NATO summit throws up a
surprise By M K Bhadrakumar
The summit of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization at Riga last Tuesday and Wednesday
came to be narrowly focused on the alliance's
operations in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan is only
one of the major operations that NATO is currently
undertaking; others are Kosovo, Darfur, Iraq and
the Mediterranean.
The conclave was a
departure from tradition insofar as NATO summits
in recent years invariably set ambitious agendas.
The 1999 Washington summit marking the 50th
anniversary of the
alliance exceeded ceremonial
trappings. The administration of US president Bill
Clinton, though lame-duck and discredited by
scandalous escapades, nonetheless ensured that the
summit made a key decision to intervene in Kosovo.
Besides, the Clinton administration succeeded in
making NATO's eastward expansion in the post-Cold
War era irreversible no matter Russia's
objections, by having the Czech Republic, Hungary
and Poland join the alliance on the eve of the
summit and having their leadership take part in
the gala gathering in Washington.
Again,
NATO's 2002 Prague summit invited seven countries
to begin accession talks, heralding the
biggest-ever expansion of the alliance. The summit
also made the historic decision on the NATO Rapid
Force. Afghanistan figured as a major theater of
NATO's operations in the alliance's 2004 summit at
Istanbul. The summit brimmed with optimism as NATO
was raring to go in, setting right the vexed,
disjointed Afghan problem.
In a grand
gesture to the US of letting bygones be bygones,
the summit also agreed to help Iraq's interim
government train its security forces. Furthermore,
the so-called Istanbul Cooperation Initiative
aimed to forge closer cooperation between NATO and
the countries of the Middle East, signaling the
alliance's determination to wade ashore in the
Levant and to engage the strategically vital
oil-rich region, while at the same time steadily
strengthening its new-found ties with Israel.
Given this tradition of NATO summitry,
expectations were naturally raised when, speaking
at a May 25 National Press Club address in
Washington, DC, General James Jones, supreme
commander of the NATO forces, asserted that 2006
would be a "pivotal year" for the trans-Atlantic
alliance, perhaps more so than in any of the
previous several years.
Jones went on to
say that the focus of the alliance was shifting
"180 degrees in terms of its military capabilities
and culture", as from a "reactive, defensive,
static alliance", it was on its way to becoming
"more flexible, more proactive", poised to take on
missions to abort future conflicts instead of
merely reacting to conflicts that were already
born. The general was optimistic that NATO's "best
days are very possibly in its future".
The
international community keenly noted Jones'
speech, as Washington invariably set the agenda of
NATO summits, and a serving four-star US general
was speaking. Washington's choice of Riga as the
venue of the 2006 summit itself was imbued with a
great deal of political symbolism - the first-ever
NATO summit to be held on the soil of the former
Soviet Union.
Almost at the same time as
Jones spoke, NATO spokesmen and senior US
officials were fanning out with statements
heralding a brave new world in which NATO would
patrol the Black Sea and would seek the withdrawal
of Russian peacekeeping forces in Moldova. They
said, disregarding the presence of the Russian
naval fleet in Sevastopol, that NATO would welcome
Ukraine's accession. They boasted that NATO would
lower the bar of efficiency to facilitate
Georgia's accession negotiations, and would
thereafter proceed to settle decisively the
"frozen conflicts" in the Caucasus and Eurasia.
These spokesmen taunted Moscow and Beijing
that NATO would offer new partnership formats to
Central Asian countries and to the far-flung
countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Japan, South
Korea, Australia and New Zealand), and even to
democratic India. Some envisaged for NATO a role
in the Middle East and in safeguarding the West
from "geopolitical blackmail" by its energy
suppliers.
Indeed, such was the hype that
NATO's Riga summit was keenly awaited as a
transformational event turning the Cold War
alliance into a veritable 21st-century global
political and military organization that would sit
in arbitration over the emergent world order, no
matter the role of the United Nations.
The
Riga summit, therefore, turned out to be a huge
surprise as the debate spawned over the past two
to three months about NATO's possible entrapment
in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan dominated.
This debate grew louder in no time and rudely
elbowed out other big issues from the center stage
at Riga. But on Afghanistan, too, there was no
breakthrough and the summit had to settle for a
messy and inconclusive compromise that can only
lead to conflicted meanings in the coming months.
The alliance as a whole was plainly
unwilling to provide the 2,200 extra troops that
US and British commanders said they badly needed
in fighting the resurgent Taliban. The result is
that the US, British, Canadian and Dutch
contingents have been left to continue to bear the
brunt of the fighting in the southern and
southeastern regions of Afghanistan, while others
have promised to send reinforcements in
"emergencies".
French President Jacques
Chirac has since said his country would consider
any such emergency needs on a "case-by-case"
basis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel left vague
as to what role any German reinforcements would
play in combat operations as well as under what
conditions German troops would respond to
"emergencies".
Turkey and Italy, too,
firmly rejected the US plea for additional troop
deployments in Afghanistan. Clearly, with major
NATO powers hedging, the Riga summit has virtually
admitted that troop strength is not the main issue
in Afghanistan.
Russian deputy Prime
Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov gently
rubbed in this paradigm shift in an interview with
Der Spiegel on the eve of the summit. Ivanov said:
"The current situation in Afghanistan is indeed
very reminiscent of the late 1980s when the Soviet
Union was involved there. It is painful to talk
about it, but even with its 110,000 elite
soldiers, the Soviet Union never managed to gain
control over the entire Afghan territory.
"I am firmly convinced that the security
situation will never improve until you are able to
very effectively monitor the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan ... [But] it's also
difficult because Pakistan is a US ally, and
because, at the same time, it is not an entirely
democratic state, and is a state that possesses
weapons of mass destruction and is even involved
in proliferation - to North Korea, for example."
Curiously, it is from the perspective of
Ivanov's "undiplomatic" take on the nexus between
US President George W Bush and President General
Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in the Afghan war
that the outcome of the Riga summit can be
assessed with a degree of cautious optimism.
Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that
from Riga, NATO's assistant secretary general for
political affairs, Martin Erdmann, headed for
Moscow to brief the Russian side about the outcome
of the summit, and to "candidly discuss certain
problem aspects in our relations and the prospects
of cooperation, particularly in the interest of
responding to common security challenges and
threats" (to quote the Russian Foreign Ministry).
Moscow will closely study a proposal made
by Chirac about NATO initiating the formation of a
"contact group" - an idea, if it is allowed to
take shape, that may form the legacy of the Riga
summit. Moscow would regard it extremely
significant that Chirac chose to go public even
before Riga formally commenced. In an article
published in the European press on November 28,
Chirac wrote, "The establishment of a contact
group encompassing the countries in the region,
the principal countries involved and international
organizations along the lines of what exists in
Kosovo is, I think, necessary to give our forces
the means to succeed in their mission ... and
refocus the alliance on military operations".
Chirac embedded his proposal within a
vision of what NATO's role ought to be in the
international system. He wrote about the need of
NATO developing a "trusting relationship" with
Russia and he stressed the need to avoid the
"creation of new fault lines". Chirac insisted
that the United Nations should remain the "sole
political forum with universal authority". And he
repeatedly called attention to the "new reality of
Europe", which, he said, necessitated a "more
substantive strategic and political dialogue
between the US and EU".
Chirac summed up
that the European Union's voice should be heard
within NATO, with the EU members "consulting
between themselves within the alliance" in an
institutional format so that NATO transformed as a
"mutually supportive alliance in which North
American and European allies will be able to ...
work side by side", upholding the "principles and
objectives of the UN Charter".
Chirac set
in motion an altogether new political process over
Afghanistan, which took Washington by surprise.
The Bush administration would rather have the
clock back, but Chirac was not alone in Europe in
harboring such thoughts. However, the main
difficulty for the US at Riga was that Bush's
entreaties (faithfully supported by British Prime
Minister Tony Blair) - that by augmenting its
muscle power in Helmand and Kandahar provinces by
2,200 soldiers, NATO could win the Afghan war -
did not carry conviction with the hard-boiled
statesmen from Old Europe. The point is that the
colossal US defeat in Iraq has begun impacting on
NATO. Iraq was the ghost at NATO's banquet table
at Riga. The gathering realized that it was time
to prepare for the defeat of the US in Iraq, with
all its unpredictable consequences.
To be
sure, Chirac's proposal on an Afghan "contact
group" reflects the growing disquiet about the
very same Anglo-Saxon caucus that has been in the
driving seat in Baghdad choreographing NATO's
Afghan war. During last week's debate in the UN
General Assembly in New York on Afghanistan, the
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
delivered joint statements testifying to their
consolidated position.
CSTO and SCO have
for long sought NATO's cooperation in Afghanistan.
But Washington remained obdurate that NATO
shouldn't enhance the credibility of CSTO and SCO
as security organizations. Chirac's ingenuity lies
in that he assesses that neither Russia nor China
can afford to wish for NATO's defeat in
Afghanistan. NATO's defeat would usher in an
entirely new national-security situation for those
two countries on their southern tiers. Chirac's
proposal invites Moscow and Beijing to talk about
NATO and an international system in which their
concerns and interests can be addressed.
That is to say, while it is too early to
envisage Afghanistan as a prototype of a global
collective-security model, Chirac, sensing what
Russian analysts have lately begun calling the
"game without rules" ("multipolar chaos"), is in
effect suggesting that a serious collective effort
involving NATO, CSTO and SCO is entirely
conceivable.
China would draw satisfaction
over the outcome of NATO's Riga summit. The US
proposal for NATO to have partnerships with the
Asia-Pacific region is of direct concern to China.
In the event, the Riga summit neatly sidestepped
the proposal. NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer in an interview with the People's Daily
calmed Chinese sensitivities that "NATO is not
pushing into Asia or the Pacific region". He
offered that NATO could as well have "closer
contacts" with China and in "working together"
with China. Scheffer stressed there needn't be any
contradiction between China's involvement in SCO
and a partnership with NATO.
In
comparison with Beijing's reticence, Russian
observers have been quite explicit. Moscow will
remain wary that the Riga summit notwithstanding,
Washington has far from abandoned its agenda of
NATO's membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Moscow
will also closely monitor US intentions to deploy
anti-ballistic-missile components in Central
Europe. The Kremlin has let it be known that any
US deployment of a missile defense system will be
the "red line", and that if a point of no return
is reached, cooperation within the framework of
the Russia-NATO Council may be called into
question. Russian commentators hinted that
Moscow's "asymmetric" response might include
denial of permission to NATO aircraft overflying
Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan.
At
any rate, soon after returning to Brussels from
his consultations in Moscow on October 26,
Scheffer announced that admitting new members was
not a priority for NATO at the Riga summit, and
that it would remain suspended until 2008. For the
present, Moscow has reason to feel satisfied,
though. As Andrei Kokoshin, an influential Kremlin
politician who heads the Duma's committee on
Commonwealth of Independent States countries,
wrote even as the Riga summit was winding up, "It
seems that the Russian position, expressed in no
uncertain terms, is beginning to find
understanding among some Western politicians,
particularly in the countries of Old Europe."
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
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