NATO’s Last Stand

Article by William Drozdiak

Even if most Germans are not convinced of it, their security is at stake on the Hindu Kush, too. Germany can help the Americans at this critical juncture, with troops, police trainers, and development resources. Defeating enemies like the Taliban and Al Qaeda requires more than sheer military force. Nothing less than NATO’s viability is at stake.

President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan—in hope that this surge will reverse Taliban gains and allow an American withdrawal to commence in July 2010—looms as the boldest gamble of his presidency. The future cohesion of NATO and the viability of American leadership of the Atlantic alliance may hinge on whether the Afghanistan conflict can be turned around—even if the Western allies return home with something short of victory.

If Afghanistan looms as a fateful test of the alliance, perhaps no other Western nation after the United States has as much at stake as Germany. The German-American partnership still functions as the foundation of an expanded 28-member NATO—just as it did during the Cold War. Germany has approved up to 4,500 troops for deployment in Afghanistan—more than any other country after the United States and Britain—and is expected to play a key role in training Afghan police forces, which is now seen as one of the most crucial tasks facing the NATO mission there.

In addition, Germany and its European Union partners will be counted upon to provide much of the economic reconstruction and civilian aid that may determine the long-term success of Obama’s new strategy. The surge of military forces may be designed to deal a crippling blow to the Taliban and help the Afghan government take greater control, but the security and stability of the country can only be assured if and when the Afghan people see tangible improvement in their living standards.

The new counterinsurgency doctrine pursued by Gen. Stanley McChrystal places great emphasis on the civilian development program, something that Germany and other European countries have been urging for some time. And while Germany still gets criticized by other allies for imposing strict conditions on how and where its forces may be deployed, the Obama administration has come to recognize that if Chancellor Merkel lacks the political will for greater military engagement, Germany must be called upon to assume a greater share of responsibility for the civilian development effort. For six decades, no country has benefited more than Germany from NATO, which kept the peace along the Cold War frontier and then ensured the peaceful unification of the German nation. For this reason alone, the United States and many European allies believe Germany owes a debt of history to do all it can to help the NATO alliance surmount its most difficult challenge since the collapse of the Soviet empire 20 years ago.

Not Another Vietnam

Whether that contribution comes in terms of troops or economic reconstruction aid, Germany will be expected to play a leading role in ensuring the success of the NATO mission—or accept a large measure of responsibility if it fails.  Chancellor Merkel and Defense Minister zu Guttenberg face a daunting task in persuading the German people that, contrary to what many of them may believe, Afghanistan remains crucial to Germany’s own security. While the Hindu Kush may seem far beyond the defense horizons of their homeland, Germans must come to realize that the long-term health and viability of NATO will depend to a great extent on the outcome in Afghanistan and thus will have a direct bearing on their own future security. For too long, German critics have sought to conflate Afghanistan with Iraq, or even Vietnam, as dangerous and foolhardy conflicts in which the United States seeks to drag its allies. But that analogy is based on a false reading of history.

During his speech to U.S. cadets at West Point on December 2, Obama disavowed the analogy of the Vietnam War that damaged America’s image in the world and brought down another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. Obama stressed that unlike the forlorn mission carried out by American forces  four decades ago, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan are backed by 43 other nations determined to prevent the Taliban from restoring their brand of Islamic barbarism in tandem with Al Qaeda. While acknowledging that Hamid Karzai’s presidency in Afghanistan was tainted by corruption and voter fraud, Obama insisted that unlike the Vietnamese communist guerrillas, the Taliban attracted little support among the local population and were generally loathed for their harsh oppression. And finally, Obama contended that America’s presence in Afghanistan was not impelled by a missionary complex to occupy foreign lands or stay longer than necessary. The United States merely sought to prevent those responsible for attacking its homeland in 2001 from regaining a sanctuary.

Instead of Vietnam, Obama’s new approach in Afghanistan seemed to echo a strategy shift in a more recent conflict—the surge in Iraq carried out by  George W. Bush, that offered money, goodwill, and reconciliation with regional warlords and eventually helped quell much of the violence between the country’s warring Sunni and Shia populations. General David Petraeus, who orchestrated the surge in Iraq, will seek to duplicate that success by working with General McChrystal, the head of U.S. and NATO forces on the ground in Afghanistan, and Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard  Holbrooke. But a key aspect that enabled the surge to work in Iraq was the close cooperation between the U.S. military operation and civilian development efforts. In Afghanistan, civilian efforts to root out corruption, improve living standards, control opium production, and stimulate the local economy have been confused and ineffectual, allowing the Taliban to gain enough momentum that—if not stopped over the course of the next year—could lead to the failure of the international stabilization force’s mission.

In trying to mount an effective counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, Obama now faces a situation vastly more complicated than in Vietnam or Iraq. The ability of United States and European forces to withdraw successfully from Afghanistan will depend in large measure on the ability of the Afghan national army and local police forces to ensure security on their own. Yet today the Afghan police forces are in chaotic disarray and viewed as prone to bribes and treachery. Building up an effective Afghan police force is seen as perhaps the most Herculean challenge facing Western forces.

Germany’s Unfulfilled Promise

Germany, in particular, bears a special responsibility to bolster the training of the Afghan police, having fallen short in this mission in the earlier stages of the conflict. German police trainers were supposed to help prepare the Afghan police but failed to make much headway since the German state governments did not round up enough volunteers to do the job. Europe has long taken pride in the quality and training of local order police, like French gendarmes or Italian carabinieri, but the European Union has not lived up to its promise of sending sufficient numbers of police trainers to fulfill their mission in Afghanistan.

The Afghan police are not the only problem. In a country with a strong tradition of regional warlords, the Afghan national army is deemed far too small to cope with the insurgency on its own. By the most optimistic estimates, the national army is only likely to grow from its current level of about 90,000 to 134,000 troops by late next year—well short of Gen. McChrystal’s requirement of 240,000 troops. Even this higher number of forces could prove hopelessly ineffective given Afghanistan’s large and dispersed population, inhospitable terrain, and multiple security challenges in a fragmented country dominated by ethnic clans and warlords.  

Afghanistan’s internal problems are rendered even more complex by the fact that the real target of the American war effort—Al Qaeda’s ring of leaders—now enjoy refuge across the border in Pakistan’s lawless northwest provinces. While the United States has poured more than $10 billion into Pakistan in an effort to sustain a military alliance that is central to the fight against Al Qaeda, elements within Pakistan’s powerful intelligence network are believed to maintain close ties with the Taliban as well as with Al Qaeda. While the Pakistani Taliban’s own terrorist bombings and military assaults in the Swat Valley have awakened much of the country to the threat of Islamic attacks within their own territory, there is strong aversion within the military as well as the public at large to giving the United States a freer hand in launching attacks inside Pakistani territory. As a result, the United States finds itself mired in Afghanistan yet unable to effectively engage its main enemy across the border.

To add to the confusion, the United States in some ways seems at war with its own ally Pakistan, which continues to practice a ìdouble gameî of accepting American assistance while parts of its security apparatus still support the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies—all in the name of maintaining a ìdeep stateî bulwark again Pakistan’s most feared enemy, India. And persuading Pakistan to cooperate with Obama’s new strategy may prove even more difficult since many see the United States as preparing to pull out of the region (as happened in the past)—leaving Pakistan with anarchy on its Afghan border and a hostile India on the other. With both Pakistan and India now armed with nuclear weapons and facing each other across disputed Kashmir, the nightmare scenario for many experts would be to see the Afghan conflict metastasize into a conflagration that engulfs the entire region of Southwest Asia.

The decision to set the start for withdrawing American forces just eighteen months after the surge will begin strikes some military experts as remarkably short since it may take several months just to get the full contingent of 30,000 American troops—plus another 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers from European nations and other allies—deployed inside Afghanistan. Yet for Obama, an exit date became a political requirement to prevent his own party ranks from splintering at a time when public support for the war has dropped below 50 percent.-

Obama will now be judged on whether his gamble pays off. At stake may also be Europe’s future support for U.S. leadership of the Atlantic alliance. A new generation of European politicians openly question whether their continent’s security interests are truly worth the risk of linking their destiny to Washington in what strikes some as another misbegotten American adventure  so close on the heels of the debacle in Iraq. Following the disappearance of the military threat of a Soviet-led invasion, the alliance mantra of the last decade decreed NATO had to ìgo out of area or out of businessî if it hoped to survive as a 21st century security partnership.

Now, as NATO’s new secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, leads a wide-ranging review ahead of next year’s summit of NATO leaders in Lisbon to forge a modern strategic concept, the fate of the United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan could revive fresh calls to curtail NATO’s security horizon and bring its soldiers closer to home. Thus, Obama now faces political as well as military tests in Afghanistan—he must convince the American people as well as the European allies that the surge will work and that the sacrifices in blood and treasure will produce tangible security gains that will safeguard our future. The message, as one of the president’s advisors put it, is ìthat we must do more now in order that we will be required to do less in the future.î Yet the potential costs seem enormous, with the armed forces already stretched to the breaking point.

The Blueprint

How will the new strategy work in practice? The blueprint calls for American and allied forces to concentrate on protecting major population centers so that economic reconstruction efforts can be accelerated free from Taliban harassment. Special trainers from the United States and Europe will strive to bolster the skill sets of fresh volunteers for Afghan army and police units so that in the years to come they will be equipped to take over from the NATO-led ISAF. Since this program foundered in the early years of the Karzai government, the new strategy will seek to reach out to tribal chieftains, clan leaders, and regional warlords to lure them into active armed opposition to the Taliban. By recruiting regional and other leaders to the cause of building a more stable Afghanistan, a key aim of the U.S. and NATO strategy will be to circumvent the corrupt and inefficient elements in Karzai’s government and give others a greater financial as well as security stake in making the surge a success.

In addition, it is hoped that partnering with tribal and clan leaders beyond the central government in Kabul will diminish their fears of hostile aliens and undermine the Taliban claim that the Americans and their allies are just another occupying force intent on colonizing the Afghan people. Once the local population centers are protected, the allied forces will also try to help local farmers improve their living standards by growing alternative crops to opium. Since Afghanistan now supplies an estimated 90 percent of the world’s heroin, finding more effective ways to control the spread of the poppy trade could also win support from neighboring countries such as Iran and Russia, which now suffer from the highest rates of heroin addiction in the world.

Regional diplomacy will also be an important factor in the new strategy in dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States and its NATO allies need to make Saudi Arabia, India, Iran, Russia, China, and Central Asia states aware that they, too, will suffer serious consequences if the surge in Afghanistan fails. The wide arc of instability stretching from the Middle East through Southwest Asia faces challenges on a number of fronts, from economic turmoil and political upheavals to demographic explosions and religious extremism.

In fighting the epicenter of global terrorism along the Afghan-Pakistan border, NATO allies—and the rest of the world—are discovering that the collapse of the Cold War order and the new threats of the 21st century require a broader definition of how to fulfill our security needs. Besides military firepower, we must learn how to restore and sustain stability in troubled regions through police training, agricultural support, and education. Nation-building and democracy promotion may be too much to expect and nobody believes Afghanistan and Pakistan will ever be transformed into Switzerland. But the lessons of history show that defeating an enemy like the Taliban or Al Qaeda will require more than sheer military force. The counterinsurgency methods being learned on the ground in Afghanistan serve as a testing ground for the NATO alliance. And the outcome will determine our capacity to accept the fact that in an era of globalization, the fate of distant, shattered nations like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Congo can affect the security of us all.

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