Thanks very much.
Chair, honourable members, and witnesses, thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to speak to you, even if it's via remote.
I thought it might be most useful for me to step back for a couple of minutes and put the conversation about Canada's current contributions in the slightly wider context of the evolution of conflict and the evolution of peacekeeping. I'll do it very briefly.
I think it's worth understanding that since the end of the Cold War, we've seen essentially three phases of evolution in UN peacekeeping.
There was a phase from the late eighties to the mid-nineties, which I think could most charitably be described as a phase of experimentation, when the UN was experimenting with new forms of peacekeeping after the end of the Cold War. There were some successes in that phase in Mozambique, El Salvador and elsewhere, but also a series of searing strategic failures in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Angola and elsewhere.
That led to a second phase, which I think we could describe as a phase of reform, led largely by Kofi Annan when he became Secretary-General. It saw the UN substantially increase the size of its deployments relative to the fighters it was confronting; substantial improvements in command and control; a recognition that impartiality as a core principle of UN peacekeeping did not limit the UN from fighting back against spoilers or those trying to undermine peace agreements; and the adoption of what's called “multi-dimensionality”—i.e., the integration of security, economic, and humanitarian instruments under an overall political framework.
The large expansion of peacekeeping during this phase from about the mid-nineties to 2010 is highly correlated with and certainly contributed to—you can't really say “caused”—a phenomenon that doesn't get discussed much, which was a 40% decline in all wars worldwide during that period and an 80% decline in major wars. UN peacekeeping, as well as peacekeeping by other actors, such as NATO and regional organizations, played a major role in the substantial decline in the level of war in the world during that period.
The third phase is what we're in now, which is a post-Arab Spring phase, where we've seen in effect the integration of two agendas: a counterterrorism agenda on the one hand, and a civil war management agenda on the other. In the period from 2010 to the present day, more than 90% of all battle deaths have occurred in wars where a terrorist organization is one of the combatants. In other words, you can no longer meaningfully separate questions of civil war management on the one hand from issues of counterterrorism on the other. These slide across a range of scale of difficulties, from the extremely difficult, like Syria, to the rather less difficult, like Mali, but we're confronting new challenges across the spectrum.
For countries like Canada, I think that creates three options for contributing to conflict management.
One is deployment through NATO, which we did in Afghanistan, of course. There are substantial advantages to NATO in terms of military capacity, military punch and CT capacity, etc., as well as substantial disadvantages. NATO has proven to be rather bad at multi-dimensionality, and I think across large swaths of Africa and the Arab world it confronts a substantial built-in disadvantage in terms of the perception of legitimacy or illegitimacy of a western-based platform.
The second option is coalitions of the willing. We're seeing these deployed more effectively in the last several years, most notably with the Global Coalition against Daesh, but also with the G5 in the Sahel and the multinational force against Boko Haram. Those are performing quite effectively. They have the disadvantage of operating in a kind of questionable legal domain and a questionable legitimacy domain and not having the instruments for multi-dimensionality that the UN, when it has done its best, has been able to deliver.
The third option is what I would describe as hardened UN peacekeeping, which we're seeing in southern Lebanon, Mali and the DR Congo, where the UN still operates under relatively traditional concepts of peacekeeping, such as impartiality, but with substantially greater punch capacity and a substantially greater capacity to fight back against spoilers and those who would derail peace agreements or otherwise threaten the peace and stability of the country in question.
The implications for the UN are that it requires—it's not an option; it requires—the participation of sophisticated troop contributors such as the Dutch, the Chinese and the Canadians if these missions are going to be successful. It does, in my view, require an evolution of the legal framework to recognize that there are times when the UN will be a party to conflict. There's nothing wrong with being a party to conflict; it's a perfectly recognizable legal category. The UN should at times see itself as a party to conflict.
It requires a willingness to use force against spoilers and against groups that are dedicated to eroding civilian security, eroding a peace agreement, and eroding the stability of the country in question, and it requires effective backstopping from headquarters.
I think all of those conditions are at least largely present in Mali, where Canada is now deploying, of course. I applauded the decision for Canada to deploy in Mali, just as I had applauded Canada's contribution to ISAF in Afghanistan. I think it matters a great deal that Canada chose to contribute at the harder edge of UN peacekeeping. It's the lighter edge of the counterterrorism spectrum, but the harder edge of UN peacekeeping. That's where the evolution needs to be.
We will see now a world in which UN peacekeeping is essentially only deployed in a context where there are CT components, and we have to evolve and develop the capacities for that if we're going to have the instruments available to us to help manage fragile states and civil wars with a CT component.
By contributing to Mali's operation, Canada has given itself a stronger platform than it's had in the last several years to push the policy framework at the UN and develop a stronger policy voice at the UN on the evolution of these instruments.
Thank you.