Analysis: NATO Pins Future to Afghanistan
Council on Foreign Relations
November 29, 2006
Prepared by: Michael Moran
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pinned its future credibility on its difficult mission in Afghanistan, declaring in a joint statement at its Riga summit that its peacekeepers must have the forces, resources, and flexibility needed "to ensure the mission's continued success" (WashPost). Yet they made only limited progress on lifting national restrictions on deployed forces which render many German, Spanish, Italian, and other troops of little use in combat zones (FT).
On paper, NATO’s Afghan force looks impressive (PDF), with multinational commands in all parts of the country. Yet many NATO members are not exactly queuing up to send troops. The restrictions on how their soldiers can react to events, in practice, mean the 32,000 NATO forces in country only yield about 26,000 actually able to fight, dominated by Dutch, British, Canadian, and American forces (Toronto Star). (A separate force of 8,000 U.S. troops conduct intensive counterinsurgency operations outside NATO's purview on the Afghan-Pakistan border). For instance, some are forbidden to use tear gas as a crowd control method. German forces, recently rocked by scandal when some of their troops frolicked in photographs with human skeletal remains, are directed toward quieter areas of the country to avoid political backlash at home (DeutscheWelle).
These problems must be overcome or NATO may not survive as a useful entity, writes Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to the alliance. NATO has “bet the alliance” on Afghanistan (Project Syndicate), he says.
Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.
Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.
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