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DE RUCNDT #0065/01 0300103
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FM USMISSION USUN NEW YORK
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC NIACT IMMEDIATE 5709
INFO RUEHZO/AFRICAN UNION COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
RUEHZL/EUROPEAN POLITICAL COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
RUEHGG/UN SECURITY COUNCIL COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
RUEHUJA/AMEMBASSY ABUJA IMMEDIATE 0402
RUEHAM/AMEMBASSY AMMAN IMMEDIATE 0039
RUEHIL/AMEMBASSY ISLAMABAD IMMEDIATE 2130
RUEHMN/AMEMBASSY MONTEVIDEO IMMEDIATE 0199
RUEHNE/AMEMBASSY NEW DELHI IMMEDIATE 2413
RUEHOT/AMEMBASSY OTTAWA IMMEDIATE 1141
RUEHRB/AMEMBASSY RABAT IMMEDIATE 1365

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 USUN NEW YORK 000065 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: UNSC PHUM PREL
SUBJECT: SECURITY COUNCIL CONSIDERS FUTURE OF PEACEKEEPING 
 
¶1. (SBU) SUMMARY.  Security Council members and invited 
speakers considered in lengthy January 22-23 sessions the 
state of United Nations peacekeeping operations. 
Participants agreed that a decade of dramatic expansion in UN 
peacekeeping efforts leaves the Council overdue for a 
systematic stocktaking of PKO performance and direction.  The 
UK and French missions have committed to steering a Council 
effort over the next several months to undertake such a 
review.  Aside from a shared desire to improve the quality of 
communication among UN entities involved in peacekeeping, no 
consensus about reform was reached and no specific proposals 
formally put forward.  The following is a summary of 
significant commentary by participants.  END SUMMARY. 
 
¶2. (U) On January 22, the French Mission hosted a half-day 
informal "Seminar on UN Peacekeeping." Participants included 
all Security Council members (Ambassador DiCarlo and 
DepPolCouns for USUN), U/SYG for Peacekeeping LeRoy, U/SYG 
for Field Support Malcorra, A/SYG for Peacekeeping Mulet, 
former U/SYG for Peacekeeping Guehenno, SRSG for MINUSTAH 
(Haiti) Annabi, SRSG for UNMIL (Liberia) Loj, and 
representatives from the Center on International Cooperation 
and Security Council Reports.  On January 23, Security 
Council President for January France presided over an open 
debate on the agenda item "UN Peacekeeping Operations."  In 
addition to Council members, participants included 
representatives India, Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria, Uruguay, 
the Czech Republic (as European Union President), Morocco (as 
Chair of the Non-Aligned Movement), Canada (as Chair of UN 
Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations), and the 
African Union along with LeRoy, Malcorra, and Annabi.  The UK 
and French missions jointly drafted and circulated two 
non-papers totaling four pages in advance of the two 
sessions, one entitled simply "non-paper" and the other 
entitled "Effective Strategic Oversight." 
 
January 22 Informal Session: Is There A Crisis In 
Peacekeeping? 
--------------------------- 
 
¶3. (SBU) UK PermRep Sawers told participants in the January 
22 seminar that the UK and France had concluded that the 
rapid expansion of UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKO) risked 
"overwhelming the system" unless the Security Council took 
measures: to became better informed about situations 
potentially warranting deployment of UNPKO's; to produce 
better mandates; and to better oversee PKO's once 
established.  Sawers cited the recent Security Council 
resolution on Chad (UNSCR 1861) as a model of what he called 
a new type of "bottom-up" resolution that includes a clear 
mandate, performance benchmarks, timelines, and performance 
reviews.  He suggested that UN missions in DRC and Darfur 
could be reviewed with these criteria in mind when they were 
up for renewal and that any PKO that may be created for 
Somalia be similarly constructed.  French PermRep Ripert 
agreed with Sawers assessment except that Ripert thought the 
recent renewal of MONUC's mandate in DRC (UNSCR 1856) also 
exemplified this new approach.  (NOTE.  France was the 
primary drafter of both 1856 and 1861. END NOTE.) 
 
¶4. (SBU) MINUSTAH SRSG Hedi Annabi, who previously served as 
Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, criticized the 
French/UK non-papers as "reading like they were written by 
NATO or the EU" in that they focused almost exclusively on 
military aspects of PKO's whereas "the UN is actually being 
given a huge range of non-military tasks to fix the civil 
society aspects of failed states."  He said the Council needs 
to ask itself whether UNPKO's are being given the resources 
to carry out these non-military tasks.  UNMIL SRSG Margrethe 
Loj, who served as PermRep of Denmark during its 2006-07 
tenure on the Security Council, agreed that the non-papers 
were overly focused on the military aspects of peacekeeping 
and overlooked the greatly expanded police and civilian 
components of UNPKO's.  This perspective, she added, was 
consistent with what she sees as the Council's failure to 
provide adequate resources to field operations in these 
non-military areas. 
 
¶5. (SBU) UN Under Secretary-General for Field Support Suzanna 
Malcorra said she sees UNPKO expansion as straining capacity 
in the way the new UN Department of Field Support (DFS) does 
business.  She said DFS finds itself caught between the 
 
USUN NEW Y 00000065  002 OF 004 
 
 
Security Council's urgent mandates and the General Assembly's 
leisurely approach to budget matters.  This tension, she 
said, often leaves her with an "unfair choice between getting 
things done and following the rules and regulations."  She 
said that correcting this situation requires significant 
change in the way DFS is allowed to do business, starting 
with DFS' implementation of the new Somalia resolution (USUN 
1863), so that "we can have accountability and fairness but 
still get things done."  She insisted, however, that a need 
for change is not reflective of a crisis and congratulated 
Council members for focusing on the need for improvement in 
UN peacekeeping before a crisis arose. 
 
¶6. (SBU) Former UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping 
Jean-Marie Guehenno argued that PKO's too often are geared to 
the achievement of "fuzzy" political end-states reflective of 
lack of unity within the Security Council as mandates are 
developed.  Guehenno was critical of what he saw as a Council 
trend to create "more dangerous missions with expansive 
mandates."  He saw some of these mandate objectives, 
particularly the protection of civilians, as laudable goals 
but poorly conceived and executed.  He offered two pieces of 
advice to Council members should the Council insist on 
continuing to issue expanded mandates.  First, he said there 
needs to be much stronger interaction between political 
planning and military planning because "you can't expect 
clear military answers to vague political questions." 
Second, he suggested the Council cannot demonstrate unity of 
purpose as long as one set of countries is seen as making 
military decisions while another set of countries sends 
troops to carry them out.  He said "traditional troop 
contributing countries will be far less willing to take these 
increased risks if the risks are not shared." 
 
¶7. (SBU) When the floor was opened to comments, Chinese 
Deputy PermRep Liu Zhenmin quickly returned to Guehenno's 
criticism of expanded UNPKO mandates, saying, "Some crises 
are not real crises but just internal disorders.  Some 
mandates are too wide with Security Council members wanting 
to add elements -- protection of civilians and human rights 
for example -- with no thought to repercussions or costs." 
While no Council member expressly supported China's position, 
SRSG Loy warned against a tendency to make mandates into 
"Christmas trees" with members adding national ornaments at 
the last minute that often demanded vagueness as the price of 
consensus.  She thought that "the famous protection of 
civilians" was such a case of a vague mandate element that 
could have been clarified had the Secretariat been more 
substantively involved in deliberations at an earlier stage. 
 
¶8. (SBU) Ambassador DiCarlo agreed that UNPKO mandates are 
becoming progressively broader and troop contributors are 
becoming increasingly difficult to identify to the point, in 
Darfur, where a mission finds itself unable to carry out 
significant aspects of its mandate.  She said recent 
experience had made clear to the U.S. that member states and 
various mission-specific "friends" groups are not technically 
and legally set-up to easily coordinate efforts with UN 
organs even when all parties concerned were determined to 
work together.  She pointed to the need to find a more 
systematic way to build capacity of potential troop 
contributors.  She urged the Secretariat to continue a recent 
trend towards providing technical briefings on particular 
PKO's. 
 
¶9. (SBU) Russian Deputy PermRep Dolgov called for benchmarks 
to be more routinely included in Council mandates for UNPKO's 
but said doing so would create a related concern about how to 
evaluate performance.  He said "the Council needs more 
consultations with the Secretariat as reports are being 
composed."  A defensive Assistant Secretary-General for 
Peacekeeping Edmond Mulet listed more than a dozen regular 
briefings made available by the Secretariat to Council 
members, concluding that "maybe members are not aware of all 
these briefings and maybe the quality can be improved, but 
they are available."  SRSG Loy suggested that the Council's 
internal consultations are "generally a waste of time" 
because representatives merely read statements from their 
capitals.  She added that Secretariat meetings with troop 
contributors are usually even less substantive.  She 
cautioned against institutionalizing benchmarks in mandates 
if their language is open to political interpretation and 
 
USUN NEW Y 00000065  003 OF 004 
 
 
concluded that "we don't need more pointless bureaucracy." 
 
January 23 Open Debate: It May Not Be Broke, But It Could Use 
Fixing 
----------------------- 
 
¶10. (SBU) U/SYG LeRoy was the featured speaker at the January 
23 Council session.  He said plainly that "I believe 2009 is 
a pivotal year for peacekeeping.  A number of our missions 
face risks that are so significant that there is potential 
for mission failure, with terrible consequences for the 
United Nations."  He said UN peacekeeping faces "operational 
overstretch and, I would argue, political overstretch too." 
He sees the operational problems as the more immediate threat 
to existing missions and largely deferred to U/SYG Malcorra 
to detail these.  The political problems he sees as stemming 
from insertion of a peacekeeping operation into complex 
conflicts where parties are often unwilling to seek peace and 
where international community divisions mirror differences 
between the parties.  The frequent result, he said, is that 
"for many of our missions, there is no consensus in the 
international community regarding the optimal political 
direction."  He offered two action recommendations for 
Council consideration: (1) find innovative ways to secure 
troops and other resources and to urgently deploy both as 
needed to existing peacekeeping and political missions and 
(2) attempt to fashion a better convergence of views among 
relevant players (Secretariat, troop and police contributors, 
the 4th and 5th committees of the General Assembly, and the 
Security Council) about what UN peacekeeping can and cannot 
achieve. 
 
¶11. (SBU) Accepting LeRoy's invitation to describe 
operational issues faced by the newly created Department of 
Field Support, Malcorra agreed that the challenges are 
daunting, but she fell well short of alleging that mission 
failure was a real threat.  She acknowledged that the UN's 
newest peacekeeping missions -- UNAMID and MINURCAT -- "are 
two of the most complex and difficult missions ever 
contemplated by the UN."  But she conveyed confidence that 
the UN would meet the challenge, in part by DFS finding 
logistical economies of scale between missions and by the UN 
hierarchy granting DFS the regulatory flexibility to take 
advantage of them. 
 
¶12. (SBU) UK PermRep Sawers offered a summary of themes he 
thought emerged from the previous day's seminar, including: a 
need for better information flow and better military advice; 
a need for more clear mandates with completion strategies and 
benchmarks; a need for there to be "a peace to keep" rather 
than allowing peacekeeping deployment in a war zone in the 
hope that peace would emerge. 
 
¶13. (SBU) Russian PermRep Churkin thought that the challenges 
facing UN peacekeeping demanded stronger UN partnerships with 
regional organizations and better management of relations 
among the Security Council, the Secretariat, and troop 
contributing countries with regard to the planning, 
implementation, and evaluation of peacekeeping missions.  He 
suggested that the Security Council suffered from a lack of 
quality military advice and urged revitalization of the 
Military Staff Committee (MSC) by involving all 15 Council 
members and including the MSC in drawing up a all aspects of 
peacekeeping missions. 
 
¶14. (SBU) Ambassador DiCarlo pledged U.S. cooperation with 
the Secretariat's "New Horizon Project," a joint DFS/DPKO 
effort to look at challenges facing UN peacekeeping over the 
next two to five years and acknowledged that "despite all our 
concerted efforts to improve peacekeeping practice, we cannot 
say, more than eight years after the Brahimi report was 
issued, that we have fully succeeded in institutionalizing 
its call for 'clear, credible, and achievable mandates.'" 
She called for the Council to include specific benchmarks 
whenever possible in creating new peacekeeping mandates as a 
means of enhancing UN capacity to undertake and evaluate 
complicated mandates.  Finally, she called for concerted 
effort to improve the operational capacity of available 
peacekeeping troops so that member states willing to assume 
peacekeeping risks would have the wherewithal to deploy. 
 
¶15. (SBU) Ugandan PermRep Butagira said that the mandate 
 
USUN NEW Y 00000065  004 OF 004 
 
 
decision-making process "must not be the sole prerogative of 
a few members of the Security Council" but must be "more 
broad-based and the consultative process even more so." 
Japanese PermRep Takasu said that Japan, as chair of the 
Security Council's Working Group on Peacekeeping Operations 
will "take a hard look at mission-specific operational 
issues..."  Austrian PermRep Mayr-Harting endorsed the 
increased use of benchmarks in constructing mandates and 
heightened attention to the protection of civilian 
populations by peacekeeping forces. 
 
¶16. (SBU) French PermRep Ripert said he had a "global 
agreement of the Council" that the UK and France should act 
as a kind a Secretariat for this initiative and they would 
therefore jointly revise and recirculate their non-papers. 
 
¶17. (SBU) Several non-Council members also participated. 
Canadian PermRep McNee announced that Canada would launch its 
own "informal thematic series on effective peacekeeping 
operations" and endorsed the recommendation of the recent 
"Prodi Report" that more sustainable funding be found for 
regional peace support operations mandated by the UN.  The 
Indian representative argued that "the Charter visualized 
peacekeeping as a tool jointly invented and honed by the 
Council and the General Assembly.  It was not intended to be 
an attribute of the power accorded to the Council by the 
Charter."  Nigerian PermRep Onemola complained that "it has 
become apparent that those who provide the material resources 
and logistics support for peacekeeping have captured the 
peacekeeping process and relegated the welfare of 
peacekeepers to the background...Attention and respect must 
revert to the peacekeepers..." 
Rice