– NATO...Are Its Final Days Just Ahead

Report calls for a radical overhaul of NATO
By Judy Dempsey

BERLIN: With NATO facing the risk of failure in Afghanistan, a group of former senior officers has called for a radical overhaul of the alliance, which they say is paralyzed by cumbersome decision-making rules, inequitable funding arrangements and an inability to sustain long-term missions.

The officers' 152-page report, "Toward a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World," attempts to analyze why NATO has not completed the transformation from a Cold War organization to one capable of dealing with threats and conflicts in the 21st century.

It will probably ruffle feathers inside NATO, diplomats said, because of its candor and because the authors also call on the alliance to continue its support for nuclear weapons as a deterrent, an issue that is still taboo.

The authors - General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former NATO commander; Admiral Jacques Lanxade, former chief of the Defense Staff of France, General Klaus Naumann, former chief of the Defense Staff of Germany; Field Marshall Peter Inge, former chief of the Defense Staff of Britain; and General Henk van den Breemen, former chief of the Defense Staff of the Netherlands - served together in NATO.

Their report comes at an important juncture for the alliance as it tries to finalize the agenda for its summit meeting in Bucharest in April.

There, NATO will focus mainly on Afghanistan, enlargement and relations with non-NATO countries like Japan and Australia that want to contribute to NATO peacekeeping missions but have no say in how the missions are organized.

Inside NATO headquarters, the alliance is already divided over further expansion, and how the summit meeting should address Croatia, Georgia, Ukraine and countries in the Western Balkans that want to join NATO.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Dutch secretary general of NATO, has repeatedly called for a shakeup inside the alliance but the majority of the 26 member states are reluctant either to change the rules over how the alliance operates or to increase defense spending.

And because decisions have to be made by consensus, NATO diplomats acknowledge that this leads to delays, weak agreements and prevents the alliance from making the final break with the Cold War era.

But even as NATO takes on more international peacekeeping missions, with Afghanistan becoming the test case for the alliance's ability to prove it can defeat the Taliban and eventually bring long-term security to the country, the authors argue that member states are still not willing to face up to the immense challenge facing the organization.

One of the biggest problems, they say, is the refusal by many NATO countries to contribute sufficient troops and equipment to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

This is despite the fact that NATO has more than two million troops and close to a thousand helicopters under its command.

"Yet we see today," the report says, "it is struggling to sustain manpower in Afghanistan, where 35,500 troops from NATO's International Security Assistance Force and 5,500 non-NATO troops operate and have difficulty in finding small numbers of additional transport helicopters."

The authors write that if some NATO members refused to contribute, they should be excluded from having a say in the conduct of those military operations. "Only nations that contribute to a mission, that is military forces in a military missions, should have the right to a say in the process of the operation," the report says.

But that is not the optimal solution. "Change the way missions are financed," the report urges. For decades, missions have been financed on the basis of "costs lie where they fall," which means that any country that sends troops or military hardware must pick up the costs. This means that the United States, Britain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany bear most expenses because they regularly participate in large numbers in NATO missions.

The result is that there is increasing resentment by these countries of NATO allies that contribute on a more meager basis or not at all, which in turn erodes alliance solidarity.

"The current cost-funding system of 'costs lie where they fall' must be abandoned entirely," the report says. "At present, that means that those who contribute are bearing both the risk of casualties and the financial burden, whereas those who simply talk are rewarded twice. Such a principle can erode NATO's cohesion and it definitely reduces NATO's ability to sustain operations."

The report called for "a commonly financed NATO operations budget. Such a budget could ensure that if NATO agrees something, then NATO will see it through properly." NATO countries sometimes agree to a mission but when it comes to providing troops and financing, many of them refuse to contribute, complain NATO military commanders.