At this crucial juncture in our region's complex history, it may be helpful to recall the experiences of international and regional organisations in dealing with conflicts and crises. During the African Union's summit meeting in Durban, South Africa, in July 2002, the organisation asserted the need for an African policy on defence and security. The suggestion was that the AU create an African Peace and Security Council to deal with international threats, regional conflicts, and humanitarian crises resulting from these conflicts. This year, at NATO's meeting in Wales, UK, on 5 September, the main summit decision was agreement to establish a rapid deployment force to protect any NATO member from foreign aggression. The force will be made up of 4,000 soldiers, capable of deploying within 48 hours, and serve as the “spearhead” for any broader deployment of force. These experiences should motivate us to think on the regional level and recall crises in the Arab world, where the absence of an Arab peacekeeping force has led to the worsening of these crises and their destructive consequences. Three such crises are of particular import. The first was the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990. This was followed by the formation of a US-led international coalition to liberate Kuwait. Strategic experts like Brian Urquhart said that if the region had possessed a system for early warning and peacekeeping action, the crisis could have been averted, along with the war. The second crisis was the Libyan Revolution of 2011. Without the involvement of an Arab peacekeeping and rapid deployment force, resolution of the Libyan situation was handed over to the UN Security Council, and subsequently NATO, which contented itself with removing Gaddafi and failed to prepare a credible response to the “post-revolution” stage. The outcome was state disintegration and civil war, from which Libya has yet to emerge. The Libyan experience was repeated in Syria, where the absence of an Arab mechanism to separate conflicting forces has led to enormous material and human losses over the past three years. Now the Arab world faces an escalation of extremist terrorism represented in the Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist groups that threaten both Arab states and societies. To be sure, terrorism has become a global phenomenon that demands international cooperation and coordination. But this does not contradict with the need to combat such groups by organising forces under an Arab umbrella. An Arab intervention and peacekeeping force would be composed of principal Arab actors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. This is not far from what was suggested by Arab League Secretary-General Nabil El-Arabi during the Arab foreign ministers meeting on 7 September, where he said that Arab countries faced unprecedented challenges that demand effective and new tools, including military tools. He proposed that a clear and decisive resolution be adopted for a comprehensive confrontation — “militarily, politically, culturally and economically” — between Arab states and terrorist groups. El-Arabi based his suggestion on the common defence agreement that was signed by Arab countries in 1945, but which remains unenforced. The secretary-general asked Arab actors to agree to establish a mechanism for peacekeeping and peace-building, to be provided with appropriate resources for the task, including the ability to deploy whenever necessary. This thinking is not without precedence. At the Khartoum Summit in 2006, the main statute of an Arab Peace and Security Council was discussed. Eight years after the statute's adoption, such a council has still not materialised. The writer is executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.
