Too Few Good Men - and Even Fewer Supplies: The Challenges of Peacekeeping in Africa
By J. Peter Pham
World Defense Review
December 6, 2007
Web site: http://worlddefensereview.com/pham120607.shtml

Exactly one year ago, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1725, approving the East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) initiative to send a Peace Support Mission to Somalia (IGASOM). Since the situation changed dramatically over the ensuing holiday period as the peacekeepers never arrived and the Ethiopian National Defense Force intervened on their own to prevent the "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG) of Somalia from collapsing altogether in the face of the militant Islamists who had seized control of most of the forlorn country, including the sometime capital of Mogadishu, the Security Council subsequently gave unanimous approval to Resolution 1744, which invoked Chapter VII of the UN Charter to authorize the African Union (AU) to send an 8,000-strong force in IGASOM's place.

When the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) was created last February, I expressed my doubts in this column space, noting that "it is beyond delusional to think that such a modest contingent of Africans can succeed where the infinitely more robust UNITAF and UNOSOM II forces, with their 37,000 and 28,000 personnel respectively, failed barely a decade ago." As it turns out, I erred on the side of optimism when I subsequently penned a column entitled "Peacekeepers with No Peace to Keep." In fact, there were hardly any peacekeepers, much less a peace for them to keep. Despite the pledges they made and the political and financial inducements offered to them by the United States and other Western nations, only Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni kept his word and dispatched the troops he promised. The Burundian, Ghanaian, and Nigerian contingents are nowhere to be found, while the Malawians have formally reneged on their earlier commitment. Confined to Mogadishu, the hapless Ugandan force of 1,600 has essentially been pinned down by ongoing attacks by both Islamist and clan-based insurgents opposed to the TFG. Last month, an audio recording was posted to a Somali web site carrying a call by Adan Hashi 'Ayro, the al-Qaeda linked leader of the al-Shabaab ("the Youth") radicals, to attack the peacekeepers.

Meanwhile this past summer, UN Security Council Resolution 1769, created an African Union/United Nations hybrid operation for Sudan's conflicted Darfur region. This force, dubbed UNAMID, will subsume the 5,000-strong African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) that was deployed two years ago. UNAMID is supposed to start its mandated tasks – including supporting "early and effective implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement, prevent disruption of its implementation and armed attacks, and protect civilians" – "no later than December 31." While, like the 8,000-strong force authorized for Somalia, the 25,987 personnel of UNAMID – including 19,555 military personnel, 3,772 civilian police, and 2,660 formed security units – will probably be inadequate to meet the combined pressures of the obstructionist regime in Khartoum and the various rebel movements in Darfur, a territory the size of France, that question is a metaphorical bridge that does not yet need to be crossed since the force has yet to be raised, leaving the international community with a terrible choice. As UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guéhenno told reporters last month:

It is a terrible dilemma, because on the one hand, you can say that a force, even if it doesn't have all the assets, can make a limited difference for a number of people in Darfur, and that is something in itself which it good. On the other hand, if that force was to know humiliation in the early stages of its deployment, then it would be very hard to recover from such a humiliation. So it's an extremely difficult decision to make.

Briefing the Security Council last week, Guéhenno warned the members of the UN's decision making body that a choice might eventually have to be made as to whether or not to go through with the mission. Part of the difficulty, which the veteran French civil servant diplomatically did not spell out in detail, was that the Sudanese regime is insisting that AU Commission Chairperson Alpha Oumar Konaré ill-considered August 12 boast that the entire force for Darfur would be entirely African was actually a binding commitment and, hence, only African peacekeepers would be allowed in. Guéhenno did say that Khartoum has refused to accept units from Thailand, Nepal, and the Nordic countries. (Interestingly Sudanese ruler Umar al-Bashir did not raise any objections to the arrival last week of 135 Chinese military engineers who will make up part of 315-strong contingent that the People's Republic is sending in its latest foray into African peacekeeping, a phenomenon I reported in this column two months ago. After all, in the past, China has repeatedly vetoed any serious UN action against Sudan, although Beijing has taken a subtler approach in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.)

On the ground, it is not just the lack of manpower, but the even greater shortage of capacity which undermines the mission of such peacekeepers who have shown up. In Cape Town, South Africa, last month for a conference, General Martin Luther Agwai, the force commander of AMIS (and UNAMID), gave an interview to allAfrica.com detailing his needs, beginning with military helicopters:

The minimum, not the ideal but the minimum… [is] 18 utility helicopters, and about 12 to 18 combat helicopters that can go to do reconnaissance and other things. As of today, there is no country in the world that has volunteered to give us that capability – zero. And that's why I am saying that by December 31 there are lots of expectations, but the reality on the ground is different ...

You must have heard about the attack we had on our camp in Haskanita [on September 30], when we lost 10 of our peacekeepers. After the attack we wanted to go to the area… to move the injured. It took us about eight hours because the civil pilots couldn't take the risks… If we had military helicopters, we would have been able to arrive there much, much earlier, and we may have been able to save maybe one or two lives…

The general also mentioned the need for armored personnel carriers as well as vehicles adequate to the terrain that UNAMID would be expected to patrol. Amazingly, these items are, at this point, not even the most pressing concern for General Agwai, who formerly served as Nigeria's Chief of Defense Staff, overseeing his country's army, navy, and air force: "There is the issue of water. [From] some of our camps, you have to go over five kilometers just to get water for our own forces, not helping anybody else."

At his November 28 Security Council briefing, the UN peacekeeping chief Guéhenno reiterated UNAMID's persistent lack of transport capabilities, saying that a minimum the mission still needed one heavy and one medium transport unit, three military utility aviation units and one light helicopter unit. In the meantime, compounding these logistical problems, an earlier pledge for a reconnaissance company has been withdrawn. According to Guéhenno:

If no appropriate offers for these missing units are identified by early 2008, it may become necessary to revert to the Council to consider options to mitigate the lack of air mobility. This may require an increase in troops. But more troops will not "replace" military aviation and they would also require more logistic support, more land, more water, and would likely not appear in Darfur until late 2008. Another sub-optimal last-resort measure would be to "borrow" these capabilities from other missions.

In addition to the sui generis AMISOM and AMIS/UNAMID operations, there are currently nine international missions in Africa overseen by Guéhenno's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO): the UN Integrated Office in Burundi (BINUB), the UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT), the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC), the UN Integrated Office in Sierra Leone (UNIOSIL), the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), and the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI).

Together, the nine DPKO missions have 54,306 personnel, two-thirds of the 82,701 peacekeepers deployed worldwide by the international organization at the end of October. The DPKO African operations have a budget for the current fiscal year of some $3.4 billion, and UNAMID will cost at least another $1.4 billion.
The problem with the AU's Konaré engaging in irresponsible musings about an all-African peacekeeping force for Darfur is that not only do his delusions enable the Khartoum regime to delay action while pretending to simply be awaiting the fulfillment of the pledge, but they also have no basis in reality. Only one-third of the 54,306 international peacekeepers assigned to Africa – some 16,799 troops – hail from the continent. Everyone pays lip service to the need for Africans to secure their own region, but the fact that they have an exceptionally limited capacity to do so. Even the continent's most prosperous state, South Africa – a country whose economy account for more than a third of Africa's GDP and whose defense minister, Mosioua Lekota, as I chronicled previously, has publicly led opposition to the establishment of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in the name of the ideology that Africa should "avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil" – contributes barely 1,200 peacekeepers to DPKO operations in Africa, a figure well behind Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Morocco, and even tiny Benin.

Many policymakers and analysts have long viewed African militaries more as a source of trouble than as a force for security – and not without reason. One study by Professor Patrick J. McGowan, who divides his year between Arizona State University and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, counted 80 coups d'états, 108 failed coup attempts, and 139 coup plots by the military in the 48 Sub-Saharan African states between January 1956 and December 2001. Only six states – Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Namibia, Eritrea, and South Africa – have been completely free from military interventions in politics; and the last three only became independent or majority-ruled in 1990s. Thus, as one veteran diplomat who had also had a distinguished career a general officer, remarked to me once while we were discussing security sector reform, "What do you want to build African armies for? All they'll do is sit around and plot coups!"

Consequently, especially since the end of the Cold War, Western donor countries have largely focused their aid programs on humanitarian relief and economic development. Whatever the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the latter, there has been a growing recognition on the part of development experts that without security there cannot be development. In his recent book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (see my review for National Interest online, the online edition of the journal The National Interest), Paul Collier, director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, points out that each year of conflict in Africa tends to retards growth in the affected country by a not inconsiderable 2.3 percent.

In part as a result of this realization of the direct link between security and prosperity, a number of Western countries have been working to build up the military capacities of their African partners. Great Britain, for example, has taken a leading role in helping stand up the East Africa Standby Brigade (EASTBRIG), currently the most advanced of the five regional brigades which the AU hopes to bring together as the African Standby Force (ASF) by 2010. EASTBRIG's planning element will be based in Karen, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, while its headquarters and logistics base will be located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. France, Portugal, and other European countries have similar efforts ongoing in other regions. This week, in Thiès, Senegal, French forces are participating in a joint exercise with Burkinabè, Gambian, Guinean, Malian, Nigerian, and Senegalese military units to test operational capacity of the task force element of what will be the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Standby Force (ESF). Previously, an annual bilateral military exercise between France and Senegal, the current exercise, Deggo XXVII ("Deggo" means "friendship," in the Wolof language spoken in the host country), has been expanded at the request of the ESF, which is commanded by Nigerian General Hassan Lai, to enable the force gauge its level of preparedness for the likely tasks at operational and tactical levels in stability support and peacekeeping operations setting. The 11-day also includes a civil-military enhancement component, including which the rehabilitation of a well, the renovation of an Islamic school for girls, and medical assistance to the host village.

The United States, of course, has launched a unified command, AFRICOM, whose mission, as Principal Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry told a House Armed Services Committee hearing three weeks ago, will in part be "to support, not supplant, African leadership":

U.S. security is enhanced most not when American boots are on the continent, but when Africa's indigenous governments and militaries can operate effectively and efficiently without putting our men and women in harm's way. By and large, Africans have the drive and initiative to take charge of their own security; more often than not, they lack the means. AFRICOM endeavors to build capacity, so African nations can solve African problems before they erupt into regional or international catastrophes.

For the longsuffering peoples of Somalia, Darfur, and all-too-many other conflict zones across the continent, that African capacity cannot be acquired a moment too soon.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.