The increasingly worrisome situation in Afghanistan is of concern not only for what it portends about the future of that country but also the future of NATO which is in charge of pacifying that country. This is NATO’s first “out of area” mission, and by all accounts it is not going all that well. Tensions are rising among members of the alliance, as seen in the furor in Germany last week after Defense Secretary Bob Gates asked Germany to send its troops where the action is—down south. If NATO fails in Afghanistan, the alliance will not survive, at least not as a credible military force.
A useful new report (“Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership”) addresses this issue. It arrives under the imprimatur of five distinguished retired generals: Klaus Naumann, former chief of the German defense staff and former chairman of the NATO military committee; John Shalikashvili, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Lord Inge, former chief of the British defense staff; Jacque Lanxade, former chief of the French defense staff; and Henk van den Breemen, former chief of the Dutch defense staff. They write that NATO interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan have revealed “structural problems” that still have not been addressed, namely “the absence of a properly defined political objective, the absence of an integrated and allied strategy to achieve that objective, and the absence of capabilities to implement the strategy.”
“In addition,” they write, “nations have commonly imposed too many national caveats on use of their forces. There exists an unwillingness on the part of nations to transfer authority to the operational commander once in the theatre of operations. Finally, there is a tendency for nations not to resource operations effectively– in terms of both personnel and materiel – which serves to undermine the one factor that preoccupies the military circles of NATO nations today: sustainability.”
Coming from such NATO stalwarts, those are strong words indeed. To address these shortcomings, the retired brass propose some common-sense reforms. For starters, “NATO should abandon the consensus principle at all levels below the NATO Council, and introduce at the committee and working-group levels a majority voting rule. This would enable NATO to take quick decisions in crises, when minutes matter.” A second change they call for is that “only those nations that contribute to a mission – that is, military forces in a military operation – should have the right to a say in the process of the operations.” A third needed change is “the abolition of the system of national caveats, as far as this is possible.”
That last clause—“as far as this is possible”—hints at the political difficulties of doing what these worthies recommend. There continues to be dogged resistance among most NATO states to actually sending their troops into harm’s way, yet even those states that are not contributing much to the success of a mission want as much say in how it is conducted as those members that are risking their soldiers’ lives. Clearly this is an untenable state of affairs. The question is whether NATO will adopt the reforms suggested in this report or whether it will give up efforts to make itself relevant to the conflicts of the 21st century.
