How many fights have continued since the catastrophic failure of Mali to kill civilians by the villageful? How many slaughters have been continuing to go on? What's the scale of destruction of the human beings? How many more refugees and internally displaced are being moved around because of this scenario?
My argument to this, Madam, is that anybody who looks at a mission, even with a flawed mandate, and doesn't see the possibility of amending the mandate, of working on a peace process....
We're working on the peace process in South Sudan right now, which has some significant problems on a significant scale. You cannot look short term at peace support or conflict resolution. The short term will often give you some bad feelings and some risk that you would prefer not to have, but it is the sustainment of an effort, the commitment by the international community, and in particular, by northern countries.
We abdicated on peacekeeping with the end of the Cold War and left developing countries with no capability, no equipment, to take on all this peacekeeping. We walked away from it. We even walked away from our rapid-reaction capability that we presented in 1995 as a solution. We walked away from SHIRBRIG, which we even commanded. We let them do it, and now we're saying they're not doing it right, it's weak, and so on.
What I would argue is that it is high time we return in a variety of very capable scenarios, not by deploying massive numbers of troops but by providing far more aware, intellectually based capabilities, with soldiers who are credible, with diplomats who can work with soldiers and with humanitarians.
I was on a committee and I had General Petraeus tell me that in Afghanistan he never talked to an NGO, because they didn't want to talk to him. There were 7,000 NGOs out there. Imagine all the information he could have gotten. That type of stuff has to stop and we have to bring in new capabilities. Generals who will sit here and tell you that the only solution to these things is to fight are generals of another era.