resistance within the UN to proposals from the Security Council for peacekeepers to deploy to eastern Chad, bordering Darfur.

But the problems facing the continuation of UN peacekeeping are political as well as operational. For while calls to intervene in Darfur have multiplied in the United States and Europe, the West is not keen to send its own troops to Africa. Today, only 3% of UN forces on the continent are European – and 0.1% come from North America. By contrast, half come from South Asia and a third from Africa itself. The EU and US provide the bulk of funding for these forces - but there is resentment of the fact that Western governments will pay for peacekeepers to take great risks, they will not risk their own troops. Sweden and Norway are the only European states now offering men for Darfur.

Europe did, of course, make a major contribution to the UN in 2006, supplying the great majority of forces for the expanded peace operation in Lebanon. But surprisingly, this episode actually increased criticisms of the West’s approach: the EU governments demanded that the Lebanon mission by commanded through a special Strategic Management Cell in New York, separate from normal UN structures and dominated by European officers. Other troop contributors objected to this “privileged mission”. And while the EU did deploy a mission of its own to reinforce MONUC in Kinshasa during the Congolese elections in 2006 (and collaboration between the two missions was largely good) the European forces were once again thought to be more risk-averse than the UN’s.

Yet political differences over the future of peacekeeping are not just about risks, but about the principles underlying UN missions. Many Western nations that do not supply troops to Africa emphasize the ethical necessity of the Responsibility to Protect, which suggests that tyrants cannot use the defense of sovereignty to commit gross crimes.

But many of the non-Western countries that do send troops are troubled by this emerging norm, precisely because it threatens their more traditional ideas of sovereignty. They are happy to mount robust operations where the host government invites UN support (as in the Congo), but not to deploy where there is no such consent (as in Darfur). While 2005 World Summit saw all the UN’s members commit to the Responsibility to Protect, they did so in a way that deliberately avoided giving a carte blanche for interventionism.

This is the dilemma in the growth of peacekeeping. If the West relies on non-Western forces to carry the burden of operations in Africa, it cannot expect to simply dictate political and moral principles to those forces. The moral case for the Responsibility to Protect must still be made. But with peacekeeping facing overstretch there is also a need for greater dialogue with those countries that provide the Capacity to Protect. Without a new strategic consensus on when it is legitimate to mandate operations, it will be ever more difficult to find the resources to mount effective missions in places like Darfur.