Transcript - Inefficient but Indespensable

MARK SOMMER: Not so long ago, the United States government declared the United Nations irrelevant, and some within the Bush administration would have shed few official tears had the institution failed.

 

TIM WIRTH: The US, you know, needs the UN and recognizes that it needs the UN. The US needs help on elections in Iraq, the US needs help in Afghanistan, the US needs help in the Middle East. It needs help on nuclear issues with Iran and North Korea.

 

MARK SOMMER: How times change. But can the UN really work if it’s only used when no one else wants to handle a problem, and can it work efficiently with all it’s asked to do when it’s given pocket change to do it with?

 

TIM WIRTH: I know that the budget of the UN is less than, I think, the city of New York.

 

JAMES TRAUB: The UN has basically been operating under zero growth budget now for years.

 

TIM WIRTH: The US votes for all of the peacekeeping enterprises, but has not requested the funding to support them.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today, on A World of Possibilities, “Inefficient But Indispensable: Reforming and Reviving the United Nations.” As the ultimate public institution, the UN is mandated to serve the interests of a global public. At the same time, it’s subject to the whims of veto-wielding great powers and 192 contentious nations. Critics say it’s massively inefficient and needs a dose of private sector management to bring its lumbering bureaucracy into line.

 

JAMES TRAUB: The entrepreneurial mentality, which is, “I know what our organization stands for and I know if I do the right thing someone is going to be there to back me up,” there’s none of that.

 

MARK SOMMER: Even more than entrepreneurial zeal, say some, it needs the ability to fire those it finds ineffective.

 

RODERICK HILLS: You can’t fire people in the United Nations. It could take six years to get rid of somebody.

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, really? That long?

 

RODERICK HILLS: If you can get away with coming in drunk, making sexist remarks, those people are the most likely to do things that are ... (inaudible) more corruption.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Join us for a sober look at what it would take in both resources and reform to bring the UN up to date in the new millennium. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

 

Media mogul Ted Turner startled the world a decade ago when he announced that he was donating $1 billion to the UN. It was intended, he said, to inspire other wealthy individuals and institutions to ante up the resources that the US government, most of all, had failed to give the international organization in recent years. Alas, few others followed Turner’s lead. But one outcome of his largesse was the creation of the United Nations Foundation, which seeks to rebuild public and political support for the UN within the United States.

 

The foundation’s president since its inception has been Tim Wirth, a former senator from Colorado, who also served in the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton administrations. These days, he deals with issues of the environment, health, security and human rights. A long-time supporter of multi-lateral institutions, Sen. Wirth readily acknowledges that the UN needs sweeping reforms to make the institution more efficient and effective, measures that he hopes will generate greater support for the organization. To describe both what is and isn’t working at the moment, Tim Wirth joins us now from the studios of ABC Radio in Washington, D.C.

 

TIM WIRTH: It’s always been easy for the United States or anybody else to beat up on the UN, because the UN generally doesn’t have political constituencies in countries that can politically defend the UN. So, it’s a good example of what happened going into the Iraq War. The US said for its own political reasons that the UN was no longer relevant or that because the UN wasn’t supporting what the US wanted to do in Iraq. Almost every other nation in the world sided with the UN and opposed the US.

 

In that era, I think it was very unfortunate for, you know, the administration to sort of nastily go after the UN, but that was very damaging to the United Nations. And what had for 40 years been a pretty consistent strong level of support for the UN within the United States plummeted and things have remained at a relatively kind of low level of support and enthusiasm about the UN. And I date it back to the Iraq War and the problems of the Iraq War. Iraq has been really a disaster area for the United States and a disaster area for the UN.

 

MARK SOMMER: And, yet, you recently made an address at George Washington University in which you called this a multi-lateral moment and a golden opportunity for the US-UN relationship. Where do you see the bright light?

 

TIM WIRTH: Well, I think things are turning around, because the US, again, you know, needs the UN and recognizes that it needs the UN. Historically, the UN doesn’t work unless it works closely with the US. The US is its host, it’s its founder, it’s its largest partner, and it’s obviously the superpower in the world, and the US can make the UN work or the US can really stymie the UN. And we’re at a stage right now where the US very much wants to make the UN work, because the UN is doing a lot of things that the US needs help on.

 

The US needs help on elections in Iraq, the US needs help in Afghanistan, the US needs help in the Middle East and on Lebanon. It needs help in the Israeli-Palestinian problem. It needs help in terms of the nuclear issues with Iran and North Korea. So, rather than giving the UN the back of the hand, the US is now reaching out and saying, “Well, hey, you’re really nice guys after all and we’d like to have your help.” So, the promise is there. The proof is still in the pudding.

 

For example, the US votes for all of the peacekeeping enterprises, but has not requested the funding to support them. As a consequence, the US debt to the UN is now growing bigger and bigger and bigger. The United States is more than a billion dollars in debt to the United Nations, and everybody else is having to pick up the freight and carry the debt that the US refused to fund.

 

MARK SOMMER: At the same time, in the last 10 or 20 years, as the United States has become more wary of the UN, a kind of radical mythology has grown up in some quarters that says that the UN has black helicopters, there’s a danger of a sort of world government. That’s always been around, but it gained some currency, and where does that come from?

 

TIM WIRTH: The strain of isolationism is still out there in parts of the country, and that generates the suspicion of the UN and is sort of a real fringe operation. That’s always been there and that doesn’t worry me as much as sort of the backhanded way in which the US has treated the UN from time to time. And you can’t continue to do that sort of thing and expect that you’re going to have the kind of strong institution that you can then turn around and depend upon.

 

MARK SOMMER: It also seems that the UN is very poor at telling its own story, and also that most Americans have very little idea what the UN does.

 

TIM WIRTH: You know, I’d ask you, why is it that airplanes all land going in the same direction around the world? Well, because there is a treaty among countries about air traffic control and the way airports operate. Why can you put a stamp on an envelope in Alabama and it can go to Australia and get delivered to your cousin who’s living in Adelaide? Well, it’s because of a UN convention related to postal employees. Why is it that the frequencies under which radio and television signals and so on are broadcast don’t overlap with each other and aren’t consistently interfering with each other? Well, because of a treaty and agreements that countries come to together. These are all examples of the kind of commercial activities, as well, that hold the world together in this modern day and age, and they’re extremely important. And they are UN treaties.

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, tell us what the budget, for example, of the World Health Organization is to do all of the work that it’s doing?

 

TIM WIRTH: Well, I would guess that it’s in the neighborhood of $2 billion, and probably less than that. I know that the budget of the UN is less than, I think, the city of New York. I mean, it’s a miniscule operation. The UN’s operating budget is smaller than the operating budget of the United States Congress as an institution.

 

MARK SOMMER: There have been numerous efforts over the years to reform the UN. Where are we now with UN reform?

 

TIM WIRTH: I think a lot of progress was made last year and the year before in terms of oversight and financial tracking and accountability, financial disclosure. There were a number of reforms and changes, and there was a good deal of momentum toward reform. On the negative side, many times the US can be awfully arrogant in the way it treats everybody and acts toward everybody, as if we’re the all-powerful and perfect country and everybody else ought to adhere to our standards, even though often sometimes those standards leave a lot to be desired. There’ll be a new US ambassador arriving at the UN soon, Mr. Khalilzad, who is currently the US ambassador in Iraq, a skilled diplomat. His energy along with the new secretary general have the opportunity to create some strong moves, again, to help to complete the ambitious reform agenda that was begun under Secretary Kofi Annan.

 

MARK SOMMER: And then there’s the Security Council. Many people say that the UN is frozen in 1945 or shortly after, and then the Security Council, which is in some ways the most decisive body, is highly unrepresentative of the world as it is today. Why does it remain stuck in that sort of 50-year-old configuration?

 

TIM WIRTH: Well, the configuration of the Security Council is, as you know, there are five permanent members of the Security Council: The US, Great Britain, France, Russia and China, the winners in World War II. They all have a veto, which means that they can stop anything from happening at the UN. So, they have an excessive amount of power. So the old distribution of power reflected 60 years ago does not look like the world today.

 

Everybody talks about Security Council reform. It’s an idea that sounds good to people if you say it fast enough, but when you start to reform those who already have power, they’re going to say, “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Let’s put it off ‘til next year.” The veto power on Security Council reform is held by those who are going to get reformed. And that’s a pretty tough thing to do. It’s pretty tough to ask people who are about to get themselves reformed to vote for the reforms that might cause them to lose power at the United Nations.

 

MARK SOMMER: So, you said earlier that the United Nations can’t really succeed unless the United States is also in harmony with it to some extent and supporting it. And all that comes back to Congress at this point, it seems like. The White House, too, if it changes, but certainly Congress. It recently shifted into the control of the other party, Democrats, who are theoretically more sympathetic to multi-lateral approaches. Do you think that’s going to shift anything in relation to support for the UN?

 

TIM WIRTH: Well, I think there’s a better mood, certainly in Capitol Hill, the people who chair the committees are much friendlier toward the UN. I think that a number of the Republicans who before had been perhaps browbeaten or really discouraged by the very conservative leadership that was up there are now freed and can more openly come out in support of the old kind of way in which the US approached the world, which was in a cooperative and more multi-lateral approach.

 

You know, I think that the so-called neo-conservatives have been pretty much eclipsed with the disaster of Iraq. I think they don’t have a lot of credibility anymore, and I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s going to be good for the UN, and I think that’s good for the world.

 

MARK SOMMER: As you look down the line, you know, 20, 30 years hence, do you think that the UN will become more relevant again, or will it sort of recede and other institutions or other informal relationships begin to take its place?

 

TIM WIRTH: I remember when I first began running the UN Foundation, I went to see George Schultz, who was a famous former secretary of state under Ronald Reagan. He was on the faculty at Stanford and I went to see him to ask him about the UN, what he thought, what should I do, how do I think about this, and so on? And he started the meeting by saying, “Well, let me just say one thing about the UN.” He said, “If we didn’t have the UN, we’d have to reinvent it, and we wouldn’t do nearly as good a job the second time around.”

 

You know, I think that Secretary Schultz was right. We need some kind of a global institution. Is the UN the perfect one? Not by any means. But what’s the alternative?

 

MARK SOMMER: Tim Wirth, president of the UN Foundation. In a moment, a tough-minded journalist who gained unparalleled access to former Secretary General Kofi Annan.

 

JAMES TRAUB: He was thoughtful, unventuresome, pragmatic, not possessed of any kind of wild romantic ideals.

 

MARK SOMMER: Insights from journalist and author James Traub, when we return.

 

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MARK SOMMER: For a decade, the kindly and courtly presence of Secretary General Kofi Annan represented the public face of the UN. A native of Ghana, Annan was initially the favored candidate of the United States when it vetoed a second term for his predecessor, Boutros Boutros Ghali. But over the course of a decade in office, Kofi Annan irritated his sponsors with his subtle, softspoken critiques of US foreign policy. Occupying a position with less real than symbolic power, Annan did his best to hold together a multi-lateral institution under increasingly hostile fire from a US administration impatient with the UN’s failure to endorse its unilateral actions.

 

Journalist James Traub spent many hours with Kofi Annan as he struggled to meet ever-more stringent demands from US ambassador John Bolton while defending the UN’s independence. Traub documents the story in his book, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in an Era of American World Power. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, James Traub has reported from Iraq, Iran, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Vietnam, and many other hotspots around the world. He joins us now by phone from New York City.

 

JAMES TRAUB: He is the same kind of person in private whom he is in public. You know, people would say to me, “The guy is, he’s uncannily serene. Does he go home and kick the dog?” The answer is, I mean, I wasn’t with him at home, but I think the answer is, no. I mean, when I was with him, and I spent many hours with him, he was unfailingly kindly, deferential, I mean, he’s very much a creature of the world of international law and international institutions.

 

MARK SOMMER: Describe that world of the UN up in the secretariat. There’s that 38^th floor where the secretary general operates. It’s sort of the West Wing of the UN.

 

JAMES TRAUB: Yes. If your idea of this stuff comes in the West Wing, it would be kind of a disappointment. It’s a very hushed, quiet place. I mean, people occasionally bustle. They may move swiftly in an urgent moment. But there is no yelling, shouting, screaming, rapid-fire shafts of ... (inaudible). It’s a very kind of carpeted place. And serviteurs come and go, whispering things into people’s ears. It’s all kind of hushed. And I’m sure every secretary general makes his own atmosphere up there, but because Annan is such a gracious person and because he has a certain delicacy about him, I suppose that tends to infuse itself throughout the whole place. I always felt extremely kind of nicely greeted and well cared for, and there’s just something kind of cushioned about the whole thing.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’ve gone to the UN a few times in recent months, having been taken there by my parents in the 1950s when I was a child, and when I went downstairs to the lower level and there was a bookstore there, it really--

 

JAMES TRAUB: There still is.

 

MARK SOMMER: It’s exactly the same. It’s like a time warp.

 

JAMES TRAUB: Yeah, if you ever want to study the design principles of 1960, that is the place to go. I mean, it really is-- Part of it is because there’s never been any money to do anything, and now, of course, they’re trying to raise money to do a gigantic rebuilding, because the place is full of asbestos and everything is falling apart. I mean, it’s turning into the worst kind of antique. But, yeah, there is the weird time-stood-still quality about the place.

 

MARK SOMMER: And then I went to see UN Radio and TV, and it’s very good people, very capable people, but they have fewer resources than an independent radio production.

 

JAMES TRAUB: Well, this tells you something about the UN in general. You know, the UN has basically been operating under zero growth budget now for years, and it’s really kind of absurd. I mean, if we believe in the place, then we should be willing to actually spend the money on the place.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s look further at the culture of the UN, because on the one hand it seems that the UN’s failings are due in large part to its almost deliberate benign or malign neglect by great powers, but there are also things that many people like yourself have said are inherent in the UN machinery and in the UN culture that actually discourage any kind of innovation.

 

JAMES TRAUB: In part, I think it has to do with the place’s history. The UN for a long time was not what you call an operational place. It didn’t do a whole lot. But the UN was a forum more than an active institution. Well, it’s very different now. And if you’re going to do stuff, then you need to be a more effective, crisp organization. But it has the same habits it had before. So, there is a deep-seated preoccupation with process, with these organizational issues. There is a sense that there are kind of inviolable rules that prevent you from doing anything except whatever it is you happen to be doing.

 

And the more entrepreneurial mentality, which is, “I know what our organization stands for and I know if I do the right thing, someone is going to be there to back me up.” There’s none of that. And so, the gifted young people who work there, and there are a lot of them, either they find some place where they can do their work without getting their head handed to them, or they leave. I mean, one positive thing is I think that as the number of such people grow, it puts more pressure on the traditional culture of the institution. But, you know, it’s really hard to change institutional culture.

 

MARK SOMMER: If a secretary general were to be entrepreneurial or were to use the UN podium as a bully pulpit the way presidents do, they would experience a very harsh shock from the great powers.

 

JAMES TRAUB: You know, it’s not as if that experiment has not been tried, though I think it is going to be the great experiment of the new secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. That is, Kofi Annan, who was a creature of the institution, spent his whole life in it, you know, he was too habituated to fully understand its shortcomings, but, certainly, one thing he knew very clearly was that the secretary general has almost no power at all.

 

So, he tried very hard to get those powers, which had to be granted to him, and one of the really kind of painful recognitions that came out of his own, Annan’s attempt to reform the institution, was the realization that, for many members of the institution, being efficient just doesn’t matter that much. I mean, as far as they’re concerned, efficiency, as we might define it, is less important than fundamental issues of the distribution of power. They didn’t want to surrender any of that to the already powerful nations of the West.

 

MARK SOMMER: There was a strong push for major restructuring and reform of the UN, and much of the impetus came from the United States. In fact, from conservatives who had no affection for the institution to begin with. In fact, there is some question about whether they really wanted it reformed or destroyed.

 

JAMES TRAUB: Certainly, the new generation of conservatives who tend to be hostile to any kind of institution or set of legal principles which they see as constraining America’s freedom of action, it’s hard for them to see anything good about the UN. This is certainly the view taken by John Bolton, our former ambassador. His view was, “Well, the UN is just fine if it does America’s bidding, and therefore provides additional legitimacy to America’s actions.”

 

MARK SOMMER: Tell us briefly that story of how that happened, how John Bolton blocked real reform, I mean real reform, that would have improved the UN?

 

JAMES TRAUB: Well, let me first explain what the reforms were that were at issue. For example, the UN has never had, has never been able to come to a meaningful definition of terrorism. So there was an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition of terrorism, which could be the basis for real UN action on terrorism. There was a real attempt to make headway on nonproliferation issues, which would have meant, on the one hand, curtailing the reckless supply of enriched uranium, on the other hand getting above all the United States but other Western nuclear nations to reduce their nuclear arsenal.

 

There were a whole range of issues having to do with economic and social development. There were management reforms. There were a whole range of issues. Actually, one of the ones I’d forgotten to mention was the creation of a meaningful human rights body to replace the toothless one the UN had now. Many of the pieces, the US agreed with. Some it disagreed with. Now, instead of coming there and saying, “Look, this is what we want. We recognize that some of the stuff we don’t want you guys want, and so we’re going to make some trades. We’ll give you this, you give us” -- you know, this is what diplomacy does.

 

Diplomacy is not about sharpening differences, it’s about blurring differences in order to reach some mutually valuable collective decision. Well, that’s not Bolton’s way. Bolton’s way is to sharpen differences. He also felt that the whole process which existed when he arrived -- he arrived in August of 2005, with a drop-dead date for this reform process about four to five weeks away -- he thought, “This process was designed to railroad the United States into agreeing to stuff it didn’t want to agree with.”

 

So, he called a halt to the whole process and said, “We’re going to start from the beginning. We’re going to negotiate everything.” Now that was a formula for paralysis, as surely he must have known. And, in fact, I think Bolton’s objective was to end with a very small, modest document, perhaps a kind of statement of principles, which was nobody else’s goal, except maybe some of the other countries which are sort of the rogue nations of the UN and were happy to have the UN accomplish nothing.

 

And so, what Bolton wound up doing is he licensed those spoilers. In effect, the US became a spoiler, even from the other end of the ideological spectrum. And so, that shifted the balance between the folks who wanted to get something done and the folks who didn’t want to get something done, and it made it extraordinarily difficult to get much done. The fact that, in the end, some kind of document was produced with some kind of useful reforms was a tribute not to Bolton, but to the professional UN staff, which basically was able to rescue things from the wreckage that Bolton and others created. The final result, though, that the Bush administration didn’t get what it wanted out of this process, it prevent what it wanted to prevent, but it didn’t get what it wanted to get, and, to me, that’s a straightforward diplomatic failure.

 

MARK SOMMER: Looking back at my own image of the UN when I visited it in the 1950s as this sort of glowing pinnacle of human aspirations, it seems to have fallen a great distance from that point. At the same time, when people say it’s inefficient and ineffective and bureaucratic and corrupt, compared to what?

 

JAMES TRAUB: Yes, exactly.

 

MARK SOMMER: Compared to the US Congress?

 

JAMES TRAUB: Compared to the Pentagon?

 

MARK SOMMER: Or any number of other civil services or agencies and defense departments and ministries in various parts of the world. What are we comparing it to?

 

JAMES TRAUB: I think it also depends which metric you’re using. On corrupt, for example, and people talk about this famous oil-for-food scandal, and yet the fact is that if you compare certainly the amount of money taken by UN officials, the amount of money taken by Pentagon officials in Iraq, it’s trivial. I mean, one person was accused of stealing $64,000. The UN did turn a blind eye to the theft of much larger sums by the Iraqis, perhaps as much as $2 billion. And that’s no joke. That’s serious. But it wasn’t the UN alone that was responsible for that. The member countries also turned a blind eye.

 

And the fact is, if we think that an organization that turns a blind eye to corruption has lost its right to exist, well, that’s going to do in an awful lot of the world's organizations.

 

MARK SOMMER: We’re staring down the gun barrel, as it were, of history, and of the future, with crises converging from all corners, and the UN is, in fact, tracking a lot of those issues. It’s kind of the nexus for a lot of networks even if it can’t always act because it doesn’t have the resources. How are we going to meet these threats when concerted global action is what’s needed, and does the UN have any role to play if we decided to invest more, I don’t mean just financially, but just invest more, understanding that we’re responsible rather than the UN to be blamed as an inadequate institution?

 

JAMES TRAUB: Yeah, I think the answer was not on everything. There are some things that will be inherently difficult for the UN to deal with. I don’t know that terrorism is ever going to be a major preoccupation of the UN, but there are so many other fields. Public health, obviously. Climate change. In the best of all possible worlds, nuclear non-proliferation where it seems to me the UN does have a role to play, the UN can play a role, but we -- and when I saw we I mean not only the United States, but certainly other countries like China which also tend to serve to gum up the works of the institution -- we, in that collective sense, have to decide to make that possible.

 

MARK SOMMER: Journalist James Traub. I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

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MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “Inefficient But Indispensable: Reforming and Reviving the UN,” is underwritten by the Ploughshares Fund. Coming up in this half-hour, the UN is an international organization, not a corporation. But what would happen if it were managed more like a private sector firm.

 

RODERICK HILLS: I think it’s a quantum jump worse than what you would see in our more frozen bureaucracies.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: First of all, the UN is not a corporation. The UN is an intergovernmental political body. It’s like your Congress, for instance, or any national parliament. But it’s more complicated than that in the sense that 192 sovereign member-states, and it’s par excellence a political body.

 

RODERICK HILLS: The most serious block is the so-called Group of 77, which I think is well over 100 members. It tends to be against almost any reform.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: It can’t be compared to a corporation. The secretariat is composed of nationalities from all different parts of the world with different ... (inaudible), different cultures, different approaches. And, obviously, its management practice and management performance will not be that of a corporation. In any case, I mean, the presumption that corporations are more efficient than the UN is questionable on several counts, I mean, if you look at corporations like what happened at Enron, I don’t think that those are practices that the UN should emulate.

 

RODERICK HILLS: You have an almost unmanageable budget operation and you have a stultified oversight capacity, internal oversight or external oversight.

 

MARK SOMMER: Those comments were from Roderick Hills and Munir Akran. We’ll be hearing much more from both in this half-hour. We begin with Ambassador Munir Akran, the permanent representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He twice served as president of the UN Security Council and more recently participated in a high-level UN Commission on Managerial Reform. As a leader in the informal association of more than 110 developing nations comprising the so-called Group of 77, Ambassador Akran strongly disputes the notion that the international body should be managed more like a well-run corporation. He joins us now by phone from his office in New York City.

 

MARK SOMMER: Critics of the UN, particularly in the United States, get very impatient with what they say is the talkshop atmosphere. They say it’s all about talk and no action. But of course I’m reminded of what Winston Churchill once said about, “I’d rather talk-talk than fight-fight.”

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Right. Well, I mean, the first point is, the UN was created for talk. It is quintessentially a talkshop. We need to talk. We need to have a forum where everybody can meet without the niceties of having to go through diplomatic recognition and good relations and so forth. We are able to talk without ceremony here. We meet every day. So it is meant to be a talkshop. So if somebody says it’s a talkshop, it’s not a denigration of the UN. It’s the nature of the UN, that we talk.

 

But apart from that, I think the UN does take action. Without the UN, you would not have the normative rules that guide international relations from postal services to telecommunications to refugees to help. All of our relationships between states are regulated by rules that have emanated from the talkshop, from positions taken at the UN, from consensus agreements reached at the UN, and that is one function -- creation of norms which continue to respond to development in the world.

 

Certainly, I think the UN is an actor in many areas from food aid, humanitarian assistance, developmental assistance, health assistance. I think you take a whole range of nations where the UN is acting on the ground. The biggest network of humanitarian assistance in the world is from the World Food Program.

 

So, if one were to move away from looking at the security issues that dominate the news about the United Nations and looked at exactly what the UN is doing on the ground, I think we would see that it is an organization that is in action. It is a family of organizations. Yes, maybe they’re not the most efficient, maybe coordination has to be better. There is duplication, but certainly one could not do without the UN, and the world would not operate as smoothly and would be much more chaotic if the UN did not--

 

MARK SOMMER: In Pakistan and in other developing countries, how is the UN viewed? Those of us living in the United States, we know that at least in this current era it’s viewed less favorably than it used to be, because the administration has been, at least until very recently, quite hostile to it. But how is it viewed from Islamabad and from other countries with which you’re familiar?

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Well, you know,. I think each country’s perspective of the UN emanates from its own sort of national priorities and interests -- and prejudices, by the way. In Pakistan, for instance, for us the UN is important because the UN took decisions, the Security Council adopted decisions in 1947, ’48, ’49, calling for self-determination for Kashmir. And it has not been able to fulfill that promise to the Kashmiri people. So, there is also negative feelings in a country like Pakistan as to why the United Nations has not been able to implement its decisions.

 

But, of course, those of us who know the UN a little better, we understand that the United Nations cannot always enforce its decisions, and it takes the whole membership and certainly the major powers to agree to take enforcement actions before decisions can be implemented. But on the ground, on many areas, the United Nations is involved with our developmental activities, be it of health, education, poverty reduction, refugees, which is highly appreciated and which is important for us. But that does not always percolate to the level of the public.

 

So I think in most countries the UN doesn’t get the projection, doesn’t get the publicity, that it usually deserves. But, certainly, even without the publicity, I think the UN does very ... (inaudible), but it’s an invaluable institution, an invaluable family of institutions, and it’s seen as such in most knowledgeable circles in various countries. But, of course, as I said, there are national prejudices which flow from specific causes. And there are specific causes in this country as well as in a country like Pakistan.

 

MARK SOMMER: And when you look at the size of the UN, I’ve heard that its budget is, oh, about the size of the city of New York, yet it is, as you say, it’s doing an immense range of activities fro about six and a half billion people.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Its budget is, I think, a fraction of that of the city of New York.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oh, maybe it’s just the police force of the city of New York.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Police force or fire force or something like that. The budget is, I think, about $4.5 billion, the regular budget. The peacekeeping budget is now about the same size. So you figure, you know, the UN has got 18 peacekeeping operations with 100,000 troops on the ground in 18 countries. It costs about $5 billion. You just imagine if there was a similar-sized force, 100,000 troops on any advanced country, the United States, France, UK, how much that would cost?

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, we know that there’s about 140,000 US troops in Iraq, and it’s costing at least $200 billion a year.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: I didn’t want to mention that.

 

MARK SOMMER: As an American, I’m free to mention it.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Yeah, but, I mean, you get the point that it’s cost-effective. It’s indispensable. Those 18 countries would be in shambles if the UN troops were not there. The $5 billion budget, yes, of course, there’s a lot of waste, there’s a lot of duplication, a lot of inefficiency, but one has to see the fact that it keeps people talking, keeps people engaged at the UN, it develops norms, international rules and laws, and decisions that prevent chaos from happening. I think $5 billion is well worth while.

 

MARK SOMMER: Why is it, as Tim Wirth, the head of the UN Foundation, says, that the UN is so terrible at telling its own story?

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Well, I think partly it’s the UN’s fault. I think it’s so involved with trying against all odds to do what they’re asked to do. There’s such a difficult process of getting the different national interests and national views reconciled, it consumes a lot of energy. And the spokesmen for the UN are not able to speak with the clarity that is required to get a message, a strong message, across to the media. That’s one part of the problem.

 

Secondly, I think the media interest is not in the good news. The media interest, unfortunately, is always, or mostly, in the bad news. You know, bad news is good news for the media. So, that’s why the negative stories get prominence. The positive stories which happen every day of the week, they are not highlighted, because, for the media, it’s not a public interest. So it’s a sort of mutually reinforcing problem. But, certainly, I believe that the UN can do a much better job of projecting itself.

 

MARK SOMMER: As can the media that covers the UN, and it doesn’t just talk, as you said, it is actually carrying on 18 peacekeeping missions and probably hundreds of refugee and humanitarian operations that are very complex. And in the media, we don’t associate them with the UN, necessarily.

 

MUNIR AKRAN: Exactly. They are all under the UN umbrella. The small programs, for example, the World Food Program, a small project, they run a project which will give lunch to poor kids. Boys’ school, girls’ school. And that is a way of attracting people to send their kids to school, even in societies which are conservative and they won’t send the girls, but because it’s a free lunch they will send them to school. And it promotes both good health and education in the world. It’s just very cost-effective, very small program, but with large results. And these are success stories that are not told and, you know, they need to be told by the media.

 

MARK SOMMER: UN Ambassador Munir Akran of Pakistan. After a short break, the view from the corporate suites of the private sector with Roderick Hills.

 

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MARK SOMMER: Roderick Hills takes a no-nonsense approach to his evaluation of the United Nations. He served as counsel to President Ford and chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s the founder and current chair of the Hills Program on Governance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. And he recently served on an independent, bipartisan congressional commission on UN reform, co-chaired by former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Roderick Hills joins us by phone from his office in Washington, D.C.

 

RODERICK HILLS: My major recommendation by far was to call for an independent oversight board that would have all the authority that an independent audit committee has under the United States rules. Almost everybody thought we did a great job, including the secretariat. Of course, the Group of 77 didn’t give us much time. You can’t fire people in the United Nations. It could take six years to get rid of somebody. You can’t move people in the United Nations. You have one department that’s got too many people, another department that doesn’t have enough people, forget it: You can’t move them from one place to the other.

 

MARK SOMMER: You say that the UN has no efficient audit system. I have noticed in the past that the Pentagon doesn’t have a particularly good audit system. It hasn’t been auditable by, I think, the General Accounting Office for some years now, and it’s a much larger budget. Is this a problem that’s to some extent endemic to large bureaucracies?

 

RODERICK HILLS: No, no. The United Nations is nothing compared to General Motors. It doesn’t have anywhere near the staff. In fact, the internal audit is quite feasible, quite feasible. Hey, you have inspector generals at the United Nations and you do have a General Accounting Office, and you have the Congress that throws an inspection at it every once in a while. So I wouldn’t accept the fact that the Department of Defense doesn’t have internal audits. They don’t have a single audit perhaps the way we want it, but every department in the government has an inspector general. Some may be more effective than others, but they’re pretty bloody independent.

 

But here you have a case where a large institution is supported by all these countries, where 10 countries put up 99 percent of the budget. Mexico, for example, puts up, by itself, puts up twice as much as another 124 countries combined. So you have a whole lot of people that have no responsibility for the budget, for the cost of the budget, but have an equal say in the allocation of the budget.

 

MARK SOMMER: You have spent much of your life in the private sector. Do you think there are quite a few things to be learned at the United Nations that are practices coming from the best aspects of the private sector?

 

RODERICK HILLS: Well, I think it’s fair to say that there are very large private sector companies that are very well managed. General Electric is a very well managed company. And that’s just, it’s got nothing to do with being private, it’s had a good tradition of good management. There are a lot of companies like that. And, certainly, any government organization can learn a lot from that. But, you know, this isn’t complicated.

 

MARK SOMMER: I think even supporters of the United Nations as it stands say that it could use some significant reforms, but many people say that it also lacks the resources to be able to operate effectively. Is it a kind of a chicken and egg thing that some people like the United States say, “We’re not going to give it more money until it reforms,” and yet it is not operating efficiently in part because it is starved of resources?

 

RODERICK HILLS: Well, none of the things that you and I just talked about costs money. You save money. For example, one of our proposals is that you get rid of surplus people. There are a vast number of people in the United Nations you don’t need, not because they’re incompetent, just because they’re in the wrong spot. And our proposal was that you skinny that down. Well, you’d probably have $100 million, $200 million charge or more to do that, but just like any private enterprise you would match that against the savings that you’d have over the next five years.

 

But you’re quite right, the United States and others are not willing to give money if they don’t think it’s going to be well-spent. The United Nations secretary is not able to get rid of assignments. I mean, they’ve got programs that have been there for decades. Every secretary general for years, Kofi Annan in particular, would list programs that he’d want to get rid of. But we wanted them to have a sunset provision so that programs would, after a number of years, would have to come back to the General Assembly for approval to keep going. But those things don’t seem to be on the market right now.

 

MARK SOMMER: You focus on what the private sector globally and governments need to do together to deal with global challenges. Where does the UN and its farflung machinery fit into that picture between the private sector and national governments?

 

RODERICK HILLS: The guiding principle of our centers, and we have them now in five countries, is to identify governance problems and to identify the corrupting influences that generate the problem. And our job is to try to figure out what the cost of those problems are, and then to find devices to reduce the influences. And I would say, you look at the United Nations, the corrupting influences are the inability to have an effective personnel system. You can’t get rid of bad actors.

 

You know, a lot of people conclude that an effective personnel system is the first route to reducing corruption, because if you can get away with missing work, coming in drunk, making sexist remarks, doing undesirable things, those people are the most likely to do things that are worse.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s look more broadly at UN reform beyond the management. For example, the Security Council, which was really set up largely according to the great power structures in 1945. Many people say it’s completely obsolete.

 

RODERICK HILLS: Well, you’ve got to deal with the ... (inaudible) possible. The right to veto is a very serious problem. It paralyzes the United Nations a lot. There is an inferiority complex in the General Assembly, which I’m sure causes some of the problems. The action, if you will, is not in the General Assembly, the action is in the Security Council. So, it’s easy to see the problem. It’s a little harder to find a solution. The question is, can you create a tradition that would not allow the use of veto power on some matters. For example, genocide. For example, weapons of mass destruction. You’re never going to get Russia and the United States, China, France, anyone, to give up the right to veto problems that affect it.

 

But if you get them to give up the right to veto the problems that affect some other countries like Sudan -- if China didn’t have the right to veto a relief effort in Darfur, you’d have a better United Nations. So, that is the kind of thing that we’ve bandied about.

 

MARK SOMMER: The task force you were part of, how did they feel about the future of the United Nations? Is it still an organization that the United States needs to invest in?

 

RODERICK HILLS: The task force was unanimous in believing that it’s in the absolute best interest of the United States to preserve the United Nations. Our absolute strong support -- in fact, the title, it’s called “American Interest and United Nations Reform” -- the bedrock of our effort was to say, “This is a terribly important institution and we must have it. We absolutely must have it.”

 

Now, we also observed that you can’t let the inefficiency of the UN prevent you from doing something you think is necessary for your country’s best interest. I’m certainly not defending what we’ve done recently in this country, but you have to maintain the point of view, you’re going to act in your country’s self-interest, if those self-interests are sufficiently important. And the more ineffective the United Nations is, the more countries are going to act in their own self-interest and not through the United Nations.

 

So, the simple answer to your question is, I think our task force would say that the United Nations, as it is, is something we unanimously think we should support.

 

MARK SOMMER: Roderick Hills, who served on a congressionally mandated commission studying UN management reform.

 

Even the UN’s most loyal supporters admit that it’s not as efficient or as effective as it could or should be. But efforts to reform it, to achieve greater managerial efficiency, have been stymied as much by those who wish to place it in the dustbin of history as by those within its bureaucracy who resist essential changes. Demands emanating largely from the United States government that the UN be held to corporate managerial standards are perhaps laudable in principle, but they should equally well be applied to federal agencies like the Department of Defense in which literally trillions of dollars have been spent without any trackable accounting for them.

 

And in the wake of Enron and WorldCom, the American corporate sector offers few exemplary models for efficiency, accountability or transparency. Corruption in the UN’s oil-for-food program reveals significant deficiencies and an antiquated accounting system, but it’s scale, like the UN budget itself, is dwarfed by the waste, fraud and abuse that riddle many national bureaucracies. Neither is excusable, nor acceptable.

 

Then there’s the matter of representation. As currently structured, the UN is still frozen in the power dynamics of half a century ago. New regional superpowers from Brazil to India to Japan have emerged in recent years, but are still largely unrepresented in the UN Security Council, where the crucial decisions are made. Yet the incumbent nations are the very ones on whose votes any change would depend. And why would they voluntarily yield their primacy of place?

 

Even with its manifest inefficiencies, the UN remains one of the world’s last bargains, not only because it provides services like peacekeeping with a higher rate of success and at a fraction of the cost of national armies, but because it takes on tasks that no nation or group of nations cares or dares to tackle. Indeed, it’s too often treated like a custodial service to clean up messes created by others and then denied the resources to do the job right.

 

Providing daily for the needs of millions of refugees from war and natural disasters, dealing with epidemics, hunger, and poverty, the UN also sets protocols for communications, postal services, air and sea traffic, and meteorology, and convenes international conferences setting priorities for action on a host of global challenges. All this for about $2 a year a person? Such a deal. Don’t you wish your federal taxes were so minimal and were devoted to such laudable purposes?

 

I’m Mark Sommer. And this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

__: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click on the listener action link at aworldofpossibilities.com. This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Brittany Danish and Tammy Ray Scott, with administrative support from Allie Cook and Susan Seminov. Production engineer is Chuck Johnson. Support for this program is provided by the Ploughshares Fund. Music is courtesy of Let’s Music Recordings, Putamayo World Music, Electra, Aware Records, and Charlie Records. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.

 

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