Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

14 July 2004

IRAQ

• According to Reuters, Iraq’s widening of its request for NATO support Tuesday raised the prospect of renewed tension in the Alliance. The dispatch recalls that during a visit to NATO, Foreign Minister Zebari appealed to the Alliance to provide border security support, military equipment and protection for UN personnel as well as training for the army. It notes that the agreement on training at the Istanbul summit was hailed as the start of a new chapter in transatlantic amity. Stressing, however, that the Alliance was at odds over how to interpret the communiqué “even before the ink was dry,” the dispatch suggests that tensions could resurface as early as next week when military experts present options for the allies for NATO’s role. One diplomat is quoted saying that protecting UN officers could require a force of some 5,000 troops. A related article in the Wall Street Journal remarks that NATO has agreed to take a more direct role by promising to train the country’s security forces. However, this promise remains to be implemented as NATO struggles to find middle ground between allies pushing for a broader Alliance involvement on the ground and those who want to avoid having a NATO flag in Baghdad. “The Alliance sent a military team to Baghdad to sound out the Iraqis and the U.S. military. The team is preparing a report on that visit, which the allies will take up next week. NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer said he hopes the training decision could be implemented by next month,” the article notes. It quotes an unnamed NATO official saying the Alliance’s military team is likely to recommend that the bulk of training should take place on the scene and involve large numbers of rank-and-file soldiers. To get around objections to a formal NATO role on the ground, the Alliance is reportedly considering sending liaison officers to Iraq to be stationed at a national embassy of a member country, thus avoiding the issue of having a NATO installation on the ground.

AFGHANISTAN

• PRTs are designed to help extend the reach of Afghanistan’s central government. Questions linger as to whether PRTs are an ingenious use of limited resources or a flawed model that has neither the military muscle to deal with serious security threats or the expertise to assess reconstruction teams, writes the Financial Times. Referring to the German-led NATO PRT in Kunduz, the article stresses that international military officials and development representatives have criticized the Kunduz operation as too risk-averse. That the Kunduz PRT sits in one of Afghanistan’s biggest opium-producing areas but has no counter-narcotics mandate—a caveat from Berlin—has been a point of contention, the newspaper says. It adds that in a report to NATO after a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan in May, the head of the delegation, Pierre Lellouche, said NATO member countries had “hamstrung their forces with excessive national caveats and opt-outs.” Based on an AP dispatch, The Guardian asserts that disillusionment is widespread in NATO’s role in Afghanistan. When NATO took command of ISAF last summer, there were high hopes for multiple payoffs for the Alliance. Now, almost a year since NATO took on the task, there is widespread disillusionment with its performance, contributing to doubts about Afghanistan’s future stability, the article claims, adding: “Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations says NATO’s commitment in Afghanistan has yielded little thus far. While helping to stabilize Kabul, he says, ‘most of the rest of the country is the wild, wild west, including the south and east.’” The article notes, however, that Bush administration officials say such comment fail to recognize that the deployment to Afghanistan is a bold departure for an Alliance that had never ventured beyond Europe’s borders.

BALKANS

• The UN mission in Kosovo and local Albanian leaders have been extensively criticized in an annual report on human rights in the province, reports the New York Times. According to the article, the report, released by the Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo, a branch of the mission, says the UN and local authorities that have run Kosovo for the past five years have failed to achieve even a minimal level of protection of rights and freedom, in particular for the Serbian minority. The report lays much of the blame for the human rights failings on the international community for failing to resolve Kosovo’s final status. A large part of the report focuses on the inability of Serbs and other minorities to live, travel and work freely in the province.