An Interview with Kimberly Zisk Marten

To read more about Kimberly Zisk Marten’s Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial PastnnQuestion: You argue that United Nations peacekeeping operations have fundamentally changed in the last ten years. Explain.nnKimberly Zisk Marten: It used to be that UN peacekeeping was really just that—keeping the peace after both sides had decided to end a war, where everyone wanted the UN to come in. The military forces involved would be from smaller, neutral countries. They would act as a buffer between the two sides, monitor what happened, and make sure that conflict didn’t break out again. But it usually wasn’t very dangerous or messy. Now we have seen much more complex military operations, in places like Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan, where there is still lots of violence and instability, where not everyone wants the international community to be there, where military personnel are asked to do police work and make decisions about humanitarian aid distribution. Now, we’ve learned, the most effective operations are ones where the big western powers take the lead.nnQ: You say that these new types of peace operations have some important similarities with imperialism. Why do you say that? Aren’t we trying to do good things in places like Bosnia and Afghanistan?nnKZM: Yes, there’s no question that the intentions of the international community are good. We’re not trying to plunder the resources of these countries. But there are some key characteristics that these operations share with the kind of imperialism that was practiced by liberal states—France, Britain, and the U.S.—at the turn of the twentieth century. Most importantly, the goals of the international community now, just like those earlier imperial operations, are centered on trying to shape and direct the political and social developments of these countries to make them look more like the west. We are trying to exert control over foreign societies.nnQ: But don’t those countries want to look more like the west? Doesn’t everyone want to be a democracy and to have human rights protected? Aren’t we just controlling the rogue elements who undercut progress?nnKZM: It’s not quite so simple. One good example is Bosnia. The international community has set up a constitution in that country that mandates ethnic tolerance and power-sharing. But there are lots of people in each of the individual ethnic groups involved—Serbs, Croats, and Bosniac Muslims—who are nationalistic and who really don’t want to share power with each other. They want to be on their own, or in the case of nationalist Serbs or Croats, to merge with neighboring countries that are dominated by their own ethnic groups. When the Bosnian citizens freely and fairly elect representatives to the government who act in nationalistic ways, the international organization that oversees the constitution—the Office of the High Representative—has repeatedly kicked these democratically elected officials out of office. In other words, the international community wants to help Bosnia become a liberal democracy—but is willing to undermine the democratic process to make sure it happens. We want to have control over the outcome more than we want real democracy to flourish.nnQ: Okay, but the kind of control the imperial countries wanted wasn’t so benevolent, was it? Wasn’t imperialism about stealing other people’s resources, and wasn’t it violent?nnKZM: We need to keep in mind that although imperialism was about taking resources from the colonies, and while it often was violent and left bad legacies behind, imperialists from those liberal states a century ago also believed that they were doing good. They thought they were sharing the benefits of the developed west with the less fortunate regions of the world, helping them to become more like us.nnQ: The old “white man’s burden” that Rudyard Kipling wrote about. But wasn’t that just a cover for what was really happening? Weren’t the imperialists hypocrites in that way?nnKZM: Since those liberal imperial states were democracies (or at least partial democracies because the vote wasn’t yet universal), colonialism needed to be supported by ordinary people who voted. Those ordinary people wanted to believe that they were making a difference, and thought they were doing their Christian duty in the colonies. That meant that the governments had to be responsive to that desire. They had to put some effort into actually helping their colonies develop economically and in terms of education and political rights and so forth, because otherwise they’d lose public support. Besides, it was much easier to keep control in the colonies if the people you ruled got some benefit from your rule; it’s very expensive to have to fight wars and put down rebellions all the time.nnQ: So what are some of the important similarities you see with today’s peace operations?nnKZM: There are several. First, by the early twentieth century, imperialism wasn’t primarily about profit, because the colonies were mostly not very profitable. (British India was an exception, because it was self-supporting.) Instead imperialism then was mostly about security. The big powers wanted to have access to raw materials and ocean shipping routes in the colonies, in case they faced warfare against each other in the future. Now obviously peace operations today aren’t competitive that way. But we see that the powerful western states are only willing to lead peace operations today when their own self-interests are at stake. Sometimes, as in Haiti or the Balkans or East Timor, that self-interest involves stopping refugee flows that could otherwise overwhelm the economy. Other times, as in Afghanistan, it’s to try to control terrorism. But usually there are no really powerful and capable states that are willing to lead peace operations for purely humanitarian reasons when there is no self-interest involved. We saw that in 1994 in Rwanda, when no one stopped the genocide of 800,000 people; we saw it again in Darfur. That lack of will to get involved, even in the face of huge human suffering, was completely predictable, and it will undoubtedly happen again in the future.nnQ: Self-interest is definitely involved. What else?nnKZM: Well, as I said, the imperial powers 100 years ago had good reasons to try to want to keep the peace in their colonies—warfare is expensive, and they thought that by bringing development assistance to the colonies and getting people on their side, they’d have an easier time controlling things. But they never put enough resources or attention into their colonies, and as a result they relied on the “man on the spot,” the governors and military officers who were in the colonies, to make decisions. That meant that in practice, colonial rule was a lot more brutal than people at home wanted it to be. Now obviously we don’t have atrocities being committed very often on peace operations today. But we do have a disconnect between goals and resources. We’re seeing this now in Afghanistan, where it’s been impossible to get a sufficient number of NATO troops and equipment deployed to really bring a sense of security to the country, where the illegal drug trade dominates the economy, and where police corruption is so terrible that ordinary cars have to pay extortion money to pass along major roadways, and merchants have to sleep in their stores at night to protect them from burglars who may be supported by the police. A similar thing has happened in Haiti. And yet we try to fool ourselves into believing that we’re doing a good job of bringing all good things to these societies because they hold elections, so we can call them democracies.nnQ: Whew. That’s a pretty big indictment of the gap between intentions and actions. Are there any positive lessons you take from the imperial era?nnKZM: Yes. When military forces are kept under close oversight and when they are rewarded for doing so, they can do police work quite well. We often hear people like Donald Rumsfeld and some senior officers in the Pentagon say that military troops can’t do police work, that they are two different jobs requiring two different sets of skills. But during the imperial era, especially in the urban areas that didn’t see a lot of guerrilla fighting, military forces often did a really good job of things like riot control; they were careful to show restraint. And today, military officers from Great Britain and the British commonwealth, places like Australia and Canada, are often proud of their policing abilities and say that they learned how to do this from their earlier imperial experience.nnQ: Can you give us an example of good police work being done by military forces today?nnKZM: Yes. In May 2004 I spent a week in Afghanistan staying with the Canadian forces who were then leading the NATO ISAF peace mission in the capital of Kabul. I went out on four patrols with them, and I watched what they did. It was a lot like cops walking the beat. They did a really good job of interacting with the local people, showing them respect for local customs—for example, we sat down and had tea for an hour with the elders of a refugee camp, to hear what their concerns were. This was one of the places that we heard about police corruption—and then that information can be passed on to the central government, to let them know where their resources have to be targeted to make the country safer. On a night patrol, they heard about a spate of robberies happening in a certain district, and that told them that they needed to expand their presence in that district to provide more of a deterrent to crime. The Canadian Forces see this as something that makes them safer on the ground, too—if the locals think they are helping, then they are more likely to share information that will protect the troops from attack.nnQ: The U.S. military is really overextended today; people are talking about going back to the draft. We really can’t do any more in terms of peacekeeping, can we? Isn’t that a job for other people, like the Canadians, to do?nnKZM: As long as we are threatened by terrorism, and as long as terrorists like Al Qaeda can set up shop in countries that are destroyed by civil war and anarchy, the U.S. has to do peacekeeping and we have to do it better. Military forces everywhere in the world have shrunk significantly since the end of the cold war, and we have to recognize that there just aren’t enough soldiers out there in other countries to do the job. The Pentagon often says that the job of the U.S. military is to deter, fight, and win the nation’s wars. We have to realize that this has changed, and today thereÕs another job, too: to win the peace after the war. We’re seeing in Iraq just how bad the consequences can be when peacekeeping isn’t done well—when there aren’t enough troops on the ground, when those troops are told not to do police work, and when (as in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) we don’t care enough to train those troops well. Peace operations have to become a priority, for the sake of our future security. We need to stop making people hate us.