Give peacekeeping a chance?

Dr. Walter Dorn, Associate Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada and the Canadian Forces College, suggests in a new op-ed article that a UN peacekeeping force is the best hope for building a more peaceful Afghanistan:

There is already a small UN “good-offices” mission, called the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), mandated to support democratization and reconciliation in Afghanistan. But a true peacekeeping mission—call it UNAMA II—would require a much larger military and police component, numbering in the tens of thousands. It would have to be deployed with the consent of the belligerent parties, including the Afghan government, NATO, the US, and the main insurgent groups. That all the parties would accept such a deployment cannot be taken for granted, but it cannot be dismissed either. As the fighting continues with no end in sight, the prospects for a UN peacekeeping force are likely to increase.

Such a mission, he suggests, might become “part of the exit strategy for the coalition forces now in Afghanistan.”


Tags: Afghanistan, Defence policy, Peacekeeping, Walter Dorn