The end of traditional peacekeeping?

An article in the National Post punctures some illusions about how much peacekeeping Canada has been doing recently:

Will the last Canadian peacekeeper out the door please turn out the lights?

Captain Dan Zegarac is the lone Canadian left with the UN mission in Cyprus, the last of more than 35,000 peacekeepers to wear the Maple Leaf on the divided Mediterranean island nation.

"Yeah, I'm the last one," the Ottawa-born staff officer said in a telephone interview from Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. "I'm the only reason the Canadian flag is still flying around here."

Cyprus is one of the longest-lasting UN peacekeeping missions, and many Canadians have served there. A friend of mine was wounded in a firefight there in the late 1970's. It's odd that there is only a token presence there now.

But Cyprus has been divided for more than three decades and the UN force, now made up of South American, British, Hungarian and Slovakian troops, could be there for decades more.

And partly as a result of such long-running UN missions, Canada is increasingly getting out of the peacekeeping business.

Despite the government's professed support for the idea of peacekeeping, Canada has been quietly closing up shop in UN missions around the world. The last Canadian battle group left Bosnia last year and this fall our last major UN contingent in the Middle East will be reduced to a handful of support soldiers.

In spite of relatively broad public support for peacekeeping missions among Canadians, there just aren't enough soldiers left to be as involved as we think we are. One major mission (a reinforced infantry battalion) and a few minor missions (company or platoon-sized) are just about all that is sustainable for the Canadian Forces now.

The Department of National Defence appears to have reached the same conclusion. Ottawa will scale back its 30-year commitment to the UN force separating the Israeli and Syrian armies mission on the Golan Heights in northern Israel.

The nearly 200 Canadians with the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) will be withdrawn by the end of the summer, leaving only 40 troops in the Golan, which was Canada's last major "blue hat" contingent, so named for the powder blue berets and helmets worn by soldiers serving as UN peacekeepers.

The pull-out from the Golan Heights follows last year's withdrawal from Bosnia, where the last Canadian battle group left the Balkans — dropping the Canadian presence from more than 1,000 troops to just over 80.

And yesterday, Canada announced it will send more troops to Afghanistan, a total of 1,250 by next February, to join a U.S.-led counter-insurgency mission to hunt down terrorists.

That is our major contribution to the war on terrorism: working (with as little press attention as possible) with the Americans in Afghanistan. It's almost as if we are ashamed of sending our troops to do battle there. On second thought, strike the "as if" from that last sentence.