The global peacekeeping investment.

AuthorRuffin, Fayth A.
Position10 Stories the World Should Hear More About

Former United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned the American Society of Newspaper Editors in his "Chance for Peace" address delivered in April 1953: "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Is there no other way the world may live?"

More than fifty years later, in the face of nuclear weapons, the question remains, and international investment in peacekeeping remains elusive.

War is expensive. The World Bank indicates that two decades of war and conflict in Afghanistan cost $240 billion. Recovery costs are estimated to exceed $27.5 billion. That amount over the next seven years would take Afghanistan from its current dire levels of poverty, hunger and want to an annual per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of about $500. On the other hand, absent the twenty-year conflict, in all probability the average annual income of an Afghan would have approximated $500 per person.

Funding war, rather than keeping peace, yields devastating results. According to The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, at a lecture in March of this year, war has a force and power of its own. "War waged for empire or wealth in an age where those arrayed against us can also get apocalyptic weapons means we dance with our own destruction. We thrill in our own annihilation. In war, we suffer as much destruction as we wreak. When we unleash war's awful power, we become its pawn, its tool."

The more the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) works to enhance the positive developments of ending old wars and preventing new ones, the more Member States will need to invest, financially and personnel wise. Fortunately, many Member States have come forward meeting monetary obligations and deploying civilian police, military observers and troops. Countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan. Ghana and Nepal have significantly contributed to bolstering troops. For example, there were 4,110 troops in November 2003 among the ranks of the United Nations "blue helmets" from Bangladesh (with a 2002 GDP of 47.6 billion), 4,565 in December 2003 and 6,362 as April 2004 drew to a close. During that same timeframe, Ghana (with a 2002 GDP of $6.2 billion) provided 2,077 troops the first month, 2,174 the following...

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