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Keeping the peace is perhaps the most complicated and expensive area of the UN's activities. Today there are about 51,000 military personnel from 94 different countries serving in 14 separate UN peacekeeping operations under way worldwide.
Authorized by a vote of the UN Security Council, these blue-helmeted forces have been used dozens of times to stand between warring parties—most recently in East Timor, Liberia, Congo, and Haiti.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon is called "UNIFIL," or the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. But "interim" isn't quite the right word—it's been on the ground in the Middle East since 1978.
Will the peacekeepers there ever be able to leave?
On the LookoutOn a recent first patrol of the day, troops head out for what's known as the Blue Line, the border between Lebanon and Israel that was drawn up four years ago by the United Nations when Israeli troops ended a 22-year occupation of South Lebanon.
Sitting atop a white-painted armoured personnel carrier, Major Dhananjay Joshi says his unit's primary job in the bare, mountainous countryside is observation and reporting—in case there's any violation taking place from either side.
Observation Post 4-7 Charlie, just 100 yards away from the Blue Line, is surrounded by some of the most hotly disputed territory anywhere in the Middle East, with the Lebanese, Israelis, and Syrians all making claims to it.
Nearby, watching the Israelis, are local activists from Hizbollah, or "the party of God." Now one of Lebanon's largest political parties, it is also on the US State Department's list of organizations that sponsor terrorism.
Yet the only powers assigned to Joshi's unit are observation and reporting.
"We can't stop anyone," he said.
Joshi acknowledges that there is an element of black comedy about his mission—trying to keep the peace without the ability to really stop anyone from firing a gun.
"But when you see the larger picture, when repeatedly the reports go in, they lead to more political pressure, more diplomatic pressure on either side to refrain from doing such things," he said.
'Neutrality, Impartiality, Objectivity'How does that affect the mission's ability to achieve results?
"The basics of peacekeeping is neutrality, impartiality and objectivity," said the battalion's commander, Col. Shivender Singh. "Being impartial is a different kind of soldiering. One has to keep the pent-up frustration within himself, because you are doing a greater work for international peace."
Singh also acknowledges that people are fully aware that the guns sitting atop the armoured personnel carriers aren't loaded with live ammunition.
"They know, I'm sure, they know," he said. "It's a very challenging task, it's a very noble task. For a soldier to maintain peace is a noble thing, and that he does by his discipline."
'Unrealistic Expectations'"As civilians, we didn't feel much difference in our lives due to their presence," said a local woman named Arij, speaking in Arabic. "We really didn't have that much to do with them. And sometimes, if there were arguments that broke out, violent incidents, we didn't really feel that they were supporting us."
Though typical of people in Kafr Kila, such opinions, say the peacekeepers, show a fundamental misunderstanding of what they're there to do.
"Not only UNIFIL, but many UN peacekeeping missions are facing the same difficulty: that is, unrealistic expectations, especially of the local civilian population," said Milos Strugar, the senior political adviser to UNIFIL's Force Commander.
"We have a certain mandate, rules of engagement, which is given to us by the Security Council. So we have to act within these rules. The local population for 22 years were asking us why don't you get Israel to withdraw from our territory? Now it is very difficult to explain to them that we didn't have the means or the mandate to enforce this decision," Stugar said.
"Now we have an opposite situation after the Israeli withdrawal. Israelis are coming to us and saying why don't you disarm Hezbollah? This is also an unrealistic expectation, because our job here is not to disarm anyone. Our job here is to prevent escalation."
Measuring SuccessCertainly, South Lebanon has been relatively quiet since the Israelis withdrew. And in spite of their criticisms, the Lebanese government—as well as local people—would rather have UNIFIL there than not.
And Force Commander General Alain Pelligrini says it's hard to see how UNIFIL can be withdrawn.
"The problem is to put an end to UNIFIL," he said. "It will be very difficult, for economic reasons, for social reasons ... we have a lot of people here who've spent all their working life with UNIFIL, you know."
General Pellegrini, understandably, would not speculate on when that withdrawal might be. But it looks like UNIFIL is going to continue spending its $40 million a year in Lebanon for quite a while to come.
'The Challenges Are Enormous'"With two organized armies you would have a cease-fire and deploy a peacekeeping force between those two armies," he said.
It became of the defining images of the United Nations: the blue-helmeted peacekeepers standing uncomfortably between two people who would rather be shooting at each other.
The system has had it successes. The 1998 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations' peacekeeping forces around the world.
But then the world changed.
"The conflicts of today tend to be complicated civil wars that morph into regional conflicts," said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy based in New York. "It's important to make a conceptual leap. To realize at that point what one is aiming at is actually peace-building, not peacekeeping."
But to what extent is the United Nations able to assume this new vision of peacekeeping and take it to this next complicated level?
"Because it's complicated and because it involves lots of civilians, it's a great deal more difficult than the old fashioned classic peacekeeping," Malone said.
Even those largely critical of the United Nations, such as Dr. Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, see this evolution in UN peacekeeping as a positive step.
"Let's face it, UN peacekeeping operations in the past populated by ineffective soldiers wearing blue helmets have been a complete disaster," Gardiner said.
"I believe that certainly the new thinking in the UN with regard to peacekeeping operations is welcome. But at the end of the day, we are going to have to rely upon the world's greatest powers—mainly the United States and Great Britain—to intervene where necessary."
Money, Plus Boots on the GroundUnder-Secretary-General Guéhenno says he may need up to $4 billion over the next 12 months, but compare this to national military budgets around the world. The United States alone spend $400 billion a year on defense.
And then there is the question of boots on the ground.
"We need troops," Guéhenno said. "The United Nations does not have a standing army so we call on member states to provide troops.
The International Peace Academy's David Malone says more and more of these troops are being supplied by poor countries.
"They also make money out of UN peacekeeping, which helps explain why so many of them sign up, whereas Western countries lose money for the UN because their costs are so much higher," he said. "So you're quite right to point out there's a sharp division, which is perceived by many of the developing countries as a new form of apartheid."
A 'Deep Ethical Problem'"I think there's a very deep ethical problem for Western countries to vote for peacekeeping operations in the Security Council, to sometimes advocate peacekeeping operations in the Security Council as the US did on Liberia and then refuse to participate in them," he said.
In the end, creating space for war-torn societies to recover—rather than merely stopping the bloodshed—is probably the ultimate measure of success for these UN operations.
Guéhenno says this takes the one thing that seems to be in the shortest supply on the world stage: patience.
"I think one of our greatest challenges in peacekeeping is that peacekeeping in the minds of people is linked to crisis," he said. "But we have learned the hard way in peacekeeping that there is no quick fix to any of those tragic situations."
Related Web Links
Official United Nations peacekeeping site
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/home.shtml
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon site
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unifil/
Biography of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/info/page1.htm