Anne Applebaum theorizes in the Washington Post that NATO is essentially useless:
There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces. …
The fact is that the idea of “the West” has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic, as countless “whither-the-Alliance” seminars have been ritually observing for the past decade. But the consequences are now with us: NATO, though fighting its first war since its foundation, inspires nobody. The members of NATO feel no allegiance to the alliance, or to one another.
Questions surrounding NATO’s relevance have swirled as the war effort in Afghanistan has stalled. The alliance’s inability to keep members focused and actively engaged in the hard- and soft-power components of the mission is due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is the Bush administration’s neglectful resourcing of the conflict in favor of Operation Iraqi Freedom (a non-NATO mission, it should be noted). And this is something of a tragedy, given NATO’s invocation of Article V — stating an attack on one member is an attack on all members — in the wake of 9/11.
However, it is also true that NATO was not conceived to conduct an Afghan-type mission, particularly one lasting nine years. NATO was born, of course, as a security pact to face down the Soviet Union — a known quantity of traditional military capabilities. The potential threat coming from Afghanistan’s hinterland is a far cry from the Cuban missile crisis.
While Applebaum bemoans the “countless ‘whither-the-Alliance’ seminars,” I’d suggest that such discussions are necessary, if ill-timed. Instead, NATO’s Secretary General, ex-Norwegian Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, should squeeze out every possible commitment NATO countries are willing to devote to the Afghan mission in the short term, reminding them that attacks in the United Kingdom and Spain are compelling reasons to take the Obama administration’s refocused efforts there seriously.
When the Afghanistan mission is wrapped up in several years, NATO must sit down and decide when it is appropriate to fight, and what sort of resources its members are willing to commit.
