‘peacekeeping mission’. Peacekeeping is not a function explicitly
entrusted to the UN under the United Nations Charter, but
instead arose through creative diplomacy on the part of senior
UN officials. Dag Hammarskjöld famously remarked that peace-
keeping was authorised by ‘Chapter Six-and-a-Half’ of the Charter.
Peacekeeping classically involves the deployment in a non-coercive
mission of lightly armed, neutral personnel, serving with the per-
mission of host countries, and under the formal authority of the
Secretary-General acting pursuant to a resolution of the Security
Council, to perform tasks such as observation, interposition, the
maintenance of law and order, and the delivery of aid (Diehl, 1994:
4–10; see also Rikhye, 1984; James, 1990; Fetherston, 1994). The
United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan
(UNGOMAP) met these requirements, and was included by the UN
in its fiftieth anniversary listing of peacekeeping operations (United
Nations, 1998). It was UNGOMAP that was the first peacekeeping
operation to monitor the actions of a superpower (Diehl, 1994:
166), and this alone makes it of some interest.
The UNGOMAP mission operated from May 1988 until March
- Its expenditures were modest, only US$14 million in total,
drawn from the regular budget of the UN. It comprised 50 military
observers, together with local support staff: its international person-
nel were drawn from Austria, Canada, Denmark, Fiji, Finland,
Ghana, Ireland, Nepal, Poland, and Sweden. Cordovez, as Personal
Representative of the Secretary-General, controlled the mission,
with Major-General Rauli Helminen of Finland serving as his
Deputy during the withdrawal phase (Birgisson, 1993: 307). It had
offices in Kabul and Islamabad, and permanently manned posts at
Shindand airbase south of Herat, and at Hairatan and Torghundi on
the border between Afghanistan and the USSR. Tasked with
receiving complaints about violations of the Geneva Accords, it
confronted a veritable deluge: Kabul lodged 7545 complaints al-
leging violations, and Pakistan 1317 (Birgisson, 1993: 308). With
such a small staff, there was manifestly little that UNGOMAP
could do to handle such protests seriously. Nor did UNGOMAP
possess a significant monitoring or observation capability: rather, it
The Road to Soviet Withdrawal 143