Umstrittene Schweizer Sicherheitspolitik ... - ETH Zürich

Institute
My personal reflections on what that niche could be would suggest
– for political, historical, and cultural reasons – it be not in active
conflict zones. That is one of the reasons why the Swiss engagement in
Afghanistan ended at a time when things looked like they were going to
become much more problematic, which in fact they did. On the other
end of the spectrum is Kosovo: a clear interest; foreign policy and security
policy in a strong engagement that has been widely respected. Between
those ends there is a range of post-conflict environments in which a clear
Swiss contribution that draws upon some of its strengths and expertise,
for example in development policy, and upon civilian expert pools could
be shaped in a somewhat more coherent way so that you could plant the
flag with both a limited deployment of military forces and a coherent
leverage of development and foreign policy resources.
Catrina Christian: Let me ask you a question referring not only to Switzerland
and its security policy, but to a broader issue: have military peace
operations in your view been a success story so far?
Krause Keith: There are a few studies on this, a Rand Corporation study
among others, from which two things emerge: the first is that UN peace
support operations have tended over the past twenty years to have a greater
degree of success in stabilizing situations than unilateral ones. The second
is that in all cases success is limited. However, we have to be realistic: if
you succeed half of the time in preventing either further violence or the
recurrence of a conflict, that is a strong achievement. An appropriate
benchmark for success would say whether a multilateral peace support
operation succeeds in stabilizing a situation for five or ten years. That is
by all criteria a good measure of success, because the costs of letting it
continue would clearly be much greater. We see that in many environments
where violence has re-erupted and the resources that were invested
in reconstruction and development were completely wasted. That is not
a good investment for Western aid donors, either.
420