SPEAKING
FREELY NATO's not so smart
initiative By Emanuele Scimia
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The North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) has launched a trust
fund project to secure or destroy hidden weapons
and munitions in Tajikistan. But impending
developments in Afghanistan, coupled with
budgetary constraints in Europe and
the United States, will curb
the Atlantic Alliance's projection in Central and
South Asia.
It is yet another small step
that could have a greater importance if only it
fell within a coherent strategic elaboration
concerning Central and South Asia. But, despite
official announcements, NATO seems to have other
priorities now.
On January 31, NATO signed
a memorandum of understatement with Tajikistan to
launch a trust fund project to help discover
unidentified caches of weapons and munitions
situated in the former Soviet republic. The stocks
of weaponry is a legacy of the 1992-1997 civil war
that tore apart the country immediately upon its
formal independence.
Under the agreement,
once detected weapons and munitions will be either
secure or destroy. According to NATO sources, the
abandoned warehouses hide aircraft bombs, heavy
machine guns, mortars rocket-propelled grenade
launchers, and shoulder-launched surface-to-air
missiles.
It is not the first deal of this
sort stricken by NATO with the government in
Dushanbe and among the project's main contributor
there are also two Atlantic Alliance non-member
countries: Japan and Switzerland.
Through
its trust fund projects, NATO gathers member and
non-member nations to pool resources to support
partner countries in the Euro-Atlantic region and
beyond with demilitarization and defense reform
initiatives. Over the years, NATO has also
promoted partnership trust funds across Eurasia
with Georgia, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and
Kazakhstan.
The main target of the latest
NATO trust fund project (which has a relatively
low cost, at as much as US$755,000) is to prevent
across-the-border smuggling of munitions, not
least of all along Tajikistan's southern border
with Afghanistan.
However, gloomy
perspectives about the transition of power
underway in the worn-torn southern neighbor, which
will result in the withdrawal of the NATO-led
forces of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) by the end of 2014, with the Afghan
troops and polices taking over the lead in
security operations all across the country, cast a
shadow on the effectiveness of such a project.
There are indeed widespread fears that after the
international forces' pull-out will be completed,
Afghanistan could descent again into a civil war,
with Taliban coming back to power. Ultimately, a
new Afghan civil strife, would have dim spillover
effects on Central Asia at large.
In his
public statement after the conclusion of the two
days of meetings of NATO Defense ministers on
February 3, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen pointed out that the 2014 deadline for
the international exit from Afghanistan was
confirmed. In addition, NATO Defense ministers
agreed on that "as the Afghan forces continue to
take the lead in more and more areas, the main
focus of our mission will also continue to evolve
- from combat to training, advice and assistance -
and how and when that happens is something we will
continue to discuss at the NATO summit in Chicago
in May 201".
NATO's specifications on the
timetable of the ISAF drawdown from the
Afghanistan was motivated by the surprising
declaration of the US Secretary of Defense Leon E.
Panetta on February 1 that US forces' task in
Afghanistan would shift from combat to support
operations by the mid-2013. In order to reassure
its NATO allies and the Afghan government of Hamid
Karzai, Washington clarified later that in the
run-up to the 2014 deadline its troops would
remain "combat-ready”.
Ahead of
Washington's sortie, during a visit in Paris of
Karzai on January 27, French President Nicholas
Sarkozy had remarked that French combat troops in
Afghanistan would bring forward their pull-out by
the end of 2013 instead of 2014.
There are
also budgetary problems in Europe and the United
States that could threat NATO's engagement for
"allied cooperation" in Central and South Asia.
For instance, at the Munich Conference on Security
on February 4, Panetta invoked the international
community's intervention - above all by NATO-led
ISAF countries - to help the United States fund
the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) after
the 2014. ANSF should rise to 352,000 personnel
before the end of ISAF mission and, according to
Washington's estimates, the cost of its training
and equipping is expected to be about $6 billion a
year.
In order to balance the impact of
cutbacks in defense spending regarding most of
NATO debt-ridden countries - especially its
European members - the Atlantic Alliance is
developing the new concept of "smart defense".
Based on the value of sharing the security burden
within the alliance, it should be a new way of
doing defense business, buying expensive military
equipment by pooling and sharing resources.
Such an approach, which would focus on
more multinational cooperation, is also at the
core of NATO trust fund mechanism. Yet, to date
smart defense is anything but a reality and budget
constraints that NATO countries are facing risk to
reduce in the short run their commitment to
international operations - both small-sized like
in Tajikistan and extensive like in Afghanistan.
Emanuele Scimia is a journalist
and geopolitical analyst based in Rome.
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