Thursday, June 23, 2011

NATO After Afghanistan

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced the beginning of a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Obamas speech elicited a sigh of relief throughout Europe. On the day after the announcement, a succession of allied European leaders congratulated Obama on his decision and quickly affirmed that they would follow the move along similar if not shorter timetables. Since most of the European public oppose the Afghanistan mission, governments were eager to capitalize on the opportunity to announce the end of their involvement. However, with NATO and its Western allies looking to draw down operations in Afghanistan, the alliance faces an uncertain future. NATO lacks a viable strategic concept it is a military alliance without a coherent vision of an external threat. Its members have disparate nationalsecurity-interest calculations and act accordingly. France, to take the most recent example, has no compunction about selling multiple, advanced helicopter carriers (at least two) to Russia, even though its Central European NATO allies consider the sale a national security threat. For the last 10 years, the mission in Afghanistan has effectively kept the alliance unified behind a common goal. NATO officials made it a point in all communications both public and private to emphasize the wars importance for the alliance. For all its political and military problems and despite bickering between members of the alliance, the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan put troops from a number of countries into the battlefield with relative success. Whenever NATO officials spoke of the future of the alliance, they displayed genuine relief when the subject turned to ongoing operations in Afghanistan. This is because the mission reaffirmed that the alliance retains a functioning military component. In Afghanistan, NATO showed it is not just a bureaucracy talking shop that occasionally puts on military exercises and obsesses about threats such as cyber and energy security, creating new layers of bureaucracy without establishing effective mechanisms to deal with those threats. Afghanistan allowed NATO members to develop and enhance operationally effective command, control and intelligence cooperation, and deepen ministry-level political relationships, all while gaining experience coordinating operations. Afghanistan was NATOs war and thus helped reinforce the legitimacy of the alliance. The problem now is that once the mission in Afghanistan is over, we cannot say what NATO as an organization can look forward to. If the most recent military operation, in Libya, is any guide, the prospects are bleak. Even staunch NATO allies, such as Poland and other Central

European nations that have participated enthusiastically in Afghanistan, have chosen to stay away from Libya, instead protesting the pull of NATO resources away from Europe. Afghanistan may have been the last major military engagement that NATO conducted in unison. This does not spell the end of NATO. European institutions rarely dissolve: They perpetuate their existence. NATO may very well continue to set up ad-hoc military interventions, akin to the ongoing operation in Libya, wherein a limited number of alliance members participate. It can act as a force multiplier, thanks to the considerable military resources and international legitimacy it brings to bear. NATO can also take on different security projects related to, for instance, piracy, cybercrime or energy security whose only purpose may be to perpetuate the bureaucracy. After all, someone has to populate NATOs $1.4 billion headquarters under construction in Brussels. After Afghanistan, however, NATO officials will have no concrete evidence that NATO is truly a military alliance. Without Afghanistan, it will be far more difficult to gloss over the fact that NATO member states, in the 21st century, no longer share the same threat perceptions that in fact, where national security interests are concerned, they dont have much in common anymore.