He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change.
He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change.
Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804782371 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2012 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
NATO in Afghanistan
THE LIBERAL DISCONNECTBy Sten Rynning
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8237-1
Chapter One
THE NATURE OF THE ATLANTIC BEAST
THROUGH HISTORY AND LITERATURE we typically encounter two Afghanistans. One is a type of roundabout for commerce and cultural transactions that originate in East and West and meet in the plains surrounding the Hindu Kush Mountains, notably to the north in the region once known as Bactria. The forebears of Western civilization come from this region, writes Adda Bozeman, and it was a land of crossroads "where conquest was transmuted into coexistence" and "cultural interpenetration and political cooperation." It is a source of inspiration for Afghan politicians today, among them President Karzai. Another Afghanistan is the country impossible to conquer, most vividly illustrated by the January 1842 massacre of the 4,500 British forces retreating from Kabul and the first Anglo-Afghan war and hoping to reach the safe haven of Jalalabad. Legend has it that Ghilzai guerrillas allowed one soldier to live to tell the tale, and though the legend exaggerates British losses it has nourished the idea that foreign powers are destined to fail in Afghanistan. 2 It matters enormously whether we frame NATO's Afghan campaign in light of one of these Afghanistans. If Afghanistan is truly the graveyard of empires, it should not surprise us that NATO has encountered problems, and we should in fact applaud it for doing so well for so long. If Afghanistan holds potential for coexistence and cultural interpenetration, one might instead ask why NATO has made such a mess of it.
It is possible to assume that both Afghanistans are real and important and then to look to NATO's own history to judge the Alliance's performance. From the vantage point of NATO there was no question that operational pressures from the Balkans had caused the Alliance to change. "This ain't your daddy's NATO," is how Lord Robertson, secretary general of NATO from 1999 through 2004, put it. This history tells us that NATO was adaptable, at least to an extent, but it does not suffice as a yardstick for the Afghan campaign. Historical differences are simply too great, even though Balkan and Afghan operations both somehow fit into the wider business model of crisis management and conflict resolution. In the Balkans, NATO began with a peace plan; in Afghanistan, there is no peace agreement. In the Balkans, NATO began with a grand deployment—60,000 in the case of Bosnia in 1995-1996—and drew down this number over time as belligerents grew less belligerent; in Afghanistan, NATO began with a few thousand only to build up beyond 100,000. The Balkans are right next door to NATO territory and logistics; Afghanistan is landlocked and thousands of miles of away.
Some of the best books on the Afghan war that began in 2001 are cognizant of the dual nature of Afghanistan, its potential and pitfalls, but they pay scant attention to NATO. One of these books is written by the regional expert and journalist Ahmed Rashid. It is not an upbeat assessment. The international community, including NATO but with a notable focus on the United States, has not grasped Afghanistan's potential for progress and as a consequence has nourished the forces that make Afghanistan a graveyard of empires. Rashid's message is that Western policy needs to be less focused on hunting bad guys and more focused on empowering good guys. This liberal message reverberates through Seth Jones's equally insightful work on the Afghan campaign. Seth Jones focuses on the United States, though, and Jones is not particularly happy with his country's ability to handle Afghanistan. NATO is present in the book but not centrally so, and it appears mainly in the context of allied disputes and bickering. It is one face of NATO but far from the only one. Two big overview books should be mentioned: Jason Burke, a Guardian correspondent, brings together a number of campaigns, conflicts, and tensions in what he calls the 9/11 wars, and Peter Tomsen, former special envoy to the Afghan resistance, provides an admirable overview of Afghanistan's wars. Neither makes the Alliance his subject matter but both are excellent books. Tomsen's book tends to read history to derive policy implications for the United States, though, and Burke's book is more contemporary and wider in its gaze and assessment and ultimately of greater importance for observers of the Atlantic Alliance. Britain's former ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is fond of allied disputes and especially the frustrations that American planning—or the lack thereof—can engender among allies and himself in particular, perhaps. Cowper-Coles's strong message is that counterinsurgency (COIN) is a means, not an end, and that the COIN surge of 2009-2010 did not sufficiently define the ends of the campaign. His book deals squarely with the predominance of American thinking that came with the surge, as well as British Afghan politics, and it has become a reference point in the debate on what is wrong with the campaign, but it does not tell us why the United States, much less NATO as a whole, has failed—by Cowper-Coles's yardstick—to grasp the nature of the campaign. Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, British lecturers of defense studies and history, seem to tackle NATO head-on in their book on "how the West lost its way." It is a smooth narrative of the war up to 2011 and a stinging critique of Western strategy. Like Cowper-Coles, they take the Western allies to task for mistaking means and ends—COIN is not strategy—and claim, moreover, that NATO has been obsessed by its own internal affairs as opposed to Afghanistan. This part of the story is incomplete. NATO has been able to focus on Afghanistan and in fact strengthen its grasp of the campaign. Moreover, NATO shortcomings result not so much from allied disagreement—often noted—but from the way in which they have framed the campaign mistakenly, which in turn has to do with how common liberal values have become the means for managing Alliance diversity and, in consequence, how NATO's campaign has developed within a fixed conceptual space ill suited to the realities of Afghanistan and the dynamic and innovative character of the adversary.
WHAT IS NATO?
NATO was never a congregation of fully aligned nations. It remains an amalgamation of nations with long histories and national interests within distinct geographical confines—be it the Arctic, the Baltic, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, the Atlantic, or the Pacific, for that matter. NATO is therefore a geopolitical patchwork that has been kept together by skillful political management. This management relates to interests as well as values. Following the founding treaty of NATO, the values are liberal but rooted in transatlantic soil. The treaty is liberal yet geopolitical. In terms of visionary ambiguity, it is a beautifully crafted document. It demands of NATO statesmen constant attention to the political art of balancing hope and realism but also leaves them scope for action. The community of NATO observers is divided, tending to emphasize a particular factor such as either liberal values or geopolitics. In the search for understanding we would do well to remember that we shall not arrive at a truth about NATO but perhaps improved knowledge. It will come about as we confront the empirical record and assess how well our concepts guide us in the effort to understand NATO and Afghanistan's impact on it. There are two distinct views of NATO. Both are illuminating, but neither one hits the mark.
When Trouble Is Destiny: The NATO-Is-Dying School
Much of the ongoing commentary about NATO and the Afghan war flirts with the idea of Alliance death. It has in fact become an enduring theme. The aforementioned Ahmed Rashid was frank when NATO prepared to expand ISAF into Afghanistan's south and east: The Alliance was setting itself up for "abysmal failure," a view echoed by The Economist, which noted that "shortsighted European politicians" were putting "the world's foremost Alliance" at risk given their lack of commitments. Other observers noted the tendency of European allies to "fill up lots of air space at policy conferences talking about Europe's readiness to play a prominent role in global affairs," concluding that Europe's bluff is easy to call. "NATO is flunking," echoes John Feffer, who notes that the "stunning lack of success on the ground" is "the real nail in NATO's coffin." NATO has proved inept at all the fundamentals of strategy, we learn elsewhere: political direction, the generation of military capabilities, funding for the war, and cooperation with other organizations such as the United Nations. NATO may simply be unable to negotiate the contested "rules of the game" that peace-building operations require, according to academic analyst Alexandra Gheicu, and the outcome is ineffective multilateralism, militarized strategy, and an "unrealistic war," adds Luis Peral, another analyst. It all lends credence to the observation that NATO "will prove less and less valuable to its members with each year." When Azeem Ibrahim of Harvard University asks, "If we were designing an alliance most suitable to face the threats of the future, would it look like NATO?" the obvious answer is "No, it would not." James Goldgeier of George Washington University concurs, "If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did not exist today, the United States would not seek to create it." British General Richards, who commanded ISAF during the first critical phase of southern and eastern expansion in 2006, finds that NATO suffered from both political and military inertia and was in fact "quite sclerotic." Canadian General Rick Hillier, ISAF commander in 2004-2005, is perhaps NATO's most outspoken critic: "It was crystal clear from the start that there was no strategy for the mission in Afghanistan." NATO is now a decomposing corpse, Hillier continues, and someone needs to breathe lifesaving air through its "rotten lips into [its] putrescent lungs, or the alliance will be done."
The alleged transatlantic divorce is rooted partly in distinct values and the drifting apart of Europeans and Americans. History and culture are taking their toll and nourish worldviews that can no longer be fitted into one alliance framework. Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations and a vivid commentator, sees little potential in the transatlantic alliance. "NATO is failing," Bacevich argues, and to think of it as a great alliance is "sheer nostalgia." The problem is that Europe has become pacified and lost its "martial spirit" and that this trend is irreversible. It is time therefore to leave NATO to the Europeans who can use such a downsized alliance to shield themselves against Russia while the United States gets on with its global business. Bacevich's point resonates. Michael Cox, also a professor of history and international relations, concludes that NATO is yesterday's news: "What existed once exists no more." Another professor, Donald Puchala, identifies a transatlantic value gap and cannot see why it should diminish. Nor can Robert Kagan, whose argument that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus stirred great debate some years ago.
The divorce is motivated also by hard power and the rise and decline of nations, the argument continues. Analysts who believe that states tend to balance each other now see European efforts to soft-pedal against the United States and maybe even outright oppose it in critical diplomatic contexts. To these analysts, transatlantic relations have transformed into U.S.-EU relations, and there is no raison d'être for integrative institutions such as NATO. The United States should therefore agree to transfer NATO bureaucratic assets-the military command and headquarters in particular-to the EU and give up on "rigid" international institutions in favor of "flexible coalitions of similarly interested [...] states." Part of the reason is that U.S. power can best be preserved if it scales back "onshore" engagements in Eurasia and instead adopts a more selective "offshore" policy that is both less costly and controversial but also in the long run more effective.
Although it seems correct to say that the transatlantic relationship is experiencing the gravitational pull of diverse regional experiences and power transitions, it is ultimately not a satisfactory account of what has happened in the Afghan context. It offers a degree of satisfaction if the purpose is to make sense of all the things that go wrong, and many things do. What one must do is then simply to amass evidence—NATO's performance last year in Herat or this year in Helmand, or NATO decision making in Brussels last year and the capacity of the chain of command to carry out these decisions this year— and pull it together in the plotted narrative: The string of failures shows that NATO is dying. The plot is deceptively appealing because it aligns with some trends that are clearly visible and it allows us to make sense of an extraordinarily complex operation.
The plot may simply be wrong, of course. Sarah Chayes, a noted expert on Afghanistan who has worked variously as a journalist, community organizer, and adviser to ISAF, has argued that "NATO didn't lose Afghanistan." The Atlantic Alliance has in fact been a marked improvement compared to the years of U.S. leadership, 2001-2003/4, when the United States pretty much lost Afghanistan, according to Chayes. This may not help NATO win the war, but it causes Chayes to admonish to her fellow American citizens that "the least we could do now is offer gratitude and support, rather than blame our friends for our own follies."
If the Western Alliance were to falter and fall apart, the plot could still be wrong. It certainly offers no account of the reason that NATO was able to make the transition from failed strategic actor to fairly successful strategic enabler. This transition will be presented in this book, and it tells us that if the Western Alliance gets the lessons of Afghanistan wrong and fails to reinvent itself, as this book also argues is about to happen, then it is because the Alliance leaders are mismanaging a real potential for change. In short, death is a framework that provides coherence and meaning, but it also numbs us to reality, providing comfort of illustration where critical analysis is needed.
The World Is a Stage and NATO Must Play Its Part: The NATO-Must-Globalize School
Other analysts do perceive a need for NATO in the twenty-first century, and they argue that NATO has run into trouble in Afghanistan because it has applied old medicine to new problems. NATO needs to evolve and change, and, if it does, it has a future. This argument comes in two distinctively different versions.
One harks back to the power analysis mentioned in the preceding pages. Some power analysts believe that the transition to a unipolar world of U.S. supremacy spelled the effective death of the Atlantic Alliance, as mentioned, but other analysts of power contend that unipolarity fundamentally alters NATO's role while not threatening its survival. A unipole such as the United States will seek to perpetuate its dominance and maybe even extend the reach of its policies and principles, and an alliance such as NATO can serve as the handmaiden of these ambitions. The key difference compared to the past is that the United States today is freer to demand certain things of NATO allies without paying for them: The asymmetry of power means that the European allies and Canada cannot use the threat of alliance withdrawal to extract concessions from the United States. NATO has therefore become part of the U.S. policy of shaping the international system: NATO has enlarged, it has taken on rogue states such as the Taliban's Afghanistan, and it has engaged in the business of exporting democracy.
The driver in NATO's transformation is the U.S. global agenda and the inability of allies to really check U.S. policies. The allies lack the power to resist and must therefore adapt. They could of course leave the Alliance and take care of their own security, but strategic uncertainty speaks against this option. At first the allies will try to restrain the United States with reference to NATO rules and norms, but when they discover that such restraint has limited reach, as in the case of Afghanistan, they must opt for a division of labor according to which they do the peacekeeping (ISAF) while the United States sets the strategic framework and does the hard part of countering the Taliban insurgency. There is great appeal in this account of events because it is self-evident that the United States calls many shots in the Alliance and that the allies lack the power to define an alternative. However, it tends to overstate the degree to which the United States is able to get its way. In Afghanistan, the United States proved unable to control events to such a degree that it was happy to bring in NATO, in 2002-2004, and later to fold most of its coalition operation (OEF) into NATO and ISAF. What began as a cherry-picking approach to NATO has ended up as a strategy of relying on NATO to provide support and legitimacy. And to make an institution work in its favor, the United States cannot merely rely on power: It must enter the fray of Alliance politics. In short, the United States is dependent on—or entrapped in—NATO in ways that the power perspective neglects to highlight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NATO in Afghanistan by Sten Rynning Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 The Nature of the Atlantic Beast 9
Section I Overview
2 A Benevolent Alliance 25
3 NATO and Afghanistan 41
Section II Analysis
4 Original Sins: A Benevolent Alliance Goes to War, 2001-2005 71
5 Crisis and Comeback: Confronting the Insurgency, 2006-2008 111
6 The Reckoning: Searching for a Strategic Purpose, 2008-2012 157
Conclusion 207
Notes 221
Index 263