– NATO...Are Its Final Days Just Ahead

NATO’s future at stake in Afghanistan: MacKay
By Robert Sibley

Ottawa • Defence Minister Peter MacKay has warned that the future of NATO is at stake if some of the alliance’s members don’t do more in Afghanistan.

“We need to have a frank discussion about the future of NATO,” Mr. MacKay said Monday in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, England.

“Afghanistan tests the ability of the alliance to execute its most basic mission in the 21st century and in a global context,” he said. “If NATO cannot deter or defeat the real physical threat facing alliance members, and indeed contribute to the building of security for the larger international community, then we have to ask ourselves, what is NATO for?”

NATO and 14 other countries have about 53,000 troops in Afghanistan. The United States makes the largest contribution, with nearly 20,000 troops attached to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Another 18,000 American soldiers are in the country as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Britain has 8,700 soldiers in Afghanistan, while Canada has deployed about 2,800 troops and the Netherlands about 1,700. The Americans, British and Canadians, along with the Dutch, have done most of the hard fighting in the most dangerous areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan. They’ve also taken the most casualties.

The situation has led to criticism that other NATO countries, particularly France and Germany, with 3,500 and 3,300 troops respectively in Afghanistan, aren’t pulling their weight or taking the same risks at others in the fight against the Taliban. The German military’s “provincial reconstruction team” is deployed in the northern part of the country, while French troops are in and around the capital of Kabul, where so far the Taliban threat has not been as extreme as in the southern areas. Both German and French leaders have been reluctant to increase their countries’ troop levels, or to commit them to more direct combat roles.

Mr. MacKay told his London audience that the American “re-emphasis on the mission in Afghanistan — with the commitment of more troops, more development, more diplomacy — has brought a predictable sigh of relief from some around the alliance.” He suggested that some NATO members saw it as a chance to sit back and say ‘it’s OK, the Americans will handle it.’”

Mr. MacKay isn’t the first to call on other NATO members to do more. In January, British Defence Secretary John Hutton also challenged NATO’s European members to “step up to the plate” and stop “freeloading on the back of the U.S. military.”

However, Mr. MacKay’s suggestion that Afghanistan presents NATO with an existential crisis pushes the issue to another level, according to Allen Sens, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.

The problem, he said, is that some NATO members don’t believe deploying troops to Afghanistan is necessarily in their best interests, or that the Taliban is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe. Moreover, even if some of the European governments wanted to commit more troops to Afghanistan, they would not get public support to do so. “So what you get is a lack of a really cohesive belief in the alliance that this is truly the No. 1 threat and that NATO’s existence depends on it.”

The academic questions whether Mr. MacKay’s rhetoric was wise. He pointed out that the burden-sharing debate in NATO goes back to the Cold War. What’s new is “we’re talking about Afghanistan and not the Red Army rolling into western Europe.” For some European governments the Afghanistan mission is “a discretionary activity and not a necessary activity.”

If some NATO members keep insisting the mission presents a defining moment for NATO’s future, they may bring about what they fear.

“It is a mistake to say NATO future is inextricably bound up in Afghanistan,” Mr. Sens said. “The alliance does a lot of different things and plays a lot of different roles, and to hinge it all on the future of an operation in Afghanistan is an unfortunate linkage.”

President Barack Obama has said he intends to substantially increase the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. But he has also made it clear he wants greater European troop deployments.

Some European countries have already responded. Last week, the Italian government said it would bring its troop strength in Afghanistan up to 2,800 from the current 2,000. The Dutch government has also indicated it might keep its soldiers in Afghanistan beyond their current mission commitment of August 2010. Poland, too, says it may send more soldiers, while Britain has indicated it might do so if other European countries did the same.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly said his government will withdraw Canada’s combat forces from the Kandahar area by 2011, as required by Parliament.

Mr. Obama is due in Canada on Thursday for a working visit with Mr. Harper. The visit will certainly allow him the opportunity to ask the prime minister directly whether there is any wiggle room in his government decision.

With files from Reuters.