NATO's road map to nowhere

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23447437-7583,00.html

"
NATO's road map to nowhere

Patrick Walters, National security editor | March 29, 2008

FOR the first time an Australian prime minister will sit around the
table next week with NATO leaders to discuss war strategy.
Kevin Rudd will make a lightning visit to the Romanian capital,
Bucharest, hoping to glean a clearer appreciation of NATO's long-term
plans for Afghanistan. On Friday NATO leaders will publicly avow a new
direction in Afghanistan, including a modest troop increase.

But their much anticipated new road map won't be enough to disguise
that NATO's war is going badly and there is little Australia can do
about it.

If Rudd is hoping the Bucharest summit will produce fundamental
changes in NATO's flawed strategy in Afghanistan, he will be
disappointed. The heads-of-government gathering comes when the
26-member NATO is deeply divided, not just over Afghanistan but over
the future expansion of the organisation and how it should evolve in
the face of a resurgent Russia. The bickering over member countries'
troop commitments to the Afghanistan conflict will be only a small
part of a much broader and potentially divisive agenda at Bucharest.

During the past two months Australia has campaigned loudly for a far
more integrated political and military strategy for NATO in
Afghanistan. We have also demanded a say in the organisation's war
planning. Our political leaders have called repeatedly for NATO
countries to commit more troops to the fight before Australia could
consider any increase in its modest 1000-strong military deployment to
Oruzgan province.

No doubt NATO's political leaders, including George W. Bush, will
listen politely to Australia when Rudd takes his seat at the table
next week. After all, we are the largest non-NATO military contributor
to the 43,000-strong NATO-led military force in Afghanistan. But our
closest NATO allies - the US, Britain and Canada - could be forgiven
for querying our credentials to speak with conviction on Afghanistan.

Unlike Australia, US and British forces have been fighting and dying
in significant numbers in Afghanistan for years. The Canadians alone
have lost more than 70 in combat operations around Kandahar.

By contrast, Australia's military commitment since late 2001 has been
notable chiefly for the political expediency of our off-on deployments
despite our stated willingness to stay the course. Our special forces
did extremely well when first deployed soon after the September 11
attacks and were then withdrawn a year later on the spurious notion
that the "job was done".

For several years we had only a single military adviser in the country
before our troop commitment was restarted in 2005 by John Howard, with
the special forces this time heading to Oruzgan province.

Once again the SAS performed admirably, only to withdrawn again after
13 months, ostensibly to "prepare for APEC". On the civil side it took
until August 2006 - nearly five years after the toppling of the
Taliban government in late 2001 - for Australia to set up an embassy
in Kabul, long after Canberra's key allies had done so.

Military analysts agree that NATO will have to at least double its
troop commitment to Afghanistan if it is to have any chance of
successfully prosecuting counterinsurgency operations against the
Taliban.

"Unless we change how we are doing business, NATO will lose
Afghanistan. We are just drifting," observes one Rudd government
insider. But there is no chance that NATO's new road map will produce
anything more than a marginal increase in the combat force necessary
to defeat the Taliban.

The more Australia demands a greater say in NATO planning for
Afghanistan, the greater the political and moral responsibility for us
to consider lifting our overall military and civil aid effort.

In Oruzgan province, where Australia's special forces and engineers
are based, there is a strong likelihood that we will be called on by
key NATO partners to make a stronger commitment in the next three
years, particularly if the Dutch withdraw their forces from 2010.

Yet there has been a subtle change in the Rudd Government's rhetoric
on Afghanistan in the four months since Labor won the election. We
don't hear much these days about Afghanistan being the "cockpit of the
war on terror" and "terror central". Nor do we hear much about the
need for an open-ended commitment to build a new Afghanistan. Only
months ago in Opposition Rudd was happy to state that Labor would look
at reasonable requests in the future for additional military help,
including the "hard-edged stuff". Now he has adopted a more careful,
cautious position.

Rudd and Minister of Defence Joel Fitzgibbon are seeking to
circumscribe the extent of Australia's future commitment to NATO's
intractable war in Afghanistan.

The Government's refrain is that our military is overstretched in its
far-flung deployments across the globe, notwithstanding the imminent
withdrawal of our 550-strong battle group from Iraq. It is as if the
Government has been warned by its best strategic advisers that the
NATO-led war is unwinnable and that it should firmly resist allowing
the defence force to be dragged further into Afghanistan's political
quicksand.

Rudd has been particularly critical of NATO's failure to devise an
integrated political-military strategy for Afghanistan. Here is what
the Prime Minister said 10 days ago: "What has staggered the
Government generally is that when we embarked on a recommitment of
force to Afghanistan some years ago there was no such common agreement
between us and the allies."

Rudd stressed that he was going to Bucharest to ensure that NATO had
embarked on a long-term strategy to secure success in Afghanistan,
which would be measured against fixed benchmarks. "I believe it is
only responsible to remain militarily engaged in a conflict ... if you
believe it is winnable," the PM added.

NATO's cumbersome bureaucracy makes it well-nigh impossible to
prosecute the war in Afghanistan even with Washington in the driving
seat. The organisation, designed to fight a conventional European war
against the Soviet Union, has no particular aptitude or appetite for
counterinsurgency operations in the unfriendly mountains and valleys
of Afghanistan. In Oruzgan, Australian forces are doing good work in
trying to stabilise one of Afghanistan's most remote and thinly
populated provinces.

Our military wins all the tactical battles but winning the war is
another matter. The Taliban keeps generating new leaders.

"They just have to outlast us. If you don't reconcile with the Pashtun
Taliban, you are going to get beaten. You have to bring them inside
the tent," observes one Australian military source.

Australian army personnel are training the new Afghan army and our
engineers are building command posts and forts to help defeat the
insurgency. But the 200-odd police suffer from poor morale, are
ill-trained and infiltrated by the Taliban. Creating a truly
combat-effective Afghan army presence able to take responsibility for
the province will take four to five years.

Australia could take over the running of Oruzgan province should the
Dutch quit in two years. We would have to lift troop numbers and
provide additional combat forces, including aircraft and artillery.

But the military operation is only a part of the Afghan story. Winning
over local tribal leaders requires a sustained and carefully targeted
program of civil aid for townsfolk and farmers. At present NATO has no
nationally co-ordinated civil aid program. The US and its close allies
are at loggerheads about how best to reduce farmers' dependence on
opium poppy crops.

Leaving aside the complexities generated by the continual cross-border
flow of insurgents from Pakistan, stabilising Afghanistan will be a
20-year assignment for the international community. It will require
extraordinary patience and resolution, more military and civilian aid,
careful involvement from the ground up to restore a shattered civil
society and consummate diplomatic skills.

So far NATO has manifestly failed in Afghanistan. It has neither the
political will to stay the course nor the military resources and
organisational discipline considered essential to defeat the Taliban.
"

Als het nergens toe leidt, waarom gaan we er dan toch mee door?

Hoe ver moet dit gaan?

En waarom protesteren de Afghanen niet tegen de interne inmenging door
een europese alliantie? De bemoeizucht van Balkenende met hun
meisjesscholen, hun cultuur, etc...?

Henk Elegeert

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