My perspective may be a little different from that of others, having been in the military. We don't do very much of what you think of as Canadian peacekeeping any more, because we're not involved in a lot of situations in which there are two sides who want a peacekeeper in the middle. Mostly, we're in places where there are people who want to kill each other, or there are people like some in Afghanistan who want to kill the civilian population, and we're trying to prevent that. I suggest that it would be similar to what's perhaps going on in Sudan, in Darfur. You have innocent people being massacred, and somebody needs to step in and try to stop that.
To be good peacekeepers, in my view—again, I'm probably a little bit biased—you need to have forces that are combat-capable, because it may go from peacekeeping to war fighting within a matter of minutes. That has happened to us in places where we have been peacekeeping, like Bosnia, in the Balkans. We were sent there on a peacekeeping mission, but we wound up in full-blown combat on very short notice.
So in my view, you need to have people and organizations that are fully combat-capable. They can do a less demanding mission, but it's very difficult to send in people with blue berets and no combat capability, and then have them wind up in a situation in which they're getting shot at.
So first and foremost, in my view, you have to have people who are capable of fighting. That may not be their mandate when they go there, but they have to be capable of it, because they may be faced with it very quickly.