The punditocracy has been abuzz this week with talk of whether or how NATO might survive its current split. From Ralph Peters dropping doozies like:
As for complaints that German troops won’t fight: Come on – isn’t the world better off with Germans holding beer mugs instead of rifles? Been there, done that, got the Holocaust…
All while otherwise accusing Vladimir Putin and Sergey Ivanov of being unreconstructed Stalinists, to William Pfaff blaming it all on America:
NATO was signed up by Washington to help in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, not to fight a second war there, this time to keep the ethnically Pathan Taliban forces from reclaiming their own country, which, as they see it, is under foreign, Western, infidel occupation…They see no threat to them, or to NATO Europe, from Afghanistan, whereas Americans believe in a global terrorist threat.
So. As usual, Peters is so wildly over the top, any useful point he might make, like about Russia’s torture prisons, is buried underneath all the hyperbole—and he didn’t even make that point, choosing instead to snipe about how the USSR is back in business. Pfaff seems to forget the very real fact that Afghanistan does pose a global terrorist threat, as does Western Pakistan: that is, after all, where the terrorist who destroyed the World Trade Center came from. It is the heart of Al-Qaeda’s propaganda efforts which have inspired countless copycat efforts, from the two bombings in Bali to the train bombings in London and Madrid.
More sober analysis of what NATO is dealing with comes from Sam Brannen of CSIS:
The crisis in NATO is generated not by disagreement among policy elites about the importance of success in Afghanistan and necessary commitments to that end. The real crisis in the alliance is the result of voters in member countries, a majority of whom do not regard success in Afghanistan as very important, and believe it is unachievable alongside an overly militaristic American strategy. Without doubt, American unilateralism and rhetoric in the run up to the Iraq war did lasting damage to allied perceptions and has hindered commitments in Afghanistan. To their political advantage, opposition parties in Europe have staked out their positions in a stance against all things Afghanistan and American, attacking the slow results in the country and the bad news of the past year, which is now being reported on the front-page as the global media refocuses from a somewhat improved situation in Iraq. This is all a bit misleading to the public — a bad day in Afghanistan still looks like a fairly good day in Iraq…
It will be a long road ahead with many long days for diplomats and politicians to keep intact the NATO ISAF mission to Afghanistan. None of Afghanistan’s problems have short-term solutions; but there is hope. Five million Afghans — 2 million of them girls — are today in school. This is the largest number of students in the history of Afghanistan and the first time the education system has functioned uninterrupted in most of the country for decades. Afghanistan’s reconstruction will really be complete when these children graduate high school and college — 10 to 15 years from today.
Indeed, many European electorates seem to be confusing their disagreement with Iraq and the necessity of success in Afghanistan. Bad idea. But there are some minor successes on hand: assuming the news can be believed (remembering the near-fable status of most news coming from the Durand Line), Mansour Dadullah appears to have been captured in Baluchistan. Last August he was reported killed, so it remains to be seen if he was really nabbed by the Pakistanis… just as it remains to be seen if they hand him over or if he just disappears into the system.
The firefight in which he was captured seems to bear little resemblance to the nasty fighting up in Swat, which is north of North Waziristan. There, the battle was against Tehrik-i-Taliban, a group now associated with terror cells in Spain.
Of course, echoing previous attempts at a cease-fire in FATA, there is a pause—which conveniently allows Baitullah Mehsud to regroup and restart the fighting at a time and place of his choosing—just like what happened in 2004, and in 2006, and 2007. The Pakistanis never seem to learn. Then again, they may not want to—after all, too many in the upper echelons of leadership still see their primary threat as Indian Kashmir, rather than a restless and violent tribal area to the west.
What might all of this mean to NATO? It is difficult to say with anything approaching certainty: clearly, evens in Afghanistan and Pakistan have an enormous impact on how secure and stable Europe remains—that much is obvious from the infiltration of Pakistani terror cells and al-Qaeda’s relentless Internet propaganda machine. But for some reason, Europeans themselves don’t seem to realize it, at least in any appreciable numbers.
A big part of this can be tied back to the strategic disaster of Iraq (another country rife with tactical victories for the U.S. that is nevertheless a net-negative in terms of overall strategy). Many Europeans are deeply angry over the invasion and occupation of Iraq, just as many Americans are. But it probably isn’t fair to assign “blame” (for lack of a better word) to such a narrow cause: Europeans tend to less interventionist, at least with their own troops, than Americans. They also tend to be the opposite of Americans—while U.S. policymakers seem to default to military action when diplomacy is no longer easy, European policymakers seem to cling to political processes even more tightly. Both positions are extreme, and it is only by having the two work together, in concert, that a pragmatic, and effective, middle ground might be sought.
So the challenge of NATO is resolving these two competing poles. In that, it is in no more danger of splitting than when Charles de Gaulle essentially pulled France from much of the organization in 1959. But the fundamental differences between the countries must be resolved, soon, or else Afghanistan—NATO’s one and only expeditionary operation—will suffer the direst consequences.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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