Not many people at Nato’s Brussels headquarters are likely to laugh these days at the old joke that the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation actually stands for Now Almost Totally Obsolete. The concern that the alliance badly needed a new raison d’être after the Cold War was briefly assuaged by the 1999 Kosovo campaign.
But Nato floundered after 9/11, rebuffed by the United States when it decided to fight al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts with an ad hoc ”coalition of the willing”. Nothing in its history had equipped Nato to combat terrorism or operate beyond Europe. Still, after its ”near death experience” over Iraq — when France and Germany lined up against the US, Britain and Spain — helping to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan (and helpfully taking up the slack left by overstretched US forces), was an appealing, if very challenging, option.
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Nato’s Secretary General, sees Afghanistan as a test of the alliance’s credibility. Thus his anxious efforts to raise more troops to share the burden being borne by British forces in Helmand province, where fierce resistance from Taliban fighters has exposed failures of intelligence, planning and tactics.
Public opinion in Britain, originally supportive of the intervention in Afghanistan in a way it never was over Iraq, is starting to turn: a BBC poll this week showed 52% backing withdrawal. The 14 coffins of the men killed in last week’s RAF Nimrod crash arrived home to a loud chorus of troubling questions. After all, what was billed as an operation to foster stability and reconstruction has suddenly become a fully fledged guerrilla war. The Canadians and Dutch, with smaller contingents in other dangerous areas, also have qualms.
But the criterion for judging Nato’s mission should not be the alliance’s institutional credibility. The only thing that matters is whether it can help extend the reach of the central government in Kabul by providing security — a precondition for normal life and economic prosperity — and at what price.
No progress was made this week in finding 2 500 extra troops to fight the Taliban before they slip back to the mountains for the winter. Yet if more forces are simply reinforcing failure, if Afghanistan is doomed to become a latter-day Vietnam, then there is little point.
British commanders, who claim to have the upper hand, will need to convince sceptics they can improve on the disastrous US performance in Iraq and Israel’s cack-handed war against Hezbollah. The lesson is that in ”asymmetrical” conflicts it is the nimbler side with local knowledge that will prevail.
The degree of support for the Taliban, notorious for beheading teachers and government officials, is unclear. But talk about winning ”hearts and minds” as soldiers in berets hand out sweets to children sounds ridiculous when the enemy is using suicide bombings and Nato is deploying massive firepower and measuring its success in dead Taliban — a label that very likely masks many innocent casualties.
The mantra that failure is unthinkable belongs to the realm of propaganda. But the meaning of failure needs examining: a Nato withdrawal would mean a resurgence of the Taliban across the country, not just the south, threatening the democratically elected government of President Hamid Karzai. It is not idle to warn that Afghanistan would then risk becoming a failed state again. But avoiding that also means re-examining the opium question: this year’s record poppy crop will help keep the insurgency going; corrupt Afghan officials will also have to go.
While some of these issues figure in increasingly audible grumbling from the British military, there is still little questioning of the overall objective, rather an insistence that the right resources must be deployed and that Nato must deliver them. — Â