Towards UN counter-terrorism operations?

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operation in Mali (MINUSMA) has become among the deadliest in UN history, suffering from attacks by violent extremists and terrorists. There are strong calls to give UN peacekeeping operations more robust mandates and equip them with the necessary capabilities, guidelines and training to be able to take on limited stabilisation and counter-terrorism tasks. This article conceptually develops UN counter-terrorism operations as a heuristic device, and compares this with the mandate and practices of MINUSMA. It examines the related implications of this development, and concludes that while there may be good practical as well as short-term political reasons for moving in this direction, the shift towards UN counter-terrorism operations will undermine the UN’s international legitimacy, its role as an impartial conflict arbiter, and its tools in the peace and security toolbox more broadly, such as UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions.

Keywords:

• Peacekeeping
• counter-terrorism
• violent extremism
• United Nations

Introduction

The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) has entered history as one of the deadliest missions in the history of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping, suffering 69 fatalities due to hostile acts from its inception on 1 July 2013 to 31 August 2016.¹ It has been deployed to an on-going conflict where it has been attacked by various armed and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) Ansar Dine and al-Mourabitoun (a branch of AQIM) in West Africa. The threat environment did not come as a surprise – the mission was deployed to a country in the midst of conflict to replace the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA), mandated to support the Malian government in the fight against terrorist, extremist and armed groups and reduce the threats posed by these groups.² MINUSMA was mandated ‘to stabilize the key population centres, especially in the north of Mali and, in this context, to deter threats and take active steps to prevent the return of armed elements to those areas’, if necessary by force.³

MINUSMA’s deployment to Mali is the first time a multidimensional peacekeeping operation has conducted operations in a theatre with on-going counter-terrorist operations.⁴ The UN mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in the Golan Heights have been deployed in theatres where terrorist threats have been present. However, both were deployed to maintain ceasefires in inter-state conflicts, whereas MINUSMA has been deployed in active support of extending state authority to areas controlled by violent extremists and terrorist groups, making it a main party to the conflict.⁵ MINUSMA is also the first multidimensional peacekeeping operation to be deployed in parallel with on-going counter-terrorism operations, the French Opération Serval and Opération Sabre, later transitioned into the current Opération Barkhane.⁶

In 2016, the UN and the African Union sent a technical team to assess the situation in Mali and the Sahel. The African Union has wanted to include an African force in MINUSMA that can deal robustly with terrorist threats in the north of Mali.⁷ This force would be modelled on the Force Intervention Brigade included in the UN stabilization mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (MONUSCO) in 2013, and the Regional Protection Force included in the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in 2016.⁸

UN peacekeeping operations are part of the international community’s peace and security toolbox. They have developed relatively rapidly over the past 30 years, from being observer missions in inter-state conflicts (such as UNDOF) to being given a range of tasks ranging from protection of civilians and supporting early peacebuilding, to the support of cultural preservation (also in Mali).⁹ With MINUSMA as the main focus, but also with regard to the role of the UN in Somalia and Libya today, and possibly Syria and Yemen tomorrow, member states are debating what role UN peacekeeping operations narrowly, and UN peace operations more generally, should have in countering and preventing violent extremism and terrorism. A high-level debate arranged by the President of the UN General Assembly on peace and security in 2016 concluded that there was a need to ‘further reflect on tools and means for UN peace operations to respond to terrorism and violent extremism’.¹⁰

I begin with some conceptual clarifications and definitions, providing a brief background on the development of increasingly robust mandates for UN peacekeeping operations. Next, I develop the new category of UN counter-terrorism operations as a heuristic device, to bring greater clarity regarding the tasks that member states may expect the UN to undertake when faced with such threats, drawing on emerging discussions in the scholarly community as well as among policymakers. I then move on to the case of MINUSMA, asking whether it conforms to the criteria of a UN counter-terrorism operation, and discussing the operational, financial, political and moral implications of moving towards UN counter-terrorism operations. The main findings are highlighted in the fourth and final section.

Conceptual clarifications

As yet, the member states of the UN have not been able to agree on a definition of terrorism, nor of violent extremism.¹¹ The US Army defines terrorism as ‘the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence, often motivated by religious, political, or other ideological beliefs, to instil fear and coerce governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are usually political’.¹² Using violence, including against civilians, to achieve political objectives is nothing new, but terrorism and efforts to counter terrorism have evolved rapidly over the past 15 years. UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted on 28 September 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, established a mandate for member states to prevent and counter terrorist attacks.¹³ In the early years, there was considerable emphasis on the kinetic and law-enforcement dimensions of this agenda. The move from terrorism to violent extremism was significant, as it opened the way for engaging a wider set of actors and tools. Discursively, it was pushed forward by the George W. Bush administration in 2005, when it acknowledged the limits of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and moved towards ‘Struggle against Violent Extremism’ (SAVE).¹⁴ In recent years, this agenda has been conceptualised as countering and preventing violent extremism (here grouped under the label ‘PCVE’).

The discursive move from counter-terrorism to PCVE opens the way for wider engagement by various UN actors and tools. In December 2015, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued his Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism.¹⁵ UN peacekeeping operations are one of these tools. They are often mandated to use force to implement their mandates, and have become increasingly robust in terms of mandates and practice, from the deployment of the first mission with an explicit protection-of-civilians mandate to the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in 1999 until today.¹⁶ Robust peacekeeping is defined as ‘the use of force at the tactical level with the authorization of the Security Council and consent of the host nation and/or the main parties to the conflict’,¹⁷ and since UNAMSIL most peacekeeping missions have been given a mandate to use force to protect civilians and itself. This has given rise to a new assertive conception of impartiality, where the UN has used force on the tactical level to protect civilians – eg in the eastern DRC in 2005, and in Haiti the same year.¹⁸ However, the UN draws a sharp line between robust peacekeeping and peace enforcement: ‘peace enforcement does not require the consent of the main parties and may involve the use of military force at the strategic or international level’.¹⁹ It is only in recent years that UN peacekeeping has been asked to cross the line and become a party to the conflict, when the UN Security Council in 2013 mandated MONUSCO to ‘neutralize’ identified rebel groups.²⁰

UN counter-terrorism operations

The threats of violent extremism and terrorism have increased rapidly, and the number of fatalities caused by terrorism has risen steadily, from 3329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014.²¹ A particularly dramatic turn came in 2014, with an 80% increase from 2013, largely because of the rise of the Islamic State and Boko Haram.²² These groups have increasingly used violence to shock the global public, with many activities constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity.²³ Women have been deliberately targeted; and rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage have been used as tactics of terror.²⁴ All this has created a new sense of urgency for dealing with these threats.

Recent years have seen increasing discussion of whether UN peacekeeping operations should be given counter-terrorism tasks, and what these might include. Here I propose, as a heuristic device, a new category of UN counter-terrorism operations, and then detail some measures for these operations. This should provide a better grounding for analysing the implications of mandating UN peacekeeping operations with counter-terrorism tasks.

The UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy was adopted by the General Assembly in 2006,²⁵ reconfirmed in the fifth biannual review of the strategy in 2016.²⁶ The strategy has four pillars:

(1)	Tackling conditions conducive to terrorism;
(2)	Preventing and combating terrorism;
(3)	Building countries’ capacity to combat terrorism and to strengthen the role of the United Nations system in that regard; and
(4)	Ensuring respect for human rights for all and the rule of law while countering terrorism.27

Depending on their scope, UN counter-terrorism operations, would either be narrowly defined to fit into the second pillar of this action plan, or be more similar to existing multidimensional UN peacekeeping operations with multiple tasks across the four pillars. Here, anchored in the discursive development from counter-terrorism to violent extremism presented above and the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy,²⁸ I choose the wider option, more akin to current multidimensional UN peacekeeping operations, and use the four categories of the UN strategy to develop an indicative overview of activities and tasks that UN counter-terrorism operations would carry out in the field.

1. Tackling conditions conducive to terrorism

Under this pillar, UN counter-terrorism operations would be expected to support various tasks conventionally seen as part of the peacebuilding–development spectrum. In current UN peacekeeping operations these are often labelled ‘early peacebuilding’ activities,²⁹ and are undertaken in close collaboration with other peacebuilding and development actors within and outside the UN system. In the Plan of Action, the Secretary-General lamented the ‘strong emphasis on the implementation of measures under pillar II on of the Global Strategy, while pillars I and IV have often been overlooked’.³⁰ The Plan of Action distinguishes between root causes or ‘push’ factors (eg poor governance, marginalisation, inequality, lack of opportunities) and factors that may ‘pull’ individuals towards radicalisation (eg collective grievances, victimisation, distortion of religious beliefs, political ideologies, social networks).³¹

UN counter-terrorism operations would represent only marginal support for addressing these push/pull factors, but could, as with current UN peacekeeping operations, support capacity development and institution-building in areas such as strengthening the rule of law, human rights, and state–society relations. This would contribute to a comprehensive and potentially transformative peacebuilding agenda, but might conflict with or be subsumed under other pillars of the strategy. I return to this in the analysis.

2. Preventing and combating terrorism

Here we find the tasks currently most closely associated with counter-terrorism operations today. The US Army doctrine on counter-terrorism operations focuses on the F3EAD process (find, fix, finish, exploit, analyse and disseminate).³² This process can be grouped into four stages of a cycle:

1.	Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) activities (Find and Fix);
2.	Operations to capture, kill or ‘otherwise rendering the node ineffective and incapable’ (Finish);
3.	Questioning and screening individuals found’, ‘collecting all material that may contain useful intelligence and information’ (Exploit);
4.	Reinsert the information gained in the intelligence cycle (Analyse and Disseminate).33

3. Building countries’ capacity to combat terrorism

Capacity development and institution-building is another pillar of the counter-terrorism strategy. Drawing on the lessons learnt by the Coalitions of the Willing in Iraq and Afghanistan, a substantial part of this engagement is likely to follow and broaden the Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams (OMLT) model developed in Afghanistan.³⁴ UN counter-terrorism troops, police and specialists would, in partnership with other actors, conduct ISR activities, kinetic operations and security sector reform tasks – including training and mentoring national counterparts before and during counter-terrorism operations; supporting detention, de-radicalisation, rehabilitation and reinsertion programmes; and working to include former rebel troops in national security forces.³⁵

4. Ensuring respect for human rights for all and the rule of law while countering terrorism

Under this pillar, UN counter-terrorism operations would seek to ensure that their activities and tasks, and the member states they would be supporting in these activities, are not in violation of international human rights and the rule of law. This would apply to all tasks and activities: for instance, making sure that targeting of terrorists does not cause unlawful harm to civilians; that detention and interrogation are monitored, for defined time periods and in accordance with international standards; and that the privacy of individuals is upheld and that data is safeguarded in connection with surveillance of digital communication.³⁶

MINUSMA – the first UN counter-terrorism operation?

MINUSMA is today operating ‘in a complex security environment that includes asymmetric threats’ which includes identified terrorist organisations such as ‘Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Al Mourabitoune, Ansar Eddine, and their affiliates such as the Front de Libération du Macina (FLM)’.³⁷ For this reason, MINUSMA is a relevant peacekeeping operation to examine when assessing how far the UN and the Security Council have moved towards developing a UN counter-terrorism operation, in terms of mandate and practice. Since the deployment of MINUSMA on 1 July 2013 and until July 2016, the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) has recorded 279 improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, resulting in 119 fatalities and 453 casualties.³⁸ More than half of the fatalities concerned MINUSMA, which has suffered 69 fatalities from its inception until 31 August 2016,³⁹ making it one of the deadliest peacekeeping operations on record.

MINUSMA was given a proactive mandate to use force to support the government in regaining control of northern Mali. The first mandate, S/RES/2100 issued on 25 April 2013, authorised the mission,

[i]n support of the transitional authorities of Mali, to stabilize the key population centres, especially in the north of Mali and, in this context, to deter threats and take active steps to prevent the return of armed elements to those areas.⁴⁰

As the security situation deteriorated, MINUSMA was targeted by increasing numbers of attacks in 2014 and 2015, and the mandate was significantly sharpened on 29 June 2016 with S/RES/2295:

Requests MINUSMA to move to a more proactive and robust posture to carry out its mandate … to stabilize the key population centres and other areas where civilians are at risk, notably in the North and Centre of Mali, and, in this regard, to enhance early warning, to anticipate, deter and counter threats, including asymmetric threats, and to take robust and active steps to protect civilians, including through active and effective patrolling in areas where civilians are at risk, and to prevent the return of armed elements to those areas, engaging in direct operations pursuant only to serious and credible threats.⁴¹

S/RES/2295 (2016) provided MINUSMA with the mandate to play a larger role in the broader effort to deal with terrorism in Mali,

Stressing that terrorism can only be defeated by a sustained and comprehensive approach involving the active participation and collaboration of all States, and regional and international organisations to impede, impair, and isolate the terrorist threat … .⁴²

The mandate also specified a range of activities that fall under the various pillars of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, and can be considered ‘PCVE-relevant’ or ‘PCVE-specific’.⁴³ These include capacity development and institution-building, hereunder to support the extension of state authority and the establishment of interim administrations and the redeployment of Malian Defence and Security Forces (MDSF) in the Centre and North of Mali (pillars 1 and 2); support the cantonment, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of armed groups; ‘ensure coherence of international efforts … to rebuild the Malian security sector’; ‘support the implementation of the reconciliation and justice measures of the [Peace] Agreement’; support free and fair elections; provide good offices and ‘support dialogue with and among all stakeholders towards reconciliation and social cohesion’; ‘promote and protect human rights’; and facilitate humanitarian assistance.⁴⁴

In terms of practices on the ground, the mission has been a laboratory for exploration and innovation in UN peacekeeping. When the operation was deployed, it included various capabilities for confronting asymmetric threats on the ground, drawing on Western experiences from counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations in eg Afghanistan and Iraq, and established the first explicit intelligence cell in a UN peacekeeping mission: ‘An All Sources Information Fusion Unit (ASIFU) is a military intelligence concept with its origins in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan’.⁴⁵ Other capabilities and tools included special forces, surveillance drones and Apache helicopters; these were provided by Western member states, the Netherlands and Sweden in particular.⁴⁶

From 2013 to 2016, ASIFU consisted solely of European troops. ASIFU was envisaged to provide analysis of information obtained from various sources (‘sensors’, in NATO parlance). ISR companies conduct long-range patrols; short- and medium-range surveillance drones, C-130 transport planes and Apache helicopters provide image intelligence; and intelligence specialists collect and analyse available open data from local and regional newspapers, local and regional TV, web-based news, and social media. In addition, ASIFU could draw upon reporting from the military troops, police, and civilian officers deployed by MINUSMA across the country.⁴⁷

MINUSMA’s tasks and activities include all of the four pillars set out earlier as possible pillars of a UN counter-terrorism operation, except that MINUSMA not has yet acted directly on its mandate to take direct action against threats.⁴⁸ However, it has shared intelligence with the French counter-terrorism operations Opération Serval and Opération Barkhane deployed in parallel with MINUSMA.⁴⁹

Operational implications

Experience from MINUSMA shows that UN peacekeeping operations operating in asymmetric threat environments require a radically different set of legal and administrative frameworks, as well as capabilities for logistical support, engineering, intelligence, casualty and medical evacuation (CASEVAC/MEDEVAC) and special forces operations.⁵⁰ At the robust end, they would need better capabilities and reformed guidelines for intelligence gathering, analysis, storage and dissemination, as well as capabilities such as the Dutch Special Operations Land Task Group (SOLTG),⁵¹ eg to ‘disable networks behind IEDs and other attacks’⁵² and ‘anticipate, deter and counter threats, including asymmetric threats’.⁵³

The 2015 Report of the UN High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (‘HIPPO Report’) held that UN peace operations ‘lack the specific equipment, intelligence, logistics, capabilities and specialized military preparation required, among other aspects’.⁵⁴ However, this could also be read as a list of reform areas to be addressed if UN peace operations should be given counter-terrorism tasks. Furthermore, the HIPPO Report argued that when a UN mission is deployed to areas where asymmetric threats are encountered, it should be equipped with the necessary capabilities and training to ‘protect itself and deliver its mandate’, attain a ‘preventive and preemptive posture and willingness to use force tactically to protect civilians and UN personnel’.⁵⁵

Western member states are willing to help the UN in this process, providing it with their experiences from Afghanistan and Iraq. Western member states also want to strengthen the command and control of UN peacekeeping missions, which often means military control of aviation assets to ensure that CASEVAC/MEDEVAC can be conducted effectively without having to ask the civilian part of the mission for permission to use these aviation assets.⁵⁶

With the inclusion of the Force Intervention Brigade in MONUSCO and the Regional Protection Force in UNMISS, there also seems to be momentum for the development of more robust UN peace operations, albeit in the form of a force within the force. Although the HIPPO Report generally held that ‘UN troops should not undertake military counter-terrorism operations’, it opened the way for ‘enforcement tasks to degrade, neutralize or defeat a designated enemy’ – with a caveat: ‘[s]uch operations should be exceptional, time-limited and undertaken with full awareness of the risks and responsibilities for the UN mission as a whole’.⁵⁷

The Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI) within the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has supported MINUSMA by establishing a Transnational and Organised Crime and Counter-Terrorism Unit.⁵⁸ OROLSI is ‘developing a dedicated [counter-terrorism] CT and P/CVE capacity at headquarters’ including ‘specific modules and operational tools and guidance on violent extremism’,⁵⁹ and is keen to take on further tasks in this area: ‘Rule of Law is a peace and security, development, peace sustainment and counter-terrorism issue. These elements cannot be divorced from one another’.⁶⁰ A report on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and violent extremism, supported by OROLSI, noted that the UN may need to adapt its guidelines for DDR in order to deal with foreign terrorist fighters, terrorist rehabilitation and involuntary detention.⁶¹ It stated that UN peace operations are already moving in such a direction, and acknowledged that this is in contradiction of the aforementioned peacekeeping principles. The report further warned that such contradictions present ‘a host of safety, legal, ethical, operational, and reputational risks to the UN, its staff, Member States, and donors’.⁶² Despite this, the authors pressed for stronger UN engagement in these areas and proposed a new substantive category of demobilisation and disengagement of violent extremists (DDVE).

Exploring the role of PCVE and CT in UN peace operations, Boutellis and Fink distinguish between activities and tasks that can be considered PCVE-relevant, and those that can be considered PCVE-specific. Under the PCVE-relevant heading they include basically all activities that multidimensional peacekeeping operations undertake⁶³; and in the PCVE-specific category they list

	Strategic communications and counter-narratives;
	Working with victims and survivors of terrorism;
	Peer-to-peer engagement;
	Early warning (including radicalization in prisons);
	Empowerment of youth and women;
	Human rights and rule of law;
	Community engagement and resilience building;
	Demobilizing and disengaging violent extremists;
	Rehabilitation and reintegration of ‘Violent extremist offenders’ back into society.64

The redirection of UN peacekeeping towards peace enforcement and counter-terrorism may affect the ability of its civilian components to interact with local populations, leading to further ‘bunkerisation’ of troops, police and civilian staff.⁶⁵ This limits the ability of the mission to build local administration, facilitate reconciliation, and implement quick-impact projects and other important activities on local levels. As for specific PCVE activities, funding is, as I will detail in the next section, increasingly available, but there has been little empirical evidence of the successes or failures of such programmes.⁶⁶

Labelling activities as ‘PCVE-relevant’ or ‘PCVE-specific’ entails the risk of stigmatising target groups and distancing the UN from these, thereby fuelling marginalisation and political isolation.⁶⁷ As pointed out by a concept note developed by UN DPKO in 2015:

In practice, distinguishing between ‘terrorist’ and ‘non-terrorist’ groups may be difficult – not least in Mali – given the fluidity of allegiances between transnational ‘terrorist’ groups and autochthonous groups with local grievances. Belonging to a so-called terrorist group may also be a seasonal activity, or be driven by limited livelihood alternatives, raising questions over whether individuals purported to belong to such groups can or should be considered ‘terrorists’. Labelling individuals or groups as terrorists in itself can be used as a political strategy to undermine credibility, weaken grievances, and limit their participation in negotiated solutions to conflict.⁶⁸

The increasing focus on PCVE, with the attendant resources brought to the table, can limit the space for more politically oriented approaches, and risks marginalising, politicising and securitising the humanitarian, peacebuilding, local governance and development agendas. When it supports the extension of the state’s authority, the UN is not seen as impartial and will be perceived as illegitimate by local communities, rather than as seeking to heal fractured state–society relations.⁶⁹

Financial implications

At the strategic level, the engagement of UN peace operations at the lower level of the conflict spectrum to deal with violent extremism and terrorism can offload financial as well as operational costs. This could be a welcome development in an environment of economic austerity and fatigue after 15 years of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Mali, the French deployment of Opération Serval was made conditional on a UN follow-up mission, much to the irritation of ECOWAS and the African Union.⁷⁰ However, the inclusion of peace enforcement brigades in UN peacekeeping operations also offers higher reimbursement rates for these contributions to troop contributing countries than would deploying within an African Union framework, providing an economic incentive.

On the supply side, there is increased funding for counter-terrorism and PCVE activities offered by Middle Eastern, Asian and Western countries concerned at the spread of violent extremism along the ‘axis of instability’ around Europe, from the Sahel in the west to Central Asia in the east. For instance, the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre established as part of the UN Counter-Terrorism Task Force (CTITF) received a donation of 100 million USD from Saudi Arabia in 2014 to strengthen its ‘tools, technologies and methods to confront and eliminate the threat of terrorism’.⁷¹ According to one UN official,⁷² the CTITF/UNCCT in 2015 accounted for roughly half of the substantive DPA budget. It has reached out to the UN mission in Mali, UN agencies and others, developing more than 30 projects by the beginning of 2016.⁷³ The availability of funding for PCVE activities may make these a tempting proposition, and risks creating supply-driven programming.

For many in the peace and security arena, the move towards the PCVE agenda represents a promising new discursive tool to secure funding for existing activities from ‘governments whose anxiety levels have been raised by the threat of transnational terrorism’.⁷⁴ The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and others have launched broad projects aimed at funding this new agenda.⁷⁵ But rebranding early recovery, peacebuilding and development activities as PCVE activities may have an entrapment effect, where funders will expect activities to be re-focused. That could result in funds being removed from current activities.⁷⁶

Political implications

At the Leader’s Summit on peacekeeping held during the 2015 General Assembly and chaired by US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron cited terrorism as a motivating factor for contributing more troops,⁷⁷ capabilities and resources to UN peace operations.⁷⁸ The US Mission to the UN noted the ‘jihadist insurgency’ in Mali as an example of a challenge that the UN needed to be better equipped to deal with.⁷⁹

In peace operations, the UN is perceived as a top-down organisation with severe staffing, conceptual and practical challenges. However, the history of UN peacekeeping shows that it has evolved relatively rapidly in response to changing circumstances on the ground. Moreover, the influx of staff from Western countries with experience from Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with political pressure, can be a powerful impetus for change. Most involved actors and member states agree that UN peace operations need an overhaul – as evidenced through the broad support from member states, civil society and the UN system of the HIPPO Report’s reform agenda.

Western and African member states want UN peace operations to be more relevant to what are seen as challenges of the twenty-first century, and some have argued that using UN peace operations to deal with situations that require counter-terrorism action is one area where the veto powers of the Security Council may be able to agree.⁸⁰ However, that remains a disputed topic – during the UN General Assembly Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations (C-34) discussions in March 2016, the Western group of countries, led by the EU, pushed for language on counter-terrorism, declaring that UN peace operations may not be suited to take on counter-terrorism tasks today but that the option should be retained as a future possibility. However, it proved impossible to achieve consensus on this point, and the entire paragraph on counter-terrorism was removed from the final document.

Irrespective of these discussions, MINUSMA may already be in a counter-terrorism mode. ASIFU is developing ‘targeting packs’ on groups and individuals considered a threat to the mission. The parallel French Opération Barkhane operates together with Task Force Sabre, which is another, less public French targeting force, consisting of 200 men based in Burkina Faso, but stationed throughout the theatre of operations of Barkhane that ‘quickly dispatch[es] small teams of airborne commandos to attack HVTs [high-value targets]’.⁸¹ A lessons-learned study of how ASIFU had fared in 2015 warned:

given that the sharing of information with Operation Barkhane may have political implications, it would seem that decisions on whether or not to share information should be taken at the political level, i.e. by senior mission leadership and informed by UN policy, rather than by the ASIFU Commanders.⁸²

In other words, it seriously questioned the informal information-sharing between ASIFU and Opération Barkhane that has been a regular activity since the inception of ASIFU. The study also warned that, through such a practice, MINUSMA may be ‘perceived as a party to the conflict’.⁸³ This is not only a matter of perception, but a legal question: by becoming a de jure party to the conflict, ‘MINUSMA military personnel would lose their protected status and thereby become lawful targets under IHL [international humanitarian law]’.⁸⁴ This could be the case not only if MINUSMA takes direct action, but also if MINUSMA provides actionable intelligence, as the quote above strongly indicates.⁸⁵ Furthermore, it is not merely hypothetical whether MINUSMA is a peace enforcement mission, but a reality, even when it is only providing ‘targeting packs’, and not acting on its mandate to take direct action. The ramifications may be far-reaching and concern not only the mission itself, but also other parts of the UN family on the ground. Staff working for UN agencies, funds and programmes become possible targets and may be lawfully killed as ‘collateral damage’ because of their association with an active party to the conflict: ‘the killing of any civilians incidental to an attack on MINUSMA military personnel would not necessarily be unlawful under IHL’.⁸⁶ That severely affects their ability to provide and facilitate humanitarian, peacebuilding and development aid.

Moral and reputational implications

UN peacekeeping operations enjoy wide international legitimacy, and this is one of its main assets. As stated in the ‘Capstone Doctrine’ for UN peacekeeping:

[i]nternational legitimacy is one of the most important assets of a United Nations peacekeeping operation … . The firmness and fairness with which a United Nations peacekeeping operation exercises its mandate, the circumspection with which it uses force, the discipline it imposes upon its personnel, the respect it shows to local customs, institutions and laws, and the decency with which it treats the local people all have a direct effect upon perceptions of its legitimacy.⁸⁷

However, due to recent operations in the DRC and Mali, the UN is increasingly perceived as a party to the conflict. The legitimacy of the UN can also be an asset when trying to widen the scope to include PCVE and CT activities, and can strengthen the legitimacy of robust national counter-terrorism activities. When the UN, as the main international norm and standard setter, develops comprehensive guidance on CT and PCVE, it lends further support to these agendas, and opens the possibility for stronger engagement through various UN tools, including its peacekeeping operations.

However, because of the need for political acceptance of sustaining losses when contributing troops to UN counter-terrorism operations, these operations, or the enforcement brigade elements of these operations, are likely to be coalitions of the willing, forming missions within the missions – like the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) in MONUSCO. These have national interests and may choose to pursue certain groups seen as a threat to civilians, but not others – again, as with the FIB in MONUSCO which defeated the M-23, but has proved reluctant to pursue the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR).⁸⁸ This could undermine the legitimacy of the peacekeeping operation and its main objective of providing long-term peace and stability.

The Secretary-General’s progress report on MINUSMA stated that ‘human rights violations committed in the name of countering violent extremism will give terrorists their best recruitment tools’.⁸⁹ However, Richard Atwood argues that the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism ‘divorces policy from politics’ by buying into the narrative that contemporary conflicts are ‘struggles between governments and violent extremists’, so that ‘[if] states can’t prevent militants from radicalizing, it implies, the only option is to crush them or force their surrender’.⁹⁰

Conclusions

Abductive reasoning leads us to the conclusion that MINUSMA could be considered a counter-insurgency operation; and, given its collaboration with Opération Barkhane, could also indirectly be considered a counter-terrorism operation. I have here conceptualised UN counter-terrorism operations, using this new category of missions as a heuristic device to draw out the possible costs and benefits attached to such a development. With the successful push from African states to include peace enforcement brigades in MONUSCO and UNMISS, and the on-going push to include a similar enforcement brigade in MINUSMA, a UN counter-terrorism operation may soon be not only a partial, but a full, reality. If UN peacekeeping operations are equipped with counter-terrorism and PCVE mandates, the host states they are supporting should not be faulted for thinking that this will be their main activity.

UN peacekeeping is a relatively new tool in the international peace and security toolbox. It has been developed in an inductive and bottom-up manner, with reform pushed by the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council deployed first as observer missions to the Middle East and Kashmir as a response to evolving situations on the ground, as well as to the failures to protect civilians in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda.⁹¹ The developments in MINUSMA threaten to undermine the legitimacy of not only MINUSMA itself, but also the tool of peacekeeping. Furthermore, it undermines the role the UN has as an impartial arbiter of conflicts through its good offices function and special political missions.

UN multidimensional peacekeeping operations can play a minor role in the preventive dimension of violent extremism and terrorism, by supporting programmatic activities that can support the development of an inclusive and legitimate central government, without necessarily labelling these as PCVE. UN peacekeeping operations should thus be strengthened to prevent and pre-empt terrorist threats when necessary, but the task to counter and neutralise such threats should remain with coalitions of the willing and multinational forces, mandated by the UN Security Council.

Member states and the UN should avoid the rhetorical entrapment that the move towards PCVE entails, and not simply move towards developing concepts for stabilisation and counter-terrorism just because the UN Security Council is deploying peacekeeping operations to conflicts they are simply ill-suited for to prop up regimes with weak legitimacy in lieu of an inclusive peace agreement. We should treat these challenges as analytically distinct, and look at MINUSMA as an outlier rather than the norm for what is to come in the future. In practice, that means advocating for a strategy for the exit of MINUSMA, and in the meantime supporting the mission with capabilities and capacities to mitigate the threats of terrorism and violent extremism, but not rebranding its activities and tasks as CT and PCVE. Both field and headquarters staff should continue to stand by the values of the organisation, and resist the calls to become more ‘relevant’ to twenty-first century security challenges.

Note on Contributor

John Karlsrud is a senior research fellow and Manager of the Training for Peace Programme at the Peace Operations Group, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), working on peacekeeping, peace-building and humanitarian issues. He has published, inter alia, in Conflict, Security and Development, International Peacekeeping, Global Governance, and Third World Quarterly. He previously served as Special Assistant to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Chad and has done research in Chad, Haiti and South Sudan.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank fellow panellists at the ISA Annual Convention in Atlanta, 16–19 March 2016, and the ECPR General Conference in Prague, 7–9 September 2016, as well as my colleague Natasja Rupesinghe for constructive and useful inputs. Any errors and omissions remain my own.

Notes

1. United Nations, “(4a) Fatalities by Mission.” The UN mission in Congo (ONUC) suffered 250 fatalities from 1960 to 1964. James, “Congo Controversies.”

2. United Nations, S/RES/2085, 4.

3. United Nations, S/RES/2100, 7.

4. See Artiñano et al., Adapting and Evolving.

5. See also Karlsrud, “UN at War,” and Karlsrud, UN Peace Operations.

6. Ministère de la Défense, “Opération Barkhane.”

7. See African Union, Report of the Commission; and Institute for Security Studies. “New African Force for Mali?”

8. United Nations, S/RES/2098 and S/RES/2304.

9. United Nations, S/RES/2034, 8.

10. UN General Assembly, Conclusions and Observations, cited in Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 24.

11. See eg Glazzard and Zeuthen, Violent Extremism.

12. US Department of the Army, Joint Publication 3-26, vii.

13. United Nations, S/RES/1373.

14. See eg Fox, “Gwot is History. Now for Save.”

15. United Nations, A/70/674. In the plan, the terms ‘extremism’, ‘violent extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ are used interchangeably.

16. United Nations, S/RES/1270.

17. United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, 34.

18. Rhoads, Taking Sides in Peacekeeping; Lynch, “UN Peacekeeping More Assertive.”

19. Rhoads, Taking Sides in Peacekeeping, 34–5.

20. United Nations, S/RES/2098, 7.

21. IEP, Global Terrorism Index, 2.

22. Ibid.

23. See eg UNHRC, “Report.”

24. United Nations, “Security Council Reiterates Sanctions Decision.”

25. United Nations, A/RES/60/288.

26. United Nations, A/RES/70/291.

27. United Nations, S/RES/2227, 3.

28. Including ‘preventive, nonkinetic components of counterterrorism, including P/CVE programs’; Millar and Fink, Blue Sky III, 7.

29. For a comprehensive overview, see United Nations, Contribution of United Nations Peacekeeping. This comprehensive and broad strategy also includes activities to provide security, which I choose to place under pillar 2 on preventing and combating terrorism.

30. United Nations, A/70/674, 3.

31. However, according to eg Modirzadeh, the ‘“push” and “pull” factors articulated in the document are so broad they are impossible to disprove’; Modirzadeh, “If It’s Broke”; see also Atwood, “Dangers Lurking.”

32. US Army, Joint Publication 3-26, V-3.

33. Ibid., V-4–V-5.

34. NATO, “Fact Sheet.”

35. On possible tasks for UN counter-terrorism operations in this area, as well as challenges, see Cockayne and O’Neil, UN DDR in an Era of Violent Extremism.

36. See eg para. 19 and 20 of United Nations, A/RES/70/291, 7.

37. United Nations, S/RES/2295, 5, 2.

38. United Nations Mine Action Service, “Background.”

39. United Nations, “(4a) Fatalities by Mission.”

40. United Nations, S/RES/2100, 7.

41. Mandate from United Nations, S/RES/2295, 9.

42. Ibid., 2–3, emphasis in original.

43. ‘PCVE-relevant’ activities may be preventive, while PCVE-specific ones should be targeted interventions. Most of these align with regular tasks of UN peacekeeping operations. For an overview, see Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 7.

44. Ibid., 7–11.

45. United Nations, Lessons Learned Report, 3.

46. Germany has since joined, with 600 troops. For more on the Western contributions to MINUSMA, see Karlsrud and Smith Europe’s Return to UN Peacekeeping and the special issue of International Peacekeeping by Koops and Tercovich, “European Return to UN Peacekeeping?”

47. The ASIFU model has been celebrated but also significantly challenged, and in 2016 it was decided to merge it with the U2 intelligence cell of the Force component, becoming the Military All Sources Information Cell (MASIC). United Nations, Lessons Learned Report.

48. According to Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 18.

49. Interview with French Ministry of Defence official, 15 January 2015, New York; see also United Nations, Lessons Learned Report.

50. Karlsrud and Smith, Europe’s Return to UN Peacekeeping

51. Including 30 Danish special forces troops as well. Forsvarsministeriet, “Indsatsen i Mali (MINUSMA).”

52. United Nations, Summary of Concept Note, 2.

53. United Nations, S/RES/2295, 9.

54. United Nations, A/70/95, S/2015/446, 31.

55. Ibid.

56. See eg Karlsrud and Smith, Europe’s Return to UN Peacekeeping.

57. United Nations, A/70/95, S/2015/446, x.

58. United Nations, UN Police Magazine, 8.

59. Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 16.

60. Head of OROLSI Dmitry Titov, United Nations, UN Police Magazine, 3.

61. Cockayne and O’Neil, UN DDR.

62. Ibid., 35.

63. Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 7, 22–23, 32, note 125.

64. Ibid., 7.

65. On ‘bunkerisation’, see Duffield, “Challenging Environments.” For more on this in Mali, see eg Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace.

66. ‘Little empirical evidence exists on the success and failures of past or on-going programming under the PVE rubric, making a judgment on approaches that would most suit peacekeeping contexts difficult’: United Nations, Summary of Concept Note, 1; see also United Nations, A/70/674.

67. Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace; Atwood, “Dangers Lurking.”

68. United Nations, DPKO Brainstorming Brownbag Lunch.

69. de Coning et al., “Towards More People-Centric Peace Operations.”

70. African Union, Communiqué; Lotze, “United Nations.”

71. UNCCT, “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

72. Interview with UN official, 5 October 2015.

73. United Nations, “Main Projects.”

74. Boutellis and Fink, Waging Peace, 34.

75. UNDP, Preventing and Responding to Violent Extremism.

76. See eg Modirzadeh, “If It’s Broke.”

77. Mason, “UK to Deploy Troops.”

78. For a summary of pledges, see Global Peace Operations Review, “Leaders’ Summit.”

79. Goldberg, “Why President Obama is Hosting.”

80. Gowan, “How the UN Can Help Create Peace.”

81. High Level Military Group, Our Military Forces’ Struggle, 79.

82. United Nations, Lessons Learned Report, 15.

83. Ibid.

84. Khalil, “Peacekeeping Missions as Parties to Conflicts.” Although the brief was written in her personal capacity, it should be noted that Khalil at the time was a Senior Legal Officer in the Office of the Legal Counsel, UN Office of Legal Affairs, dealing with inter alia peacekeeping, sanctions and counter-terrorism regimes.

85. The close cooperation with Opérations Serval/Barkhane/Sabre was also one of the issues addressed by the HIPPO panel recommendation that ‘Where a parallel force is engaged in offensive combat operations it is important for UN peacekeeping operations to maintain a clear division of labour and distinction of roles’. United Nations, A/70/95, S/2015/446, x.

86. Ibid.

87. United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, 36.

88. Fabricius, “Is the Force Intervention Brigade Neutral?”

89. United Nations, S/2016/498, 19.

90. Atwood, “Dangers Lurking.”

91. See eg Bellamy et al., Understanding Peacekeeping; and Karlsrud, Norm Change.