At next week's NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, history will be made when an American president, cowboy hat in hand, literally begs Europe for help in Afghanistan. For weeks, high-ranking US officials have traversed the "old" continent, beseeching its capitals for anything in lace-up boots and camouflage. Spare a tank, Germany? How about a mothballed helicopter, Italy? Say no, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has warned, and NATO will be "effectively destroyed," its members forever consigned to two tiers -- a fighting first and a lazy second.
Fortunately for everyone, Washington will get its reinforcements and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will survive another year. When the conference-room doors close, the pledges will flow in: a battalion here, a commando squad there. With the probable exception of France, however, the new forces are likely to come not from NATO's harassed second-stringers, but from members of its overworked, underappreciated "first" tier, most of whom already have troops at the war's hottest fronts.
Three of the countries in this group are already well known. For years, the British, Canadians and Dutch have held the line in Afghanistan's casualty-prone southern and eastern provinces. But they are not alone. Alongside them are some of NATO's newest members, the former communist countries of Central Europe. Though rarely mentioned in the media, these nations -- many small, few wealthy -- have often answered NATO calls for help when many larger Western militaries demurred. In the east of Afghanistan, Polish combat teams patrol the Al Qaeda-infested Pakistani border. In the south, Estonian light infantry, Romanian mountain troops and Lithuanian, Polish and Czech special forces have helped repulse Taliban offensives.
All told, about 3,000 Central European troops are in Afghanistan. Two new NATO members, Poland and Czech Republic, already have responded to the latest call for reinforcements. Answering Canadian threats to withdraw unless NATO sent 1,000 fresh troops, Warsaw pledged 400 soldiers -- its second increase in 18 months and a move that has done much to salve alliance wounds before the summit has even started.
This is a very different picture than is painted by some American commentators. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, military expert Andrew Bacevich complained that the new members had "diluted" NATO's military capabilities. Ted Galen Carpenter, a prominent Washington think-tanker, has called them "security consumers" that bring new burdens but "add next to nothing to America's already vast military power."
In fact, they're adding quite a lot -- the equivalent of a US brigade, to be exact. For every soldier from Krakow or Brno who searches a Taliban cave, a soldier from Kansas City or Biloxi doesn't have to. Together, the Central Europeans and other first-tier members may be the best hope for winning in Afghanistan and for extending the life of NATO.
But the first-tier countries are not a happy lot. As Canada's recent warnings made clear, their military contingents, outnumbered and exhausted, are near the breaking point. Making matters worse, officials from first-tier countries say, is US heavy-handedness, on and off the battlefield.
Two changes in US policy are needed to shore up their support.
- We must learn to criticize less. In the lead-up to Bucharest, American officials have publicly chided NATO allies for not fighting as well as US troops. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gates complained that, unlike American troops, the Europeans "don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations." First-tier allies took this personally. "Bloody outrageous," one British lawmaker said. The Dutch summoned the US ambassador to explain. "We should not be criticizing allies," the Polish foreign minister warned. Indeed we shouldn't. A bad idea in any war, it is astonishingly unwise when Washington is pleading for help from other countries.
- We must listen better. For months, first-tier allies have been lobbying Washington, with little success, to experiment with a new southern strategy that would rely less on air strikes in an effort to avoid Afghan civilian casualties. Incorporating these suggestions would do a lot to soothe intra-alliance tension.
Washington's new motto, at Bucharest and beyond, should be "less hectoring, more harkening." In its remaining time in office, the Bush administration should devote as much energy to keeping NATO's workhorses happy as it has to motivating NATO's laggards. Doing so could help ensure that Bush's successor inherits a first tier that is growing rather than shrinking. The only thing worse than a two-tiered alliance is an alliance with one universally disillusioned tier.
A. Wess Mitchell is Director of Research at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington, DC-based institute dedicated to the study of Central Europe.
This article was originally appeared here in the Los Angeles Times, and is published on the Atlantic Community by kind permission of the author.
Related materials form the Atlantic Community:
- Nikolas Kirril Gvosdev: Rapid Reaction: Moving NATO Forward
- D. Korski & M. Williams: The End of NATO and the Threat of US Unilateralism
- Marek Swierczynski: NATO at a Crossroad
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March 29, 2008
ilyas m mohsin, ppp, Platinum Contributor (253)
As per the reports from the war zone, the situation remains touch and go. The attacks on the ‘foreign troops’ are on the rise despite deadly use of missiles/ airpower etc by the US troops.
Mr. Mitchell’ 2 suggestions for our American friends are indisputably important for the combined forces to hold out/on. First, criticising forces from the EU countries is going to further demoralise them which would help the opposing side. Such soldiers are already
ambivalent about their mission. Some of them, like the British, may know the history of the Afghan people which underscores a hatred against ‘occupation’. Quite recently, they with help of US and Pakistan they forced the defunct- Soviet Union to withdraw from their country which resulted in the melt-down of the empire. Second, there should be ‘less Hectoring and more Harkening’.
The situation could have been much better if the pledges of aid made at Bonn Conference were honoured. If the economic situation has changed for the better, Karzai could have persuaded the Pakhtuns not to side with the ‘enemy’. As hunger insecurity stalks the land, the people hate the mess and their major livelihood is underwritten by production of drugs for the Western markets.
We must consider the cost of killing innocent civilians, either by mistake or of out of desperation, in Afghanistan. Shedding of blood the Afghans seldom forgive, so says the history. History proves that they do not give up easily.