Humanitarian/Reconstruction Coordination in Peace Support Operations

(As Prepared)

I would like to thank the Peacekeeping Affairs Office of the Ministry of National Defense, and China Institute for International Strategic Studies, for hosting this important Seminar. I also salute the Challenges Project for its continued leadership in the field of peace support operations. I am pleased and honored to continue to be a participant in this landmark effort.

We all recognize that effective peace support and post-conflict stability operations require an incredible amount of cooperation and coordination. Yet in practice, both cooperation and coordination too often break down. Why does this occur? I believe there are two principal reasons:

First, there is a significant mismatch between the disciplined integration of the military forces on the one hand, and the less disciplined, less integrated civilian political/humanitarian/reconstruction component on the other hand.

Second, the linkages and communication between these highly asymmetrical military and civilian components too often are hostage to personalities and ad hoc coordination arrangements.

Drawing on the experience of a wide range of peace support, and transition support, operations world wide, I believe there are five major elements of successful collaboration.

First, we have to do better comprehensive campaign planning. The military is skilled at campaign planning, but neither the military professionals, nor civilian professionals, is very good at comprehensive campaign planning. Each can do planning within their own narrow lane; but exceedingly few in either camp can work across the lanes to do comprehensive civil-military planning.

Such planning means developing a common civil-military picture of:

1. The situation, both from the standpoint of a clear understanding of the threat, and familiarity with the total civilian and military assets needed to meet that threat;
2. The overall civil-military mission; (developing the outlines of what is achievable is vital here. Top-level civilian and military planners need to get together early to work through what would be a realistic mission, and what it would cost.)
3. The concept of operations needed to reach the desired civil-military end-state;
4. What the military component could be expected to do support the main civilian effort in helping that effort achieve its political, humanitarian and reconstruction objectives. This needs to be spelled out in a range of specified and implied tasks that military forces might be called upon to provide;
5. Description of how cooperation and coordination will be accomplished.

Getting two very different planning cultures together to draft a timely workable comprehensive campaign plan is the most difficult--but also the most important--element of a peace support operation. Getting this to happen in a multinational, multilateral UN peace support operation is a monumental undertaking, but one that must be attempted.

In the U.S. we have yet to succeed of producing such a functional plan in a timely manner. Getting the interagency team together at the top to do this has proved too difficult. I have some ideas on how both national, and United Nations, planners could work around this huge obstacle. I hope this Seminar will give us an opportunity to explore these ideas.

The second principle is the need to assess in advance the humanitarian impact; the unintended humanitarian consequences, of actions political leaders take, or fail to take, in complex contingencies such as peace support operations. In the Balkans during the 1990s, a series of acute humanitarian emergencies, including ethnic cleansing, arguably could have been avoided or mitigated, had such an assessment of humanitarian consequences been undertaken. The two classic tragedies where humanitarian impact was overlooked were the slowness to respond to genocide in Rwanda, and the very late response to the million-person march of Hutus from Rwanda to Eastern Zaire in mid-1994. With consideration of, and planning for, the humanitarian impact in each of these cases, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.

The third principle is the need for the civilian and military planners to huddle together well before the launch of a civil-military operation. The purpose of this "huddling", or getting together in an interactive, participatory workshop, or conducting a "rock drill" as military planners like to call it, is to accomplish several absolutely essential tasks. These include identification of critical gaps in the plan; to point to those gaps that could be "show-stoppers" if not fixed; to answer any lingering doubts and questions in the minds of the key participants; and to reduce to the extent possible, surprises and unintended consequences in the plan of operations.

The best, but unfortunately the only really good example of such a huddle, was the two-week long participatory workshop that United Nations Special Representative Martti Ahtisaari conducted for the UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia in 1989. Ahtisaari attended every session of this pre-deployment workshop. He used it to establish communication, to generate teamwork and loyalty, and to instill an esprit de corps that afforded the best possible opportunity for this peace support operation to succeed. To this day, the UN Transition Assistance Group for Namibia is considered one of the finest hours of the United Nations. Ask Martti Ahtisaari how this happened, and he would point to this pre-deployment get-together as one of the major ingredients of success.

A sub-principle to the conduct of a pre-deployment "huddle" of the key operational players is to find a way to determine the key tasks where the civilian humanitarian and reconstruction players need the help of the military. Then these requirements need to be coordinated with the military planners. The UN agency best placed to do this is the UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. What is needed is a list from the key UN agencies and other international organizations involved in an operation, plus the NGOs, the range of specified and implied tasks that military forces might be called upon to provide in support of the main civilian humanitarian and reconstruction effort. Then OCHA should go over this list in detail with the military planners, both at DPKO, and with planners already deployed forward in the field. The purpose of this exercise is to determine which ones the military can, and will do; which ones the military hasn’t planned for but can and will, and which ones the military acknowledges need to be done, but the military will not do them for a variety of reasons. (As an example, the most troubling gaps usually identified in such an exercise are the absence of any clearly identified responsibility for administration of justice, for civil policing, and for assuring the secure space in which the civilian humanitarian and reconstruction players can work.

Finally, the fourth principle of effective civil-military coordination and cooperation is to conduct a brutally honest after action review. It is too arrogant to call this a lessons-learned exercise, since the record of learning these lessons is not very impressive. But it is vitally important to identify what went right and wrong and why, how to fix what went wrong, and how to build on what went right.

Moving now from the theoretical to the practical, let me touch on how some of these ideas concerning cooperation played out in Afghanistan.

Good cooperation on many levels has been essential to success in post-conflict Afghanistan. The Program Secretariat and follow-on Consultative Groups really embody the large-scale cooperation we achieved between UN organizations, the U.S. and other donors, and the new Afghan government. This mechanism allowed for a smooth transfer of planning, programming, and budgeting of public services from international organizations to Afghan ministries.

The development of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, PRTs, provided much-needed field coordination among foreign and Afghan civilian and military officials, diplomats, and humanitarian workers. A well-planned system of checks-and-balances ensures that the interests and roles of all these various groups are respected. For example, PRTs approve reconstruction projects only with the approval of provincial authorities. PRTs also assist in coordination between local authorities and the central government in Kabul, raising the profile of the central government throughout the country and ensuring that national and local officials are on the same page. At a higher organizational level, the PRTs represent international coordination, with the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and others sponsoring teams in key locations out in the countryside.

I believe that in Afghanistan the international community can point to a success story in terms of coordination and cooperation. Several key ingredients made this cooperation and coordination work. These included:

Posting of liaison persons from the key United Nations agencies involved in humanitarian and reconstruction work at the major military headquarters. (This kind of coordination was vital to instructing the military planners on the skills and competencies of these agencies. It also showed these planners and senior staff the ways the military could help these agencies while staying out of their way and letting them do their work.)

Putting UN agencies out front to provide for public services and perform many of the functions of governance while new and very weak national ministries were trying to get on their feet and do this job for themselves.

Insure coordination and cooperation between the UN agencies and their corresponding Afghan ministries through the ingenious Program Secretariat twinning model.

Establish sectoral task forces that include Civil Affairs military personnel. These task forces formed around the sectors of Water, Food, Medical, Security, and Winterization. The military brought a useful discipline and organizational skills to these task forces. And the coordination and cooperation made possible by these task forces kept the civilian and military components of the operation informed of each others work, and help minimize (though not eliminate completely) the blurring of lines between military and civilian humanitarian actors.

In many ways the Afghan example demonstrated the future of a peace and transition support operation, and shows that it can work. It also showed the things that did not work. For example, it revealed the serious consequences of inadequate planning for public safety out in the countryside. It revealed the weaknesses of assigning responsibility for oversight of such key sectors as Justice, Police Training, and Poppy eradication to individual donor countries rather than equipping and funding international organizations to do these tasks. And finally, the weakest link was the lack of a Human Rights program to provide a Neighborhood Watch over the abuses of warlords, militia commanders, and the oppression of majorities over their minority neighbors throughout the country.

The lesson identified in Afghanistan and every other civil-military operation is that coordination and cooperation work best when the civilian component is tightly integrated as was possible through the twinning of UN agencies with Afghan ministries. The military component need not, and normally should not, be integrated with the civilian component, but must provide the harmonious and interoperable support needed to make the civilian effort succeed. It is this interoperability that permits the substitution of the military’s version of Command and Control with the civilian-friendly term of Cooperation and Coordination.