This originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-partial-european-rapid-response.html.
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Following the recent debacle (based on how many vulnerable people were left behind) in Afghanistan when that nation fell to misogynistic violent extremists, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia have formed a "rapid response" military force.
The concept is that this unit is ready to deploy at short notice, and thus, if something similar happens again elsewhere in the world, they can get there in days, rather than weeks.
It is a well intentioned and nobly-intended concept ... and it has - to some extent - been tried before, with mixed results. The deployment to Somalia, which went off the rails when its mission underwent scope creep without commensurate re-planning and increased military resourcing, and ended in ignominious failure, is one example. The poorly prepared deployment to Lebanon, which also ended in ignominious failure, is another, but the most notorious, in my opinion, is the NATO deployment to Bosnia, which was effectively deliberately undermined by the stupidity of a NATO general who was duped by the lies being told to him by Serbian war criminals - an utterly repugnant general who, with others, led to a half-hearted "response" that was so USELESS it allowed mass murder under the noses of smiling NATO soldiers who were sharing drinks and selfies with war criminals (see Chapter 11 [9 and 12 also relate] of this book).
So, clearly, there are lessons to learn from past failures.
The first, I would suggest, is ensuring the political AND MILITARY will - from the top down - is GENUINELY committed to doing humanitarian work. This will require consideration NOW
of who will decide on missions, how, what the goals will be, and the
who-how-what-where-etc of the military planning, equipping, and
execution of mission.
The next is the potential for things to go badly - not just the military stuff ups, but also the risk of mass rape and OTHER human rights abuses by those deployed. That has been a problem in Bosnia, with aid organisations, the UN, and - most recently - the WHO.
Just having soldiers on the ground is meaningless - there were US soldiers in Somalia who watched Somali women stripped, raped and murdered just metres away from their positions.
The
concept of "peacekeepers" has been a furphy from the start, and its
successes are due more to luck and the goodwill of those involved than
any inherent value. The need for peace enforcing, as it is now called (given that the applicable term had been perverted by its earlier misuse), led to better mission rules for East Timor. (The ineptness and possible [certainly appears to many people to have happened] complicity of Europeans in Rwanda also drove the better mission rules.)
It is to be hoped that Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia's rapid response force will have all these issues properly considered and allowed for.
If that is done, I wish it well.
If not, then this has just been a political point scoring exercise - another game with people's lives.
