by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, South Asia
My recent extended growl about the parlous state of peacekeeping has been cited as evidence in a fascinating online debate among Indian security analysts on whether their army should stay committed to UN operations. This debate is significant because (i) India is consistently among the top three contributors to UN forces, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh; (ii) it is even more important in terms of hard-to-find assets like helicopters; (iii) it is suffering a run of negative publicity about how badly some of its troops behave (the fact that a lot of this snark comes from the BBC irks some in the debate, who detect post-colonial prurience).
With India’s economy growing fast, the payments it receives from the UN in return for its troops are increasingly irrelevant. So might there come a moment when India decides that blue helmet deployments no longer befit its status and interests as a great power? Yes, and the sooner the better, according to two hawkish strategists in the Indian Express in early July. Edited highlights:
More Indian troops have died in the line of their UN duties than from any other country. According to the Indian Embassy in the US, “India has risked the lives of its soldiers in peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations, not for any strategic gain, but in the service of an ideal. India’s ideal was, and remains, strengthening the world body, and international peace and security.” That the Indian government should take pride in risking the lives of Indian soldiers in the “service of an ideal” is appalling. It now serves little more than bureaucratic interests.
In order to give the issue the attention it demands, India should immediately suspend all further UN deployments. This should be followed by a graduated withdrawal of all Indian troops operating under the UN flag. There might be a case for a small, token presence, in carefully chosen theatres. It is time for India to stop seeing foreign troop deployments as “risking lives in the service of an ideal.” Rather, they should be seen as being tightly coupled with vital foreign policy objectives, like for instance, securing India’s construction crews in Afghanistan. As India’s economic interests expand globally, it is likely that the need for such deployments will increase.
You can follow the debate sparked by these comments over at Pragmatic Euphony, a blog devoted to India’s national interest. Fears of new violence ahead in the eastern Congo suggest that Indian peacekeepers may be in the headlines again this summer, as this is one of the theatres in which they are squarely on the frontline. A rapid drawdown of Indian forces isn’t imminent – New Delhi has good reasons to look responsible after (i) it took flak for helping kill off Doha (whatever the merits!) and (ii) the IAEA signed off on the US-India nuclear deal this week.
But these online stirrings may be the start of something bigger. India could well lose faith in the relevance of peacekeeping – recent violence in Kashmir and reports that Pakistan was implicated in July’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul are reminders that it has urgent problems on its doorstep to tend to. New Delhi is also deeply skeptical about all the current talk about the Responsibility to Protect (as it demonstrated during the Burmese cyclone crisis) and is liable to demand an ever-greater say in UN strategy-making if it is to stay involved. That raises the tricky question of when if ever India will get a permanent Security Council seat…
If India cut back on its peacekeepers it would be incredibly difficult to sustain big peace operations in places like the Congo. This is often obscured by (i) a lazy assumption that the South Asians will be peacekeepers forever out of habit; (ii) a focus on the views of African troop suppliers, especially in Darfur; and (iii) possibly excessive excitement about the prospect of other countries getting involved, like China. China’s peacekeeping commitments are still less than a quarter of India’s.
I’ve got yet another academic analysis of the dynamics of UN ops out, in a book on “Strategies for Peace” (don’t be put off by the lime-green cover). I wrote it ages ago, but it highlights the South Asian contribution and how UN missions rely on a global compact between three categories of state: “those in which large-scale peace operations are deployed (mainly in Africa); those which supply the bulk of peacekeeping forces (most notably in South Asia and Africa); and those that provide most of the funding for peace operations (the United States, EU members and Japan).” Lose the Indians, and that compact starts to unravel.
Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) this new article isn’t online. But it concludes along the lines of a shorter think-piece I published last year about developing a new strategic consensus that all those involved in UN ops can buy into if they are to keep on keeping on… a consensus, I infer from the Indian online debate, that should be couched in interests not ideals.
UPDATE: check out Pragmatic Euphony’s interesting riposte to this post here.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, Off topic
Look, look at the screen looming up behind him. It’s enormous.
(As you probably guessed, the picture’s from Vanity Fair).
by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
In January, I enjoyed 15 seconds of fame commenting on the shortage of helicopters for peace operations in The Economist (I’d already raised the issue on this blog and for ECFR). I found myself in touch with Thomas Withington, an aviation journalist researching the problem. He was kind enought to quote me back in May, but it was evident that he knew a lot more about the technicalities than I did. Now he’s published a first-class study of which countries have what helicopters, and who might send them to Darfur. The IHT takes up the story:
The report said military powers like the U.S., Britain and France are tied down in wars and other peacekeeping operations. But it singled out the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Spain, Ukraine and India, saying they have suitable aircraft needed for the mission.
A UN official in Darfur told AP the mission has only 27 transport helicopters, all commercially leased. UN documents say the mission needs 18 medium-lift military helicopters and the force has sought to get six attack helicopters. But the UN official said it has none and an offer from Ethiopia of five combat helicopters was still being discussed.
Many military helicopters that could be used by the UNAMID mission in Darfur are sitting in hangars or being used in air shows, the report said. NATO nations “could provide as many as 104 suitable helicopters for the UNAMID force,” saying the alliance members best placed to provide the aircraft are the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania and Spain. In addition, it said, “Ukraine and India could together contribute 34 helicopters.”
There was no immediate comment from the governments of those nations. The report was endorsed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has repeatedly expressed frustration over the lack of attack and transport helicopters and other critical gear that he says is crucial for the Darfur peacekeeping mission. “Given the terrain and security situation in Darfur, it is critical that member states provide missing aviation assets,” Ban said in a statement released by his office.
The governments involved would doubtless argue that they are doing their best elsewhere: India is the UN’s #1 helicopter supplier, Ukraine has attack choppers in Liberia to deter any new trouble there, Spain has committed two planes to Chad, etc. I am increasingly inclined to think that, while I usually view the idea of “UN standing forces” as a miasma, there is a case for some sort of international helicopter pool for peace ops. That was where Thomas and I ended up in May:
The pool of aircraft “could be available to the UN, AU and others. They wouldn’t be UN owned but it might be possible to fund a standing pool of aircraft,” says Gowan. “The most convincing political basis we’ve seen for it is that it should be something largely focused on the region where the bulk of UN peacekeeping is concentrated, which is Africa, and that it should be something shared between the UN and the AU who would fund this pool for missions that were mandated by the UN or AU.”
A nice idea on paper. But not much comfort to the people of Darfur, I admit.
PS: Mark reminds me that, last November, Indian combat camels were mooted as an alternative to helicopters. I find no evidence of progress on this front.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Global system
Over the past few months, China’s given a few lessons in how not to do public diplomacy, whether it’s nationalist students abroad or Party officials at home. Orville Schell has a piece in this week’s NYRB that’s worth a look for some of the backstory, exploring a sense of persistent historical humiliation that he argues is central to modern China’s self-image.
It all began, he argues, with 19th century colonial humiliations such as the Opium Wars. More recently, when the Treaty of Versailles gave Germany’s concessions in China to Japan, the expression “wuwang guochi” – “never forget our national humiliation” – became a popular slogan.
And so it went on. When the PRC was founded in 1949, Mao said “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We…have stood up.” When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, Jiang Zemin said that “the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered in modern history”. And in 2001,
…the National People’s Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official “National Humiliation Day.” (However, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates could not agree on any one, and thus, no day was designated, although one of the leading candidates is now September 18, the day in 1931 that Japan began its invasion of Manchuria.)
And so we come to the Olympics. Already, Schell argues, the protests that disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch have played straight into the humiliation narrative:
While patriots from other countries would doubtless also have felt affronted by the sight of such a potent symbol of their nationhood under assault, the response of many Chinese to these confrontations revealed in dramatic fashion how sensitive China still was to foreign insult. What these Chinese at home and abroad chose to see on television was not oppressed Tibetans seeking a redress of grievances, but China again under siege and again being demeaned in the most public of ways.
Part of the root problem, he continues, is that: “for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history”. At first, it was Chinese reformers “denouncing traditional Confucian culture” at the start of the 20th century. Then it was the nationalists who came under attack, with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife seen as too westernized and American. Then came Mao and the Cultural Revolution, followed by Deng Xiaoping “to perform yet another act of demolition, this time on Mao’s revolution itself”. Schell concludes:
The cancellations of these successive efforts at self-reinvention have left Chinese with an uncertain sense of cultural or political direction. The country has tended to swing from one experiment to another, seeking refuge in a series of large-scale, but never definitive, makeovers. It is therefore perhaps understandable that a more robust sense of cultural and political self-confidence has remained elusive.
So, partly in shock, and partly in disappointment, China responded to the demonstrations against its Olympic torch with incensed outrage, rejecting any suggestion that its own actions could have contributed to, much less have ameliorated, Tibetan demands … what made these demonstrations against the torch such an affront to so many Chinese was the way in which they intruded just when they had allowed themselves to imagine that their national identity might actually metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games.
Problem is, as I first noted back in November last year, so much could go wrong with the games themselves – making the torch disruption look like a trailer for the main feature. Let’s hope not.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks
Oh dear. First the collapse of Doha, and now this:
Russia plans to form a state grain trading company to control up to half of the country’s cereal exports, intensifying fears that Moscow wants to use food exports as a diplomatic weapon in the same way as Gazprom has manipulated natural gas sales.
The move by Moscow, the world’s fifth-biggest exporter of cereals, has been sharply criticised by US agriculture diplomats as a “giant step back” to the Soviet era.
Morevoer, in the future Russia’s strategic importance as a grain producer is likely to grow as a result of climate change: higher average temperatures are likely to benefit Russia’s agricultural productivity, at least in the short term, as temperate latitudes are projected by the IPCC to see some carbon fertilisation effects between one and three degrees C of warming. (This said, Russia’s yields could still fall in absolute terms if extreme weather events, droughts and changes in water availability impact heavily – but it’s still likely that Russia’s importance as a producer would grow in relative terms.)
Russia (like Canada) looks set to be one of the big winners of the 21st century world of scarcity. Massive investment in new oil production even as the price soars; the prospect of even more resource finds as the Arctic melts; relatively lower exposure to climate impacts; and Russia’s role as a breadbasket of the world (with all the influence that this entails) set to grow and grow.
