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Gazeta.KZ, Kazakhstan
19.11.2007
By Gazeta.kz, exclusively for Gazeta.kz
The United States and its European allies have fundamentally
different ideas about what is needed to build a functioning country
in Afghanistan - a rift that could have possibly fatal consequences
for NATO, according to an international panel of experts, writes
Joshua Kucera for Eurasianet.org.
A former White House official accused some European political leaders
of not doing enough to prepare their voters for the possibility of
violence and casualties in Afghanistan. That failure has led to
greatly varying acceptance of risk among NATO member states with
troop contingents in Afghanistan. That fact, in turn, threatens to
scuttle the entire mission, said the former official, Kori Schake.
"What we are looking at in Afghanistan is - and I mean this with real
foreboding - a much more dangerous international order if the lessons
that people take away from Afghanistan is that the world's wealthiest
countries, most capable militaries, with the support of the United
Nations and the NATO alliance, can not piece together a successful
international intervention," Schake said during a November 13 panel
discussion, titled NATO's Big Mission: The United States, Europe and
the Challenge of Afghanistan. The Brookings Institution in
Washington, DC, sponsored the discussion.
"What does that tell the rebels in Darfur, what does that tell the
bad guys in Somalia, what does that tell people who want Kosovo to go
up in flames this fall? It tells them that there's not an
international community, that you can peel off the countries where
the political leadership didn't make a good enough case to their
public that what German soldiers are doing in Afghanistan is
important to Germany," Schake added.
A German security expert, Peter Rudolf, a researcher at the Berlin-
based Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (German Institute for
International and Security Affairs), acknowledged that public opinion
in Germany is trending against involvement in Afghanistan. While
there is still support for civil reconstruction work, only 4 percent
of the German public favors an increase in military involvement in
Afghanistan, Rudolf said.
"Over the last two years, the change in the mission from
stabilization to counterinsurgency has been a real challenge for
policymakers and for the German public," he said. "There might be
experts in the foreign policy community who argue that in
Afghanistan, the future of NATO is at stake, that there are vital
security interests, but this argument does not resonate with German
politicians or the German public. Hardly any German politician would
speak out in favor of doing more militarily in Afghanistan."
The effect of that has been to create, in essence, two sorts of
missions in Afghanistan, Schake said - one, in the south, where there
is much more combat, and one in the rest of the country, made up of
European allies who are less willing to accept risk.
"The reason there are two NATO chains of command is because most NATO
countries were not willing to sign up for the kinds of fighting that
the British, Canadians, Dutch, Danish and Americans are doing in the
south," she said. "And the United States, to be honest, was not sure
we wanted them to, both for the practical reason that the nuts and
bolts of fighting in this type of environment are extraordinarily
difficult."
"I'll give you a nightmare scenario," she added. "If I were a Taliban
bad guy, I would set 150 snipers up outside one of the German or
Swedish [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] and shoot everybody who
came through the front gate. Because I bet you could precipitate a
German withdrawal out of Afghanistan, and a wider European withdrawal
out of Afghanistan, for the same reason that you saw the US beat a
hasty retreat out of Somalia: namely, that the political leadership
has not prepared the public for the fact that their soldiers are
involved not merely in reconstruction they're fighting there."
Having two different chains of command - one, the International
Security Assistance Force, controlled by NATO, and the other,
Operation Enduring Freedom, under the US Central Command - is bad
operational practice, asserted James Dobbins, a former top State
Department official in the Clinton administration.
ISAF and OEF are "both operating in the same areas and this is an
invitation to fratricide, failure to render timely support and other
difficulties that arise from the lack of a unity of command. And the
confusion is even worse than that because the NATO command is under
the command of an American four-star general in Belgium, and the US
command is responding to orders and authority from an American four-
star general in Tampa, and so you have a command chain in Afghanistan
that doesn't meet until you reach the president of the United States.
This is not the most efficient way of running a war," Dobbins said.
The experience of Afghanistan has shown that NATO may not be able to
carry out such ambitious projects, given the apparent lack of a
common strategy for counterinsurgency and nation building and
willingness to use force. In addition, he said, "NATO is ill-equipped
to address the wider regional strategic context of Afghanistan.
Everyone knows that Pakistan is the key to any solution in
Afghanistan, but Pakistan up to now has not been part of the
transatlantic agenda. Hopefully this will change, but NATO as an
institution is not equipped as an institution to address the wider
strategic issues."
"I think the mission has already exposed the flaws, the limits of
NATO as a global counterinsurgency alliance. I think less ambition
may be necessary in the future to preserve NATO as a still-valuable
security institution," he concluded.
Editor's Note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance
writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the
Caucasus and the Middle East. |
