Thank you.
There's a debate inside the Secretariat. There's a debate in the membership about the question of what it means for UN peacekeeping to be engaged in contexts where there is a terrorism dimension. It's not comfortable for the UN. There's uncertainty about it. There are concerns about it.
It's very important for Canada to be learning in real time from its operations in Mali and feeding those discussions into the policy debates at the UN. It requires a further elaboration of the concept of impartiality to recognize that if you're confronting a group such as AQIM, which is never going to support a peace process, a sustained tempo of operations in defence against AQIM, whether it's from the French or from the UN, is part of the process of implementing a peace agreement. It's not outside of that. That's part of the reality, to push the envelope in terms of where impartiality confronts strategic spoilers and continuous spoilers against peace operations.
Inside the Secretariat, the legal office and the peacekeeping office understand this, but there is hesitation and nervousness, essentially because some of the “traditional” peacekeeper African countries and some of the smaller Asian countries that have been doing the bulk of the contributions over the last several years are very nervous about it. They don't have the kinds of capability Canada has to defend itself or to be engaged in more offensive operations. They don't want to be put into a context where they're expected to undertake the harder edge of peacekeeping but without the capabilities to do it.
That circle cannot be squared, unless countries such as Canada, Holland, and others that have more advanced capabilities are in those operations and bringing the policy argument back to New York.