The Munk Debates Read online

  RICK HILLIER: And what I would say to you is this: you would fail because you’re approaching from the heart. What I’m saying is that a ruthless, pragmatic approach by the international community would be better. And the international community needs the United Nations resuscitated. If President-elect Barack Obama can resuscitate that organization and give it some capability, and when we have countries signed up beforehand with the proper nation-building tools, then we might have a vision for what we’re doing, and a strategy. So far, the international community appears incapable of being able to do those things.

  But I want to go back to the point about the generals at home not wanting to intervene, which Brian laid out a few moments ago. I think the generals, the ones that I know, from many nations, are very pragmatic and very loyal men and women. They want to do what’s right, and they want to take on the operations that are in our national interests and in the interests of a stable world. But they also know that the burden will follow them, and the other members of the international community will not help because the capabilities are not yet there.

  BRIAN STEWART: I want to say one thing. We have this image of your average soldier going to a country you may not have heard of, dying, and then people asking why his or her life was wasted on a foreign cause. Every Western military has big, glamorous special forces, quickly trained to go anywhere, especially to areas where new conflict has broken out. We could replay the events that happened on the ground in Rwanda and probably 1,000 soldiers could have put down that massacre of 800,000. We seem to have ever more spectacular military resources. But is it not the unwillingness of politicians and generals to risk casualties that prevents some interventions?

  RICK HILLIER: Not at all. First of all, I question whether a 1,000- or 5,000-strong force could make a difference, or would have made a difference in Rwanda. When we reformed our military structure that brought us smaller units and more sophisticated military technology, we thought we wouldn’t need as many troops. What we have discovered in operations since 2001 is that God remains on the side of big battalions, and we need boots on the ground and we need many soldiers to have an effect in helping secure populations. I don’t think 1,000 troops in Rwanda would have made a single bit of difference, nor would have 5,000 troops. It would have required a lot of men and women on the ground. Should we have been there? In all truth, absolutely. But with a hell of a lot more than 5,000 troops.

  BRIAN STEWART: You were one of the first, General Hillier, to go into Afghanistan and make the statement that, yes, people really warmed to the idea of Canada helping the Afghan people towards a better life, towards education for their children, but Canada went in to protect its own national security interests. We were part of an international obligation to make sure that the Taliban didn’t again allow a safe haven for al Qaeda. It seemed to morph into the kind of humanitarian intervention mission now that you doubt could work elsewhere.

  RICK HILLIER: Of course, you realize that we went into Afghanistan as a nation long before I became the Chief of the Defence Staff.

  There are those who say that we went into Afghanistan because we did not want to go to Iraq, and that’s why our troops initially showed up on the ground in Afghanistan. Yes, Canada has honourable goals. Yes, we believe that our national interests are at stake in that region. But all of the things that I have discussed during this debate are things that I’ve lived through both as a commander inside Afghanistan, and then as the Chief of Defence Staff. I made those decisions once the government had given me the direction to send our young men and women there.

  BRIAN STEWART: But my point here is that when you go to the military and ask, why we are in Afghanistan until the end of 2011, they don’t say that it’s to stop the Taliban taking over and Afghanistan becoming a rogue state. They say, well, the Afghan people need security, they need a better life, they need agriculture, more education. It’s becoming more of a back-door humanitarian mission.

  GARETH EVANS: Brian, I think that statement misrepresents the situation because what we set out to do, as an international community, in Afghanistan, was an exercise in self-defence after the Taliban attack on the United States. We’re still trying to rebuild that failed state in order to ensure that there’s no resumption of a Taliban-led government of the kind that will create similar problems for us in the future. In order to complete that rebuilding operation as an international community, we have to address issues surrounding confidence in government, and issues of fairness with which everybody is now wrestling.

  But this is a long way from fire brigade operations used in extreme cases when all else has failed to stop immediate mass atrocity crimes, and genocide of the kind that we saw in Rwanda. Military operations are always ugly, always horrible, always bloody, always awful for those who lose their kids or their relatives. But sometimes in extreme cases we have to do it.

  BRIAN STEWART: I understand your objection. But what I’m describing is how the mission in Afghanistan is justified to the Canadian people now, and that is the way it tends to be justified. Mia Farrow, does hearing these views make you more pessimistic?

  MIA FARROW: No, I’ve heard much worse than this. I’m absolutely convinced that we can summon the political will, and that the discussion has to start at the grassroots level in rooms such as this one. So I go from place to place and appeal to governments, I’ve been before the U.S. Congress three times, and before the Senate three times. I go from campus to campus, divestment hearing to divestment hearing, and I think in the United States, anyway, we’re seeing the largest response to an African atrocity, Darfur, since apartheid. So I do think we can summon the political will, and we must if we are to have a world that’s worth giving to our children. And if we’re all to sit here and say, well, that’s it, this was the best we could do and everything else is impossible, then we might as well call an end to it and take the cyanide and drink the hemlock. I think that if we don’t have the will, then we should get out of the kitchen and leave the cooking to someone who does have the will and does have the stomach for it.

  BRIAN STEWART: Mr. Bolton, what about the argument that maybe things aren’t changing and that certain countries might take a new look at United Nations reform? Your experience has been negative, but do you rule out the possibility that the Responsibility to Protect might be worked into applicable international doctrine?

  JOHN BOLTON: No. I think you have to be practical about the Security Council. We tried to put Burma on the Security Council agenda as a threat to international peace and security for a variety of reasons. The Chinese objected over and over again. We finally forced it to a vote on whether the Security Council would discuss Burma, and we won that vote. China voted no because it was a procedural vote. China didn’t have veto power, but there’s no doubt — and there hasn’t been since the day we won the procedural vote — that if we tried to do anything in the Security Council with any meaningful impact on Burma, that China would veto it.

  So I think the question for the advocates who say that we’ve got to do something and use more than military force is, what happens when the Security Council won’t act?

  GARETH EVANS: Can I introduce a slightly more optimistic note about what has been achieved by the much-maligned UN and Security Council over the years since the end of the Cold War? A Canadian institution, Simon Fraser University, has gathered stats on this, and they are compelling. The reality is that there has been an 80 percent decline in the number of serious conflicts with 1,000 or more casualties of war a year over the last eighteen years. There has also been a decline of that magnitude in the number of mass atrocity crimes of the kind we’ve addressed during this debate. Why? The analysis suggests that there has been a remarkable increase in international commitment, mainly through the United Nations, but also through some regional organizations, to effect diplomatic peacemaking operations with expanded mandates of human protection now enacted regularly by the Security Council. There has also been a much expanded commitment to post-conflict peaceke
eping to ensure that there’s no relapse into these atrocity situations.

  All of that is good news, and I think we ought to recognize it because it does mean that our efforts are not wasted. And most of those strategies have not involved the aggressive use of invasive coercive military force.

  BRIAN STEWART: General Hillier, do you think Afghanistan is going to be a concern for Canada for three more years? Do you think, after Canada withdraws, the Canadian military and the Canadian public will be ready to return to peacekeeping in more operations abroad and developing some of the trends Gareth Evans mentioned?

  RICK HILLIER: I think that the Canadian military certainly would be ready to recover, to prepare for other missions abroad, or to participate in missions closer to Canada, and to do so at the direction of the government. But are we leaving behind things that might actually work, such as government institutions and economic systems? Where is the battalion that’s going to go and train a police force in Darfur or in Zimbabwe or in Burma once we have helped them build a government and actually changed their political structure?

  BRIAN STEWART: But that’s something the Canadian government could aim to develop in the future.

  RICK HILLIER: The point is that those initiatives have to be started and developed correctly. Right now, the capabilities to do to achieve these goals — such as leaving an effective police force — are minuscule at best. I’m worried that we’ll go in and do the security piece, train an army well, and then allow a corrupt, inept government to take power.

  BRIAN STEWART: One thing I’m really curious about is whether there’s any indication that the tyrants of the world are becoming more uncomfortable, that they feel heat on their back? Even with international courts and international pressure, is there any evidence that tyrants are sitting in their presidential palaces a little more nervous about committing atrocities and brutalities?

  GARETH EVANS: The response to the indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir at the International Criminal Court is a much more careful response than was being feared by a number of commentators, who said the prosecution was going to set the place alight. I believe the ICC is altering behaviour. The international criminal process has been the most important single form of pressure introduced into international affairs in recent times. It’s just a pity that the United States opposed it for so long, and I hope that under the new administration we’ll have a full-throated commitment to the international criminal process.

  RICK HILLIER: I’d like to make a comment on that topic. I don’t think the President of Sudan’s behaviour is changing. The lead story on the BBC this afternoon was the fact that he is selling all the fertile land along the Nile River to other countries in Africa and the Middle East so they can grow crops to feed their populations while a good part of his country’s population starves. So I’m not sure the effect really has taken hold in Sudan as you describe.

  GARETH EVANS: So what is your solution for Sudan, for Darfur at the moment? What kind of leverage would you apply?

  RICK HILLIER: The first thing I would say is that diplomatic incentives are not working, and financial incentives are not working or are not sufficient. What you have to do is look at how rich President al-Bashir is, and how rich the group of men and/or women who actually run the country are, and see what you can do to force them to behave better.

  The legal constraints on killing people are clearly not working, either. So it would require a strategy for Africa, as opposed to a strategy for Darfur, which simply won’t work.

  JOHN BOLTON: I’d like to answer your question on whether there is an effect on leaders around the world. I have to say I think the evidence goes in the other direction. The Kremlin recently ordered military forces to cross an international border into the territory of a state, a former state of the Soviet Union, for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. And they used the argument that they had to protect ethnic Russians in South Ossetia from Georgian interference.

  The Russian government is handing out Russian passports to ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, obviously laying the basis for a subsequent argument that they’re going to protect the Russians in the Ukraine. If you look at the use of aggressive military force by a nuclear armed power, you can see it before us in the past few months. We are approaching a very tense situation in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan due to the terrorist attacks conducted against vital Indian interests.

  Let me close with another example. We are seeing international piracy, based in Somalia, of a magnitude we haven’t seen since the nineteenth century. And NATO has been unable to do anything about it for fear — among other things — of being prosecuted for violating the human rights of the pirates.

  BRIAN STEWART: I think it’s time to bring the audience in now. One audience member asks: “What should be the determining factor in deciding whether to intervene — national interests or national values?” Mia Farrow, why don’t I start with you on that?

  MIA FARROW: Actually, Gareth has listed these so magnificently in his book, The Responsibility to Protect, which I highly recommend. So perhaps you ought to leave that one to Gareth.

  BRIAN STEWART: National interests or national values?

  GARETH EVANS: It’s a combination of both, because national interest does extend in the way that I previously described. National interest also exists in reputational form. Every country has a national interest in being perceived as a good international citizen — an area where Canada has led the world traditionally. In pursuing these issues beyond ourselves, a country can benefit from the respect that flows from other countries when they demonstrate a willingness to put treasure and sometimes even blood into advancing these particular cases, so national interests and values do, in a way, overlap.

  If you mean militarily, there’s a lot of criteria to satisfy before you even get to that. You have to satisfy the threshold criteria and the seriousness of the harm to the people who are victims of atrocity. You have to satisfy criteria of last resort, of proportionality, of right intention, and above all, the balance of consequences. You have to be confident that you are actually going to do more good than harm. There are very few cases where, when you apply those criteria, you can justify coercive military invasion and even give rise to this judgement about national interest. There are a lot of hurdles to jump over and rightly so, because war is an ugly business.

  RICK HILLIER: You cannot separate national interests completely from some national values. But you have to have a method of approach, a strategy, and you have to have a set of conditions to have a chance of success.

  JOHN BOLTON: In his autobiography, Colin Powell told a story which took place in the early days of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration when they were debating what action to take in Somalia. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright said to General Powell, “What’s the point of having this wonderful military if you’re not prepared to use it?” Powell said that he just about had an aneurysm as a result of that kind of attitude. And I agree; I think we have to guard against that attitude.

  BRIAN STEWART: One question for the entire panel: How are humanitarian interventions different from past attempts by Western powers to civilize developing nations?

  GARETH EVANS: Leaders in the developing world are suspicious; they believe that this talk of humanitarian intervention is an excuse for the big guys to throw their weight around — more of the civilizing missions that developing nations experienced so often in the past. And when you have many countries who are very conscious of their fragility and coming into the international system, they’re going to be very resistant to signing on to any generalized doctrine or intervention of that kind.

  That’s why there was so much debate and disagreement about intervention in the 1990s. There was a gulf between developing countries and the Western world — the Western world that was all too enthusiastic about intervention. The whole point of developing the Responsibility to Protect concept was to bridge the gulf be
tween those two extreme positions.

  MIA FARROW: The first option is to work with the nation in question, helping it to use its own capabilities to bring about its own resolutions.

  RICK HILLIER: And I would agree with that. One of the first things that should be done is to reinforce the country’s existing government structure and to help the government become effective and efficient enough that they can deliver what the population needs. I think there is a significant difference between what we are discussing now and past interventions with a so-called mission of civilizing the population. The civilization of the population of Africa resulted in the deaths of millions of proxy soldiers in the First World War, slavery, endemic diseases that spread throughout the continent, and a variety of other ills. I’m not sure that African nations can withstand more humanitarian interventions of that nature.

  Right now, global communication changes everything. Events in Darfur, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or Burma, or anywhere else, are seen and heard instantly. That changes things dramatically.

  I would also say that the stateless threats that we see out there are different now. Yes, we had that kind of thing in the past, but extremist groups, terrorist groups, criminal groups linked by global communications and with the ability to travel back and forth instantly now – well, I think the dynamic of an intervention has changed. That’s why I reiterate that you have to have a strategy, not only Darfur or Sudan, not even for the seven or eight countries around it. But you’ve got to have a strategy to look after the ailing continent of Africa as a whole.

  MIA FARROW: I resent [your] referring to the continent of Africa as a failed continent. We’re looking at very separate nations with very separate goals, cultures, and languages which have to be respected, each on their own terms. I’m not talking about the colonial divisions, but all that Africa is. And yes, there are success stories in Africa, and yes, there are failures in Africa. Failures and a collapsed state in Africa, or anywhere else, serves no one, and is in no one’s national interest.