Civil-military coordination in peacebuilding: the challenge in Afghanistan.

• Author: Weinberger, Naomi
• Position: Toward the Future

"... prevention and rebuilding are inextricably linked at the societal level, leading to the conclusion that a formal agreement ending a civil war is meaningless unless coupled with long-term programs to heal the wounded society."

The engagement of the international community in Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States opened a new phase in the evolution of multinational peace operations. World leaders' swift recourse to international organizations to frame a global response to unanticipated threats revealed multiple avenues for coordinated strategy. One imperative for a joint response was the heavy humanitarian price of the military campaign initiated in prompt retaliation against Afghanistan for harboring terrorist networks. Even more than in recent crises in the Balkans, Africa and East Timor, the need for coordination of military and humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan was palpably evident from the outset.

Yet despite ostensibly auspicious conditions for launching peacebuilding in Afghanistan, the magnitude of the Afghan challenge and the numerous apparent pitfalls confronting interveners are overwhelming. As a result, no matter how well thought-out plans for coping with security, humanitarian and political challenges may be, there are many different ways in which these plans may go awry.

COMPLEX ROAD TO RECOVERY

The sheer ambitiousness of the concept of peacebuilding reflects the varied activities involved in repairing a fractured society in the wake of sustained civil conflict. The basic distinction between the security and humanitarian dimensions of peacebuilding conceals many layers of complexity within each dimension. (1) In effect, security encompasses the role of the professional military in deterring and responding to armed attacks and training an indigenous army, as well as the functions of police in maintaining law and order in closer contact with civil society. The humanitarian dimension embraces an even more amorphous set of functions, ranging from the delivery of emergency food and medical relief to the planning of short- and long-term economic policy and strategies for sustainable development, significantly including the need to transform former combatants into gainfully employed civilians.

In a sophisticated application of social science methodology, Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis have developed an extensive data set of 124 civil wars fought since World War II. (2) Their goal is to formulate overall guidelines for peacebuilding, which they define as "an attempt, after a peace has been negotiated or imposed, to address the sources of current hostility and build local capacities for conflict resolution." (3) The authors argue that the probability of peacebuilding success reflects three critical dimensions--the local roots of hostility, local capacities and the degree of international commitment--the assigned values of which constitute the sides of a triangle whose area defines the "political space" for effective peacebuilding. (4) Their data indicate that the probability of success in peacebuilding is enhanced by introducing a UN peace operation, preferably a multidimensional operation addressing the economic and social roots of conflict. (5) While the insights afforded by these hypotheses are well substantiated across the board, reliance on this analytical method alone will not provide adequate guidelines to policymakers in a specific case, and surely not as complex a case as Afghanistan's.

The evolution of multidimensional peace operations is quite recent, reflecting a broader vision of international engagement after the end of the Cold War. In the early decades of peacekeeping, beginning with the creation of the United Nations Emergency Force in the Sinai in 1956, international forces were deliberately restricted to the static role of buffers separating former combatants and guided by restrictive rules of engagement. (6) Peacekeepers were generally deployed in the aftermath of interstate rather than civil wars, especially after the UN's unhappy experience in the Congo (1960-1964) when the superpowers' support of competing local factions undermined the operation's success. (7)

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali construed the unprecedented cooperation between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council during the Gulf War of 1991 as a momentous change. (8) In his path-breaking Agenda for Peace, he optimistically declared that "We have been given a second chance to create the world of our Charter ... with the cold war ended we have drawn back from the brink of a confrontation that threatened the world and, too often, paralysed our Organization." (9) In the early 1990s UN successes in monitoring elections facilitating the transition to independence in Namibia and in implementing peace accords designed to end civil conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cambodia encouraged a willingness to take on new challenges. (10) Now it seemed possible to reach beyond the limited, security-driven tasks of peacekeeping to multidimensional operations aimed at rebuilding societies, for which the Secretary General coined the new term of peacebuilding. As he explained in 1992," ... the concept of peace-building as the construction of a new environment should be viewed as the counterpart of preventive diplomacy.... Preventive diplomacy is to avoid a crisis; post-conflict peace-building is to prevent a recurrence." (11)

Boutros-Ghali's formulation conveys the profound recognition that in societies experiencing civil strife, a cyclical pattern of violence may emerge whereby the failure to address the root causes of conflict in the wake of combat sows the seeds of the next round. Thus, prevention and rebuilding are inextricably linked at the societal level, leading to the conclusion that a formal agreement ending a civil war is meaningless unless coupled with long-term programs to heal the wounded society. (12) This observation is confirmed by Doyle and Sambanis, who point out that "In plural societies, conflicts are inevitable. The aim of peacebuilding is to foster the social, economic, and political institutions and attitudes that will prevent these conflicts from turning violent." (13)

Yet by the middle of the decade a string of reverses for the United Nations and other multinational organizations had shattered earlier optimism about prospects for peacebuilding. (14) Three episodes were especially traumatic: the perceived distortion of the mandate of the UN operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) followed by its precipitate withdrawal; (15) the failure of a UN force to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia followed by reassignment of security functions to a NATO-led force; (16) and, most painfully, the UN's failure to prevent or stop genocide in Rwanda. (17) By the end of the decade, a sense of dismay over prospects for enforcing international authority was deepened by the circumvention of the Security Council in response to the crisis in Kosovo of 1999 and the humiliation of UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone in 2000 when a local warlord held several hundred of them hostage. In a self-critical mood, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan authorized two independent commissions to develop new guidelines for peace operations, leading to the influential Brahimi Report of August 2000 and the report of the Independent Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in December 2001.

The Brahimi Report wrestled with the dilemma that the United Nations was over-committed in so many peace operations, frequently deployed in risky environments with inadequate troops and financial resources. (18) The immediate precipitants of these concerns were ongoing civil conflicts in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to which the United Nations was hard pressed to respond. (19) The report carries a cautionary tone about deploying new UN operations, advocating alternative solutions in "those situations into which peacekeepers cannot or should not go." (20) Indeed, until the secretary-general obtains solid commitments of troops from member states to carry out an operation, the report urges the Security Council to leave an authorizing resolution in draft form. (21) The Brahimi report is unusually candid in questioning how realistic the habitual UN insistence on seeking neutrality in civil conflicts can be, calling for "robust rules of engagement, against those who renege on their commitments to a peace accord or otherwise seek to undermine it by violence." (22) Moreover, it concludes that "impartiality does not mean equal treatment of all parties in all cases for all time, which can amount to a policy of appeasement; where there are obvious aggressors and victims." (23) There are limited references to peacebuilding, including advocacy of "a doctrinal shift in how the UN conceives of and utilizes civilian police" in societies recovering from civil war. (24)

More recently, the General Assembly appointed a commission of experts, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), to formulate a convincing doctrine of humanitarian intervention. (25) In December 2001 the commission released an impressive report, The Responsibility to Protect, identifying those conditions in which "it is appropriate for states to take coercive--and in particular military--action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state." (26) The ICISS addressed a narrow range of cases entailing ethnic cleansing or large-scale loss of life considered sufficiently weighty to trigger coercive intervention, for which the precedents of Rwanda and Kosovo loom large. Nonetheless, The Responsibility to Protect has implications for a broader range of international engagements. The report reveals increased sophistication about the complex challenges of peacebuilding, especially in addressing "Local Ownership and the Limits to...