It's so hard to square mythology with reality. While 70 per cent of Canadians consider military peacekeeping a defining characteristic of their country, Canada has turned down so many United Nations' requests to join peacekeeping missions during the past decade that the UN has stopped asking.
In 1991, Canada contributed more than 10 per cent of all peacekeeping troops to the UN. Sixteen years later, its contribution is less than 0.1 per cent.
On this month's fifth anniversary of Canadian troops being sent to Afghanistan and one year after assuming responsibility for the counterinsurgency campaign -- a war by any other name -- in Kandahar province, one of the country's biggest unanswered questions is: What is Canadian military policy? It's certainly not to be the global leader in peacekeeping the country once was.
Little more than a year ago, Colonel Michael Hanrahan, the Canadian Armed Forces' top expert on peacekeeping, was offered the job as chief of staff of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations. His Ottawa superiors nixed the idea. There is, in fact, not a single Canadian officer in the UN's peacekeeping headquarters.
The Department of National Defence website touts in glowing terms Canada's support and participation in SHIRBRIG -- the Danish-inspired multinational Standby High Readiness Brigade for United Nations Operations designed to provide rapid deployment of peacekeeping troops for up to six months. In reality, Canada's SHIRBRIG commitment is a will-o'-the-wisp.
Canada invented the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect that the UN accepted in 2005. Since then, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have stood by with their hands pretty much in their pockets while the doctrine glaringly failed its first test: The call for robust and, if necessary, uninvited UN military intervention to halt the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The military has been given the money to upgrade its equipment, increase its personnel and enhance its capability. Now, what's it supposed to do? In particular, what's it supposed to do after Afghanistan?
Is it to play deputy sheriff to the U.S. military in hot spots such as Afghanistan, fighting so-called three-block wars few people believe can be won?
Is it to fight terrorism militarily? Or acknowledge that resistance to international terrorism likely comes first and foremost from intelligence and the military should be used for other tasks?
Should it follow a Canada-first policy -- which, as former UN ambassador Paul Heinbecker points out, leads inevitably to the next question: What would the military be defending Canada against? "I don't see a threat myself," he says.
Should it serve Canada's national interests, however those are defined? David Carment of Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, suggests the Conservative government has little enthusiasm for a military mission in Africa, but more interest in treating the Caribbean and Latin America -- regions with large diasporas in Canada and considerable Canadian economic involvement -- as a sphere for possible engagement in the event of trouble.
Should it reflect Canadian values and interests in advancing the concept of Responsibility to Protect -- R2P, as it's abbreviated? If so, how does Canada persuade the world to embrace a doctrine that supersedes the principle of sovereignty of states, because Sudan does not want a UN force on its territory?
Or is the problem really as described by Ann Livingstone, director of research for Ottawa's Pearson Peacekeeping Centre: In the wake of the Cold War, where everyone more or less knew the rules and what to do, no one today, including the Americans, has accurately nailed down what the role of their respective militaries should be.
"The hard reality of the complexity of conflict is so significant that our reactions and responses universally are changing," she says. "How do you deal with the intersection of security with development? And how do you deal with the intersection of development and humanitarian assistance, negotiations at the diplomatic level and safety and security? It's another huge conundrum."
The best anyone can do is look at patterns, Dr. Livingstone says. Although, she adds, to predict the future on that basis would be an act of hubris. "We're feeling our way into a new way of thinking . . . and I think acting as responsibly as anyone does in the middle of significant change."
Fen Hampson, director of the Norman Paterson School, notes that, while the world overall is more peaceful since the Cold War ended at the close of the 1980s, significant terrorist attacks have risen steadily, global crime networks have become key players in today's conflicts, more nations are acquiring nuclear weapons and great power rivalries are coming back into fashion (with China and India, for example).
