Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama has made clear he is counting on AmericaÂ’s NATO allies for greater military contributions in Afghanistan. He may be in for a disappointment.| No kidding. The Euros wouldn't pony up for Bush and they're sure not going to pony up for President Featherweight ... |
In encountering such reluctance, the U.S. is paying a price for its past errors, says Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We asked NATO to join us in a peacemaking, post-conflict reconstruction effort when we hadn’t won the war, and let the insurgency grow to where it threatened to take over the country,” Cordesman says. “Now we’re dissatisfied because these countries that signed up for something different aren’t willing to bail us out of our own mistakes.”
| CSIS is full of the usual progressive clap-trap. If everything was going well in Afghanistan the Euros still wouldn't help. We needed them to help in the south and east and, except for the British, Dutch and Danes, the Euros haven't and won't help. And, mostly, can't ... |
The issue will be an early test of Obama’s international leadership. The new president highlighted the war in a Jan. 22 letter to alliance members, in which he said NATO “has much to be proud of, but also much work to do,” including “helping the people of Afghanistan build a better future.”
NATOÂ’s contributions to the Afghan effort will be spotlighted in a series of international meetings, starting later this week at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.
| Munich -- always a great place to ask Euros to show a spine ... |
The discussion of Afghan strategy will continue at meetings of NATO defense ministers in Krakow, Poland, later this month and alliance foreign ministers in Brussels early next month. It will culminate in April at a summit of NATO heads of government in Strasbourg, France, marking the 60th anniversary of the alliance.
U.S. officials say they are hopeful that Obama’s international popularity will spring loose new troop contributions that European leaders were unwilling -- or politically unable -- to make during George W. Bush’s presidency. “My sense is, from some of the information and diplomatic comments and public comments that some leaders have made in Europe, that they are prepared to be asked and that they are prepared to do something,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 27. “In fact, there’s some indication that a few of our allies have been sitting on a capability so that they could give the new president something when he asks,” Gates said.
But recent statements by European leaders donÂ’t support such expectations.
| Of course not. The Euros care nothing for Bambi's popularity -- something that's going to disappear anyway over the coming months. The larder is mostly empty. The Euros have their hands full with their own economies. And they simply don't believe in using their military, be it for 'peacekeeping' or anything else. |
French Defense Minister Herve Morin -- whose country has the fourth largest contingent in Afghanistan behind the U.S., U.K. and Germany -- also ruled out more troops in a Jan. 21 interview with Europe1 Radio.
A British Defence Ministry spokesman said Jan. 30 that while the U.K. may bolster its Afghan force when its mission in Iraq ends later this year, it wonÂ’t be a one-for-one swap. That means the increase in Afghanistan will be less than the 4,000 to be pulled out of Iraq.
The U.K. has 8,910 troops in Afghanistan, Germany 3,405 and France 2,890, according to NATO. Italy, which has 2,350 troops in the country, according to NATO, agreed last month to add 300 and isnÂ’t planning any additional increases. Poland is considering increasing its presence to 2,000 from its current 1,600. A substantial NATO troop contributor outside Europe is Canada, which has more than 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan.
Christine Fair, an analyst at the RAND Corp. policy- research organization in Arlington, Virginia, said there is “debate among German military officials that they could do more -- and they could. But they don’t call those shots. I don’t see in European capitals any desire to increase their exposure in Afghanistan.”
| Correct: no desire, no money, no manpower, and no logistics. |
While the new administration is in the midst of a strategy review and hasnÂ’t made any final decisions about Afghanistan, Admiral Michael Mullen said in a Jan. 29 interview that close to 30,000 additional U.S. forces will likely go to Afghanistan over the course of 2009. Mullen is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ObamaÂ’s most senior uniformed military adviser. If that level of reinforcements comes to pass, the current ratio of U.S.-to-European forces in Afghanistan, about 1 to 1, will grow to 2 to 1. And because some NATO members, such as Germany, wonÂ’t allow their troops to be deployed in areas where combat is most intense, the U.S. will carry the military burden to an even greater degree than the numbers indicate.
The upshot may be a slow-motion reversal of the decision during the Bush administration to let NATO take over responsibility for security in Afghanistan as the U.S. became increasingly preoccupied with Iraq.
Still, as Gates indicated in his Senate testimony, there are ways apart from adding combat troops for NATO members to contribute. One, he said, would be for countries to lift restrictions on how their forces can be deployed. Another would be to send civilian specialists in economic development, governance and drug control. Yet another would be to help meet the estimated $17 billion cost of expanding Afghan security forces.
For example, Merkel may be willing to send police trainers to Afghanistan, even if she isnÂ’t prepared to deploy more troops in an election year, says Karl-Heinz Kamp, director of research at the NATO Defense College in Rome. German national elections are scheduled for September.
Such initiatives may provide an opportunity for crafting a face-saving compromise, says Shada Islam, an analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. “Nobody wants the NATO summit in Strasbourg in April to turn into a shouting match,” Islam says. “So these are the kinds of things that are being considered and may be announced there.”