Paul raises two important points. On the first, all the peacekeeping professionals have long insisted that a sound peace agreement should precede the despatch of peacekeepers. The kinds of tasks mapped out for UNAMID in Resolution 1769 are difficult enough at the best of times and in the middle of ongoing hostilities they are all-but-impossible. The “responsibility to protect” is a fine principle but no-one has quite figured out how it should operate in practice, short of launching a war. One of the reasons for the UN’s caution on this is that once an international force gets involved in fighting, almost for sure it gets dragged into the conflict and then becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution. This is what happened in Mogadishu. For these reasons, the UN is hoping that the peace process recently launched will come to a successful conclusion before UNAMID is fully deployed.

Your second question is also a good one. In earlier postings, we have debated whether things really are “getting worse” in Darfur and the implications of doing something dramatic (like a no-fly zone). A general rule is, when Darfur becomes the battleground for a clash of principles, then the rhetorical confrontation makes it harder to identify the right thing to do, get agreement upon it, and do it. The particular challenge we face in Sudan is that the kinds of real progress achieved are rarely if ever enough to satisfy many activists, so that western governments are under constant pressure to move the finishing line. In turn this undermines confidence in what has actually been achieved and makes implementation more difficult.