The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (78 page)

Two points of this definition are particularly important. The first is that the aim or outcome that military force is intended to achieve is political. Thus, to have a strategy for the use of military force, one must have a political aim that can be achieved by force. Without such a political aim, one may deploy force but will not be able to employ it to strategic advantage. If the political aim cannot be achieved by force alone, then the other measures necessary to achieve it must be closely aligned and coordinated with the military activities. Often the military will be acting in support of the other measures. Failure to establish the aim and, if necessary, close coordination between military and non-military activities leads to there being no linkage between the political purpose and the military acts. Secondly, a strategy is not so much a plan as a desired pattern of events to achieve a desired outcome. The architect does not produce the drawings for the builder – the military plan – until he has decided in the circumstances on what he is to build, for what purpose – the aim – and with what resource. A military plan should lay down a coherent course of events that leads to achievement of the aim in a specified set of circumstances. Subordinates are allocated objectives and the forces and resources to achieve them, together with the means necessary to command, supply, and administer the force in the circumstances. A strategy and, to a large extent, a
campaign plan describes the conditions one wants to achieve so that it is possible to use one’s forces advantageously to achieve one’s aim.

In addition to a strategy, one needs an organization at the strategic level to put that strategy into effect: to shape the pattern of events and develop them to achieve the desired goal. Such an organization, sometimes called a strategic headquarters (HQ), must link the political objectives to the military means. In the case of NATO, for example, the political leadership sits in the NATO HQ in Brussels, containing the North Atlantic Council, the Military Committee and International Military Staff. The Supreme HQ Allied Powers Europe, its military strategic HQ, is based in Mons, 40 kilometres away. Beneath the strategic HQ, one generally finds other HQs charged with achieving the military objectives outlined by the strategy. Particularly in the case of multinational operations where an organization is intervening in a conflict in another country, it is necessary to establish a theatre HQ. HQ UNPROFOR was such an HQ. The Security Council, the Secretary-General, and the UN Secretariat in New York constituted the political HQ, but there was no military strategic HQ to link to the theatre HQ of UNPROFOR in Sarajevo.

Moreover, in formulating a strategy, it is necessary to understand the opponent’s one. A strategy involving the use of force is always used against an opponent with its own political aims, and, it must be supposed, the will and means to achieve it. It too will have a strategy, and will do everything in its power to frustrate one’s strategy while advancing its own. It is even more difficult and complex when one intervenes in a fight between two or more parties with the intention of not taking sides. Then, to a greater or lesser extent, all groups are opposed to the intervener. This is the situation UNPROFOR found itself in.

Against this backdrop, it is possible to break down the role of the UN in military conflicts. At the strategic level, a UN operation has to address five issues in particular:

• First, it has to form the force. The UN needs to gain contingent forces from member states and, when necessary, provide them with equipment, as had to be done for the troops from Bangladesh for UNPROFOR, for example. Such a force will always be a collection of contingents rather than a cohesive whole. Each contingent is from a different state, each with its own reason for providing the contingent, and with its own organization, training, culture, law, and language.

• Secondly, the force needs to be dispatched. When the state providing the contingent cannot do this, the UN will contract a carrier to fly the contingent to the theatre of operations.

• Thirdly, the UN must direct the force to its objective within the overall context of the confrontation. This is the very essence of strategic command: it requires a clear idea of the desired outcome, the part the military and other agencies have in achieving it, and a comprehensive understanding of the current situation. Finally the strategic commander must be able to alter priorities and the sequence of
actions. As I will discuss later in this chapter, the UN HQ was unable to carry out this function.

• Fourthly, the force needs to be sustained. This involves more than ensuring that the force is adequately fed and housed, although this is important enough. It also involves the moral, legal, and personnel measures that motivate the manpower, and supporting functions such as the ability to communicate that make it possible for the force to act together. In UN peace operations, the national authority of each contingent is usually responsible for those matters to do with supporting the manpower and the UN is responsible for those matters relevant to the contingents acting together.

• Finally, it must recover the force. Recovering the force is not just a matter of arranging the transport. To meet this requirement, a mission needs to succeed in such a way that the force can return.

Each one of these functions is dependent on one or more of the others, and to be carried out successfully they require a clear definition of the desired outcome and knowledge of those opposed to it. Thus, without knowing the desired outcome and the opponent, one cannot know what force to form, cannot know what force to move and to sustain, and cannot know how to direct the force to achieve its goal and enable its recovery.

Applying this framework to UNPROFOR, it is possible to see that UNPROFOR’s Bosnian operation was an operation without a strategy. It lacked an agreed outcome, or aim. Whatever political purposes the forces deployed into the Balkans served, they were not supporting goals directly related to a resolution of the conflict. Indeed there was no clear agreed idea as to the nature of the desired political outcome. There was discord between the European allies and the US over the nature of the political compromises necessary to resolve the situation. In a conflict such as that in Bosnia involving an international intervention, the different warring parties will never agree to the painful compromises necessary, as long as they believe that they can get a better deal by holding out for longer, in the hope that outside forces will manage to tilt the equation more in their favour. An international effort to achieve peace will never succeed unless there is peace within that international effort, and that was certainly not the case during much of the period of the Bosnian conflict up to mid-1995.

In 1993, the search for a solution, the desired political outcome, was placed in the hands of Lord Owen acting for the European Union, and Ambassador Vance acting for the UN, as co-chairmen of the Conference for the former Yugoslavia. These two
travelled widely and consulted deeply in their efforts to find a resolution to the conflict. Their efforts were undercut by the Clinton administration in 1993 on the grounds that the US considered that too much, geographically and morally, was being given to the Bosnian Serbs. From this point onwards, the US pursued its own Balkan policy, concentrating in the first instance on supporting Croatia’s military development and later sponsoring the Bosnian Croat Federation. The European allies were surprised by the US pulling the rug from under the Vance–Owen Plan and, in the aftermath, the Contact Group was formed in 1994 (so named to show the intention of staying together), including France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the US, to find a resolution to the conflict.

Throughout this search for a political solution, the Security Council remained responsible for the military operation. However, the operation was limited in purpose, and states were so averse to risk to their contingents that they retained in large measure the authority to deploy and to employ force. The initial purpose of the operation was to protect the delivery of humanitarian aid. However, as the fighting continued with the associated scenes of atrocities, destroyed homes, and refugees, ever more was expected of UNPROFOR. Expectations were held by those whose lives had been disrupted by war, by the losing factions, and by the US. These expectations were expressed in Security Council resolution after resolution, and were expectations that the force could not fulfil. UNPROFOR was hindered by a number of limitations: it was bound by national caveats on the use of its contingents; the extra contingents required for the new tasks were slow to arrive and never in the numbers required; the troop-contributing states were reluctant to allow UN HQ to redeploy their contingents away from the original tasks; and it lacked suitable firepower.

In addition, NATO became involved in the military aspects of the conflict. The US, spurred on by television pictures of Bosnian Serb aircraft attacking refugee columns and seeking to apply pressure to the Bosnian Serbs, proposed that a NATO-imposed no-fly zone should exist over Bosnia. The Security Council established a ban on military flights in October 1992,
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but only in March 1993 authorized the implementation of the ban by NATO,
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and the North Atlantic Council agreed to enforcement in April 1993. On 28 February 1994, four warplanes violating the no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina were shot down by NATO aircraft. It was also agreed that, should UNPROFOR call for it, NATO aircraft would give close air support to UN peacekeepers that came under attack. In 1994, the role of NATO airpower was expanded when the North Atlantic Council declared the establishment of exclusion zones for heavy weapons around so-called ‘safe areas’, and threatened air strikes against any heavy weapons found in those zones.

Until the end of 1994, force was threatened and applied incrementally by the Security Council and by NATO, to mitigate the awfulness of the conflict and to
prevent it spreading rather than to support the achievement of a resolution of the matter. The efforts of Owen and Vance and the subsequent efforts of the Contact Group during 1994 were made irrelevant by the failures of the different states to reach agreement not only on which political deal they should seek to impose on the parties, but also on how far they were prepared to go in enforcing its implementation by military means. In these circumstances, and standing between two or three factions at war with each other, UNPROFOR (and so by implication the Security Council) became in my words in 1995 either a hostage or a shield to one or other party. The tragic story of the safe areas and Srebrenica gives a good example of the weakness of these arrangements.

During 1992, the Bosnian Serbs in the east of the country had maintained control of substantial areas of territory. The humanitarian situation inside these areas was poor and UNHCR and UNPROFOR became caught, in hindsight, in the first of the hostage or shield situations that mark the story of UNPROFOR. As a UNHCR official explained to Lord Owen:

The Bosnian Serbs attacked the eastern Muslim area in January 1993 and the defenders were driven into enclaves centred on two towns, Srebrenica and Goražde, and a village, Žepa. By mid-February, the humanitarian situation in the enclaves was very bad, there was little food or medicine, and people were dying of malnutrition and of simple wounds. Convoys were denied access by the Bosnian Serbs. The pressure on the ‘international community’ to do something intensified. In April, the Security Council requested the Secretary General to increase UNPROFOR’s presence in eastern Bosnia.
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The UN force commander led a small group drawn from his state’s contingents into Srebrenica, and rapidly became personally involved in the crisis on the ground.

At the same time, the idea of declaring safe areas was being discussed in capitals, in the media, and in the Security Council. The idea of having a zone in which combat does not take place is not new. Regardless of the historical evidence, the idea had been voiced in relation to the Balkan crisis from about 1992 onwards, with its proponents drawing on the recent use of ‘safe havens’ in Kurdistan in 1991 and 1992 in the aftermath of the Gulf War. In Kurdistan, the idea had worked, it was
thought, because after the war over Kuwait, the Iraqis did not see the UK and US as neutral or impartial, and the allies had demonstrated their willingness to use force. Furthermore, the terrain allowed for the use of airpower, and the areas in question were not isolated and could be reached by crossing the border with Turkey, a NATO ally. Unfortunately, none of these criteria applied in Bosnia. Nevertheless, the idea of demilitarizing the area around Srebrenica began to be discussed in capitals and the UN, and the national representatives all worked hard to draft a Security Council resolution, while at the same time avoiding exposing their own nation to risk.

One has only to read the ‘constructive ambiguities’ of Resolution 819 of 16 April 1993 and Resolution 836 of 4 June 1993 to see how well they did. As Shashi Tharoor, then Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, commented in an article for
Survival
in 1995, the Security Council resolutions