23 Mar UN better than US at Peackeeping and Nation Building?
Last week’s Economist has this excellent article (sub. req’d) summarizing some important empirical studies being done on failed states and post-conflict state building. The conclusions of a raft of recent studies give grounds for optimism: failed states and those on the brink of failure (sometimes called “Low-income countries under stress” or LICUS) can be saved with relatively low investments in peacekeeping and aid. The article discusses a recent RAND study that concludes that the UN is pretty good, on balance, at post-conflict peacekeeping. Maybe better than the United States:
Of the eight UN-led missions it examined, seven brought sustained peace (Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Eastern Slavonia, Sierra Leone and East Timor), while one (in Congo) did not. An earlier RAND study had looked at eight American-led missions and found that only four of the nations involved (Germany, Japan, Bosnia and Kosovo), were now at peace, while the other four (Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq) were not, or at any rate, not yet.
The comparison is not entirely fair. The Americans took on tougher targets: Iraq has more suicide-bombers than East Timor. On the other hand, the UN had punier forces and budgets at its disposal. The annual cost of all 11 UN peacekeeping operations today is less than America spends in a month in Iraq.
The full RAND study can be found here. It is an impressive quantitative effort, with important lessons for current and future crises. For example, it gives emprical support for the view that the group that brings about peace, either through political processes or through prosecuting the war, is often not the best party to secure the peace and bring good post-conflict governance. (In practice, we tend to make the error of assuming every conflict is like Germany or Japan and needs a robust US-style occupation and “Marshall Plan.” )
As the Economist points out, there a places in the world where the UN is the only good governance (or best governance) they have ever known. In discussions about UN reform, we need to keep in mind those things the UN is good at –and work to strengthen those capacities –and those the UN is bad at — and get them off the UN agenda.
The empirical study in question is entirely unconvincing. First of all, why mention old conflicts, such as those in Germany and Japan and imagine this should be a plus compared to Afghanistan and Iraq, which are imagined as minuses. Afghanistan and Iraq are new conflicts with more determined and fanatical insurgencies, one would not expect the situations to stabilize immediately. Germany and Japan, in contrast, are old conflict which have had adequate time to stabilize after extremely difficult wars. Given enough time, one would imagine that Iraq and Afghanistan will likewise stabilize.
Basically, this study is intellectually unsound. It compares that which should not be compared. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not like conflicts elsewhere. It is ridiculous to count the number of countries and pretend this a meaningful measure. One would rather have to try to measure the intensity of the conflict. Stabilizing one Iraq, one Germany, or one Japan might be worth more than twice all the stabilization done by U.N. operations combined. (Perhaps.) A better comparison would be between what the United States has done and what the U.N. has done in the same regions. In Iraq, if I recall correctly, the U.N. abandoned the country at the first sign of difficulty. In Bosnia, NATO was a far more effective force than the United Nations.
While well-done empirical studies can be quite insightful and informative, extremely flawed empirical studies like the one at bar can actually decrease understanding through the confusion they create. The flaws in this study should be evident and identifiable to even an undergraduate freshman, nonetheless, some much more educated apparently find it enlightening.
In general, the idea of the U.N. having any sort of core competancy with it’s bloated and overpaid and rather unaccountable bureacracy is rather amusing. Perhaps some sort of non-U.N. multinational peacekeeping force is appropriate in situations where apparent neutrality is highly valued. I am highly skeptical of even that claim. In Iraq, troops from non-American countries have been targeted as intensely as American forces.
Moving away from so-called “empirical” studies to substance, the reason most people who support the U.N. do so is not because it is effective, rather it is because they are ideologically enamored to the idea of a United Nations itself. The United Nations has failed in countless situations: from the Rwanda genocide to the conflict in Bosnia, to the sex abuse of women and young girls by unaccountable U.N. peacekeepers in the Congo, to the scandal plagued oil-for-food program, to the failure of the U.N. to ensure compliance with security counsel resolutions, to the failure to acknowledge that the genocide in the Sudan is genocide. Nonetheless, most U.N. supporters continue to claim without basis that the U.N. has some sort of core competancy and thus should be preserved. Such idealism is old school. As part of a younger generation who does not forgive or make excuses for the idealistic failures of the past, I feel that the life of the U.N. is definitely limited. There is no convincing argument that the U.N. possesses any technical competancy that cannot be developed by major individual countries. Further, if any multinational peacekeeping effort is warranted, it can just as well be organized on an ad hoc basis with the cooperation of willing nations under an organization established for that limited purpose or, alternatively or in addition, making use of existing regional organizations. (i.e. the African Union). Given no special technical capacities and no advantages over more limited forms of multinational cooperation, the U.N. has lost it’s reason for existing. The world will be a much better place when scarce development funds go to those who need them, such as the millions in Africa threatened by preventable disease rather than some sick, bloated, unnaccountable, corrupt and overpaid bureacracy which arroganty purports to represent the world rather than the narrow self-interests which it truly advances. The United Nations does need to be reformed. Reformed out of existence.