|
|
|
|
If Afghanistan is its test, NATO is failing
By John Feffer
Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
[1] is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and
ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the
smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics
have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any
sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the
transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.
Frankly, it should be.
The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its
current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance's most
significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last.
Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient
Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim.
For NATO, this year should have been a celebration, not a dirge. After
suffering a trans-Atlantic rift of epic proportions during the Bush years, the
alliance thrilled to the election of Barack Obama and his politics of
conciliation. The new American administration swore it would shift troops from
Iraq to Afghanistan to give NATO more of what it wanted to fight "the right
war".
United States Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
both promised to push the "reset button" on US-Russian relations, potentially
removing one of the greatest obstacles to NATO's health and well-being. And in
a final flourish for the alliance's diamond jubilee, France agreed to return to
the fold, reintegrating into NATO after 43 years of standoffishness.
But hold those celebrations. Afghanistan has an uncanny ability to spoil
anybody's best-laid plans. At the April 2009 NATO summit in Strasbourg, Obama
failed to get the troop reinforcements he wanted from his European allies. The
NATO powers, in any case, have attached so many strings and caveats to the
troops they are supplying - Germany has kept its soldiers away from the
conflict-ridden south, most contingents have complex rules limiting combat
operations, Canada will be pulling out in 2011 - that NATO's mission resembles
Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.
The real nail in NATO's coffin, however, has been its stunning lack of success
on the ground. The Taliban have, in fact, not only increased their hold over
large parts of southern Afghanistan, but spread north as well. Most
embarrassingly for NATO, a recent surge of alliance troops seems only to have
made the Taliban stronger. Nearly eight years of alternating destruction (air
bombardment, over 100,000 troops on the ground) and reconstruction (US$38
billion in economic assistance appropriated by the US Congress since 2001) have
all come up desperately short. A new counter-insurgency campaign doesn't look
any more promising. What was once billed as the most powerful military alliance
in history has been thwarted by an irregular set of militias and guerrilla
groups without the backing of a major power in one of the poorest countries on
Earth.
Worse yet, the Afghan operation has become a serious political liability for
many NATO members. European politicians fear the kind of electoral backlash
that in some measure ousted Britain's prime minister Tony Blair and Spain's
prime minister Jose Maria Aznar when the Iraq War went south. Despite
enthusiasm for President Obama, European public opinion is, by increasingly
large margins, in favor of reducing or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan (55%
of West Europeans and 69% of East Europeans according to a recent German
Marshall Fund poll). Mounting combat fatalities, a rising civilian casualty
count, and devastating snafus like the recent bombing of two fuel trucks stolen
by the Taliban in Kunduz province that killed many civilians have only
strengthened anti-war feeling.
Meanwhile, in the United States, both elite and public opinion is turning
against the war. With the American economy still reeling from recession, Obama
faces a guns-versus-butter dilemma that threatens to wreck his domestic agenda
as surely as the Vietnam War deep-sixed former president Lyndon B Johnson's
Great Society reforms of the 1960s. No surprise then that the president is
ambivalent about following his top general's request to send yet more US troops
to fight in what the press now calls "Obama's War".
Not so long ago, pundits were calling for a global NATO that would expand its
power and membership to include US partners in Asia and elsewhere. This hubris
has given way to despair and discord. Although the United States still holds
out hope for a NATO that focuses on global threats like terrorism and nuclear
proliferation, other alliance members would prefer to refocus on the
traditional mission of defending Europe. Add in disagreements between the
United States and its allies over how to approach the Afghan situation and NATO
begins to look more like a rugby scrum than a military alliance.
NATO officials are now scrambling to sort things out, in part by calling the
allies together to debate a new Afghan strategy before the year ends.
Meanwhile, NATO's secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen is preparing a new
"strategic concept" that would recode the organization's operating system for
the next summit in Lisbon in 2010.
It might be too little, too late. Some US officials are fed up with what they
consider European dilly-dallying about Afghanistan. "We have been very much
disappointed by the performance of many if not most of our allies," Robert E
Hunter, the US ambassador to NATO during the Bill Clinton administration,
recently said in testimony before the US Congress. "Indeed, there are elements
within the US government that are beginning to wonder about the continued value
of the NATO alliance."
As for the Europeans, they are building up their own independent military
capabilities - and will continue to do so whether or not NATO gets its act
together. The question is: will the Afghan War eventually push the United
States and Europe toward an amicable divorce? If so, the military campaign that
was to give NATO a new lease on life and turn it into a global military force
will have proven to be its ultimate undoing.
Near-death experiences
This is NATO's second brush with death since the collective security
organization was founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union. Although it
didn't fire a shot during its entire Cold War existence, NATO did fulfill its
mission: to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down,
according to the infamous catechism of Lord Ismay, NATO's first secretary
general.
When the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact vanished, NATO was suddenly an
organization without a mission. During the early 1990s, it cast around for new
portfolios - environmental work, humanitarian missions, anything. It needed a
raison d'etre fast. After all, the conflict-prevention mission of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe spoke more directly to the
post-Cold War temperament, and trans-atlantic publics were eager for their
peace dividends. NATO was seen as a pillar of the old world order at a time
when even president George H W Bush seemed prepared to accept something
radically new (though he settled, of course, for a rough approximation of the
status quo ante).
Tragedy proved NATO's salvation. The organization got a second wind when
Yugoslavia disintegrated into warring states and European governments did
little to prevent the bloodletting in the Balkans. The United States belatedly
turned to NATO in 1995 to fly a few bombing missions against Serbian forces
during the Bosnian conflict. Then, in 1999, responding to fears of Serbian
escalation in Kosovo, NATO engaged in its first-ever war.
During the 77-day conflict, the alliance conducted 38,000 air sorties against
Serbian targets that resulted in considerable "collateral" damage including
Serbian civilians, Albanian refugees, and, famously, the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade. Although no NATO personnel died during these combat operations, the
alliance acquired a reputation as the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
As if the Balkans weren't rationale enough, NATO also fell back on an old
directive: to keep Russia out. Eastern Europe's persistent fear of its former
overlord injected new purpose into the organization. Although Russia's leaders
believed that Washington had promised not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe,
the alliance did just that - and with gusto.
First, it established a kind of alliance halfway house in 1994 that it dubbed
the Partnership for Peace; then, in 1999, NATO accepted the Czech Republic,
Hungary and Poland as members; and five years after that, it expanded into the
former Soviet Union by absorbing the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and
Estonia along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Russia has, to put it mildly, been less than thrilled by NATO's eastward leap
and then creep. Meanwhile, wary of Russia's military campaigns in Chechnya,
Georgia, and Moldova as well as its energy power plays against countries to its
west, the Eastern Europeans have eagerly huddled beneath the NATO "umbrella".
As it happens, neither the Balkan tragedies nor the putative Russian threat
proved to be unalloyed blessings for the alliance. The Balkan campaigns created
enormous stress for its military command, and only the brevity of the air war
over Kosovo saved it from popular repudiation across Europe. The expansion of
NATO into Eastern Europe, meanwhile, made consensus within an already unwieldy
institution more difficult.
The once central focus of NATO - a commitment to the collective defense of any
member under attack - was, by now, looking ever less workable. Western European
countries appeared anything but enthusiastic about the idea of defending the
former Soviet bloc states against a prospective Russian attack. And despite
promises to station troops in Central and Eastern Europe, the United States
left its new NATO allies in the lurch.
"While they are loath to say it publicly, [Central and Eastern European]
leaders have told me that they are no longer certain NATO is capable of coming
to their rescue if there were a crisis involving Russia," wrote Ronald Asmus,
former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. "They
no longer believe that the political solidarity exists or that NATO's creaky
machinery would take the needed steps."
On the eve of September 11, 2001, a decade after the end of the Cold War, NATO
had become an overstretched alliance with an ill-defined but expansive mission
and a collection of member states increasingly at odds with each other. When
the United States prepared to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Bush
administration simply bypassed NATO, constructing its own ad hoc coalitions "of
the willing". (Only in 2003 did the George W Bush administration turn to NATO
to shoulder some of the local burden.) There could have been no greater vote of
no-confidence in the institution.
The Afghan test case
Since the end of the Cold War, the US troop presence in Europe has been
plummeting. From a Cold War peak of several hundred thousand, it had dropped to
around 44,000 by 2007. Reductions to the 30,000-level or even lower have been
discussed. With US forces stretched to the limit elsewhere in the world and US
strategists fixated on the energy heartlands of the Middle East and Central
Asia, the European theater of operations has been (and remains) the obvious
place for force reductions.
Continued 1
2
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2009 Asia Times
Online (Holdings), Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
