Anthony Lake

What are the political purposes of peacekeeping? The conventional wisdom is that the purpose of peacekeeping in contexts of civil war, ethnic conflict, or fractured states is to heal the fractures, and, as was attempted in Bosnia, to reconstitute the state.

I think we need to begin to contemplate exceptions to the conventional approach. From a military point of view, before any operation is begun, there is a moral obligation and a practical obligation to define success in a political sense. Only then will we know that the job has been completed and it is time to come home.

It is not enough to say that we cannot tolerate the human anguish in a situation and therefore we are going to intervene, even if the purpose of the intervention is unclear. But, in effect, that is what we have done in Kosovo. I believe we should have intervened sooner in Kosovo and should not have taken ground troops off the table in the initial stages as we did. At the same time, we should have forced ourselves and our allies to define the political solution to the problem better. In effect, we responded to events rather than adopting a political and diplomatic strategy that would shape them.

This is exactly what happened in Vietnam. Contrary to what many believe, the U.S. military never was defeated in Vietnam. Had there been the political will in the United States, we could have stayed in Vietnam in perpetuity and prevented South Vietnam from falling to the North. But our purpose was not to colonize Vietnam. Our political goal — the only way we could succeed and leave — was to leave behind a government in Saigon that could defend itself on its own. Vietnam was and is a strongly nationalistic society, which it had to be in order to avoid being taken over by the Chinese for 2000 years. However, the more the United States did for the government in Saigon, the more its nationalists credentials became tattered. The weaker its domestic support became, the less effective it was in the military struggle. This in turn led to increased reliance on U.S. intervention, creating a vicious circle that we were never able to break.

Similarly, in Kosovo today, because of the strong feelings of our European allies and the Russians and the Chinese, we have implied that Kosovo will remain under Yugoslav sovereignty in some undefined status, and we have left that status very fuzzy indeed. However, it is extremely unlikely that the majority in Kosovo will ever accept living under Yugoslav sovereignty, especially if Montenegro becomes independent. As a result, at some point the troops that came in to rescue the Kosovars will be seen not as a liberating force, but as an occupying force. They will then become increasingly at risk from the very people they were sent to protect.

In short, we need exit strategies which are not defined by defeat, but by success. The common definition of success in all of these recent operations — except in East Timor, which was on a somewhat different legal footing — is the reunification of the state. While this is a worthy goal and one that we should as a general principle pursue, the goal may not be achievable in a reasonable span of time; it could be the work of generations. In addition, the international community needs to be clear about who is primarily responsible for achieving that goal. If the international community takes the primary responsibility on itself for healing the wounds and bringing a fractured society together, this can create dangerous dependencies within the country and can fuel resentments of the international community’s role.

Therefore, the international community should limit its military missions to giving such societies a breathing space — a period of calm — combined with economic and political assistance until they can again manage their own affairs. If we reach further, and set as our goal reuniting a shattered nation, we condemn ourselves either to defeat or to the near-perpetual occupation of deeply divided societies.

Of course, I am not suggesting that we set very short deadlines. If there is a reasonable case for operations to last for a decade or more, as I believe to be the case in Bosnia, so be it. And if there is a reasonable case to extend a deadline, as we did in Bosnia, so be it.

However, after a reasonable amount of time the breathing space created by the military peacekeepers should end. If the security situation remains relatively stable, then the civilian dimension of the operation — the aid program, the political assistance, etc. — certainly can continue. But if the military situation starts to deteriorate, or if the cumulative bloodshed is so large and the ethnic hatred so deep that the two parties simply cannot live together, then we should think the unthinkable, and work to oversee a peaceful separation. I think this is clearly going to be the case for Kosovo.

Moreover, if it is obvious from the start that the society will never reunite, as I think was the case in Kosovo, then we should set separation as the goal from the beginning. Such a suggestion is often met with strong disagreement and even anger. And certainly abroad, our European allies, the Russians, Chinese and most African states are vehemently opposed to division. The Europeans do not like the precedent in Kosovo or the separation between Kosovo and Yugoslavia, because of what it implies for other actors in the Balkans. But I would note that it is about to happen in Macedonia, and perhaps one reason why Albanians are making such trouble in Macedonia is out of frustration over the undefined status of Kosovo. The Russians and Chinese oppose separation because of what it implies for Chechnya, Tibet and Taiwan. And the Africans oppose it because African borders were set by colonial powers with no regard for realities of African life and efforts to open this issue could provoke further civil wars.

But given the realities of the world, we need to think about the exceptions to the rule. There are many critical questions which must be asked in this context: What is the scope of the humanitarian crisis? How are our interests or other’s interests affected? Is reconciliation still possible in the practical sense? Have all diplomatic means to hold the country together been attempted, or at least considered? Has a state’s behavior in the face of separatist movements become so reprehensible and so repressive that it has lost its right to sovereignty over its component parts, as I would argue has occurred in Yugoslavia? Would allowing a state to break up produce further ethnic bloodshed in the breakaway state because of the creation of a new majority and minority? Would the new entity be democratic? Would it be viable economically and militarily? What effect would allowing separation have on neighboring countries and on the region? What role would the international community play in guaranteeing the independence of a new state against aggressive attacks by the states that have lost a piece of themselves?

The current course is unsustainable and could be disastrous. It will produce a growing number of peacekeeping garrisons scattered around the world with no end in sight, turning the United Nations and the members involved in this into the greatest colonial power in history, which is neither its mandate nor sustainable. Certainly if this becomes the case in the United States our military and our public will raise serious objections, reinforcing those who are already skeptical of American leadership in UN efforts. We should not allow that to happen.

For the sake of our interests and for the sake of peacekeeping and all the human beings whose lives are at stake, we must scale our ambitions to our resources and to our real responsibilities. If we do not, our support for and leadership of UN peacekeeping efforts will be badly damaged. That would be a tragedy. For if we dismiss efforts to redress such wrongs as those in Kosovo as mere social work abroad, we will have diminished ourselves. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Governments can err. Presidents do make mistakes. But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Anthony Lake is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. From 1993-97 he served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. This article is based on the Seventh Annual Theodore M. Hesburgh C.S.C. Lectures on Ethics and Public Policy, which Lake delivered at the Kroc Institute in April 2001.

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