Give the UN the tools to do the job we ask of it

The new proposals for the reform of the United Nations unveiled yesterday are notable, above all, for their honesty. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, is not frightened of calling a blunder a blunder. The report which he commissioned says that the UN has "repeatedly failed" to meet challenges with which it has been faced.

The new proposals for the reform of the United Nations unveiled yesterday are notable, above all, for their honesty. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, is not frightened of calling a blunder a blunder. The report which he commissioned says that the UN has "repeatedly failed" to meet challenges with which it has been faced.

The report notes: "No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor." It acknowledges, too, the problem of talking big while doing little. "The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear, when recommending force and other resource levels for a new mission." The seemingly endless conflicts in different corners of the world mean that the appetite for UN peacekeepers can seem limitless. The UN must make hard choices. In future, missions will only be authorised when sufficient troop commitments for a given hotspot have been received.

Yesterday's report came in the wake of the UN's admission of its humiliating failure in Bosnia, where 6,000 people were massacred in Srebrenica while the UN did nothing, and in Rwanda, where the reaction to the genocide of 1994 came too late - despite repeated warnings from those in the field. In recent months, too, the abduction of 500 UN peacekeepers by armed rebels in Sierra Leone made an absolute mockery of the operation there. The proposals in yesterday's report include a permanent list of military officers on standby and the preparation of brigade-sized forces which can be deployed at short notice. In short, a smoother operation.

It is still unclear whether, despite the good intentions of the authors, the UN can change as much as it needs to. The powerful permanent five members of the Security Council still call many of the shots; in some cases, they wield power without responsibility. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister who chaired the panel responsible for yesterday's report, argues that it is "unacceptable" that the United States consistently fails to pay its UN dues; it currently owes $1.35bn to the peacekeeping operation.

American leadership and equipment have played a valuable role. But the UN must wield more power of its own. This, in turn, would mean that the UN response to crises can become more streamlined than in recent years. This report, if implemented, will mark a step in that direction; if so, it is welcome and overdue.