Global Policy Forum

By Felicity Barringer

Peacekeeping is no longer a dirty word in Republican Washington. The United States is appealing to other countries to share the military burden of the occupation of Iraq, and President Bush is also signaling his willingness to send American troops to West Africa to help pacify Liberia. But as peacekeeping, like bell-bottoms, comes back into fashion, it is now cut from a different fabric than before. The missions are longer, and the troops are more likely to come from developing countries.

In its original missions, United Nations troops were likely to be the first force on the ground, after combatants had agreed to step back. But in the last four years, urgent humanitarian crises in the eastern Congo, Sierra Leone and East Timor have required new tactics. Military action is needed more quickly than a United Nations blue-helmeted force can be authorized and deployed. In these knotted conflicts, ad hoc multinational forces have taken the lead, with the United Nations' blessing, and they have been led by developed countries — the British in Sierra Leone and the French in the Ivory Coast, for example.

Their tenure tends to be measured in weeks or months, while the tenure of United Nations' forces, which follow the multinational forces, tends to be measured in years. The United Nations' forces also tend to come from countries with less substantial economies, though they usually have substantial militaries. On June 30, the top contributors to peacekeeping missions were Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana. Together, they contributed 13,826 troops, military observers and policeman. The five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — together contributed a total of 2,097, less than all the individual countries but Ghana.

Does it matter? After all, the countries with the most robust economies are paying most of the bills. The United States, in the current fiscal year, is paying 27 percent of the United Nations peacekeeping budget of $2.17 billion. "There are countries that support peacekeeping in a big way, with a lot of money, and countries that support it with flesh and blood," said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the United Nations under secretary general for peacekeeping operations, in a recent interview. While the movement in this direction has been going on since at least the mid-1990's, "I do hope we are in a trough, not a trend," he said. This divide "could create some resentment."

Indeed, if the military intervention is to have any meaning, it must display international backing of all sorts, said David Rudd, the president of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies. "It's all well and good to support an operation financially," Mr. Rudd said, but "if you subscribe to the notion of some form of global community, this demands and equitable sharing of the risks." But Paul F. Diehl, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the increasing dominance of developing countries is not a major issue if their forces have the military capability and are seen as legitimate, not interlopers with their own agenda. (Which makes Nigerian forces a problematic presence when it comes to West African peacekeeping.)

For the major troop contributors, there are rewards — peacekeeping dividends, if you will. Pakistanis and Indians believe "that peacekeeping adds to the military experience," Mr. Guéhenno said. "To be able to hold fire in a difficult situation requires a lot of training." And then there is a more tangible dividend: Mr. Guéhenno's office reimburses the countries that provide troops at the rate of $1,100 per soldier a month. Often, the cost to the country providing the troops is significantly less. "Generally, it is a substantial and generous differential," said Tariq Chaudhry, a peacekeeping specialist at Pakistan's mission to the United Nations. "But that's not why we go into it. We are actually quite proud of our record, proud that we've got peacekeeping right."

Economic incentives may become more explicit. In Iraq, the Pentagon is considering a plan to train private Iraqi security force to guard pipelines, government buildings and other sites. And now, most of the 500-strong police force the United States has serving in Kosovo are employees of a private firm, DynCorp. Indeed, the notion of privatizing peacekeeping is getting more attention. In the June and July issue of Policy Review, published by the Hoover Institution, P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that the growing industry of private military firms could be tapped to protect humanitarian aid workers or to intervene "whenever recalcitrant local parties break peace agreements or threaten the operation." They could even take over the whole operation, as a coalition of private security companies offered to do in the Congo, for $100 million or more.

Privatization, unsurprisingly, has many critics. In his article, Mr. Singer warned that "outsourcing also entails turning over control of the actual provision of service. For peacekeeping, this means the troops in the field are not part of national armies, but private citizens hired off the market, working for private firms. Security is now at the mercy of any change in market costs and incentives." For his part, Mr. Guéhenno said he was worried that privatization offered the wrong message. "With private troops, the first signal you send is: This is important, but not important enough to risk our own people," he said.

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