Congo vs Afstan

The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese writes another story, in which he implies that our troops should be in the Congo under the UN rather than in Afstan.
...
The six-year war in the Congo claimed four million lives, according to the UN, while another 3.4 million people are refugees. Seventeen million don't have enough food, according to the world organization.

The Canadian commitment of just nine soldiers to the UN's Congo mission [MONUC] stands in stark contrast to the 2,300 personnel it has assigned to Afghanistan.

The thousands of troops in Afghanistan are under the Pentagon's Operation Enduring Freedom, the codename for the U.S. war on terror.

"We're abandoning the UN, we're abandoning UN soldiering," said Walter Dorn [his CV is revealing as to his leanings], an associate professor at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. "It's because missions like Afghanistan are sapping our capacity for other purposes."

With the withdrawal of its troops this week from the UN's Golan Heights peacekeeping operation, Canada drops to 50th among the nations contributing soldiers to missions overseen by the world body...

Other nations, however, are committing to the Congo. Germany has agreed to lead a European Union mission of as many as 1,500 troops in the coming months in preparation for the Congo's June elections... [That's not the whole story; see at "Daimnation!": Darfur: NATO willing to help UN; EU eyes Congo.]

"This whole view that peacekeeping is dead is certainly not true," said Mr. Dorn. "The UN has actually seen a surge in peacekeeping and in the Congo they're increasing to 18,000 troops. Yet Canada has trouble providing four or five soldiers there."

Mr. Stollery [Liberal Senator] agreed that there is a campaign in Canada to "denigrate" UN operations. "It's as if UN missions aren't where it's at these days," he adds...

The implication of the story is that with our current Afstan mission Canada has abandoned our so-called "traditional" peacekeeping role.

Mr Pugliese does not report that the Congo mission is authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1635 (2005) under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and is no traditional peacekeeping mission. Chapter VII authorizes the use of force. (Mr Pugliese does write that In early March, UN troops backed by helicopter gunships, killed a number of rebels in the Congo.) Peacekeeping missions are conducted under Chapter VI of the charter.

The US and NATO missions in Afghanistan (Canadian troops are now under the former and will shift to the latter this summer) are also authorized under Chapter VII of the Charter by Security Council Resolution 1623 (2005), passed unanimously. The UN Congo mission and the Afghanistan missions are not peacekeeping missions. The difference between them is that the UN has a very difficult time running its own missions effectively whereas the US and NATO do not.

Canadian Forces are much better off not being under UN command and are able to do a much better job when they are not. Compare what happened under UN command in Bosnia and Croatia (little HARMONY there) with what happened under NATO command in Bosnia.

This story was manufactured to make its point; it is not reporting. It is an effort, yet again, by our media to create an agenda.

Cross-posted to Daimnation!