Army Peacekeeping Institute Sent Packing

Jim Lobe
June 17, 2002, TomPaine.com

As relief and human rights groups warn that much of Afghanistan is falling into chaos due to the lack of security, the Pentagon has decided to close the United States Army's Peacekeeping Institute (PKI)--the only government agency devoted to studying how to secure peace in failed nations or post-conflict situations.

The agency analyzes past peace operations and passes the results on to the hundreds of American military officers from all the agencies of the armed forces who attended its seminars and courses. The institute also informs UN officials, officers, and civilians from other nations who participate in peace operations of its findings.

While the shut-down, set for September 2003, has not yet been formally announced, Pentagon officials said some of the institute's functions will be reallocated to the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They said the dissolution was part of the Army's reorganization under new budgetary allocations decreed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But knowledgeable sources rejected that explanation, stressing that Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides have long been hostile to U.S. participation in peacekeeping. Condoleezza Rice exemplified the contempt for peacekeeping held by many Republicans when she said during Bush's presidential campaign, "We don't need to have the Eighty-Second Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."

Peter Gantz, a member of the Partnership for Effective Peacekeeping (PEP), a Washington-based coalition on peace operations, said he did not believe the institute was shut for financial reasons. "The Bush administration is saying it wants the U.S. out of peacekeeping in every way, shape, or form," Gantz said.

Indeed, the agency has a total permanent staff of only 10 people and an annual budget of just $200,000, not including salaries. It has built a strong reputation as an international resource for peacekeeping strategy and studies since its founding in 1993 at the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn.

"This sends a powerful signal," said Robert Perito, an expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), a congressionally funded think tank, who has overseen peace operations in the Balkans and East Timor. "The U.S. has been criticized recently by a variety of sources about our unwillingness to take part in peace operations, so this only seems to substantiate that criticism."

The move provided one more example to worried U.S. allies of the administration's hostility to international security initiatives and its unilateralist, "go-it-alone" foreign policy. Experts also said abolishing the PKI is counter productive, especially in places like Afghanistan.

"The PKI's focus was directly relevant to real security challenges, such as Afghanistan..." said retired Air Force Col. Mike Dziedzic, who worked as a strategic planner with the UN peace mission in Kosovo.

"If we are successful in removing from power the leadership of the 'axis of evil,' as [we did] in Afghanistan, we will still have to do something about creating good governance in those places, and that starts with peace operations," said Dziedzic, who is also associated with USIP.

In Afghanistan, however, Washington refused to contribute to the 4,500-troop International Security Assistance Force. It has also resisted pleas from UN officials, NATO allies, and even interim Afghan president Hamid Karzai, to support expanding the security force beyond Kabul into other regions of the country. Those regions are now ruled by many of the same warlords whose rivalries and rapaciousness helped bring the Taliban to power in the mid-1990s.

The situation has become increasingly worrisome to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Late last month the House of Representatives voted 407 to 4 for a resolution calling on Bush to submit within 45 days a "strategy for meeting the immediate and long-term security needs of Afghanistan."

During his presidential campaign, Bush said he opposed U.S. participation in peacekeeping because it reduced military readiness and morale. His views echoed similar skepticism expressed by much of the uniformed military at the end of the cold war. At that time, U.S. policymakers were pushing to add American troops to the multinational peace operations created to address security issues after the Soviet Union's collapse.

But in many cases the military's early skepticism turned to support by end of the 1990s as the armed forces acquired more experience. A recent study by the World Peace Through Law Education Fund, based on in-depth interviews with more than two dozen top U.S. commanders, found that virtually all believe "that peace operations are no longer the discretionary humanitarian missions they were considered in the 1990s, but now are necessary operations that preclude terrorism and enhance U.S. security."

The report also explicitly rejected the notion that peace operations hurt readiness or morale. "The training that the young [non-commissioned officer] or younger officer gets [in Kosovo] is far superior to what he or she would be getting if they were [stationed at U.S. bases] in Germany," according to Joseph Ralston, a retired general and former NATO commander, who was quoted in the report.

But top officials in the Bush administration reject those views, suggesting repeatedly that U.S. armed services should be "war-fighters,'' and other nations, under some circumstances, can do the peacekeeping.

But even that view is flawed, according to former Pentagon spokesman and PEP chairman Kenneth Bacon. "While it is not an illogical division of responsibility, the problem with it is that everyone looks to the U.S. today for military leadership, and other people will say, 'Why should we put our troops at risk, if [the United States isn't] going to do it?'"

Gantz said the problem is ideology.

"The administration cannot say that we need to ensure that Afghanistan does not become a future threat to the U.S. but then not address how to create a secure environment to make that possible," he said. "That's the problem they're facing now in Afghanistan, and that's precisely the kind of problem the PKI has been dealing with."

( Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.)

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