With Secretary Clinton’s trip to Africa highlighting the fighting that continues in the Congo, an opinion piece in the Washington Post is calling for American troops to support the tiny UN force.
Michael O’ Hanlon, at Brookings writes:
If the situation is to improve, we need to do the one thing that is required above all others — strengthen security, especially in eastern Congo. And by now we should have learned the hard way that there is only one way to do so — by leading through example, with the deployment of at least modest numbers of American troops, to spark a broader strengthening of the current U.N. mission. If the Afghanistan mission was undermanned last year with only 60,000 NATO-led troops in a country of 30 million, how can a U.N. mission of 20,000 address the challenges of Congo and its 60 million people?
But what is really interesting about O’ Hanlon’s piece is his proposal that the US military create an all volunteer force to send on peace keeping operations. “Ask for volunteers to join a peace operations division for two years,” O’ Hanlon writes. “They would begin their service with, say, 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training and then would be deployable. They would receive the same compensation and health benefits as regular troops, given their age and experience. Out of a division of 15,000 troops, one brigade, or about 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers, could be sustained in the field at a time.”
This doesn’t erase all objections, of course. US force is US force, regardless of whether or not these volunteers are committed to stopping human rights abuses. At the same time, this proposal would dilute the objection that we are risking American lives for goals that are not directly related to national interests.
Interesting idea…