Center for a New American Security

My column in the World Politics Review this week is full of depressing observations on NATO:

[The] Libya intervention demonstrated that the militaries of non-U.S. NATO nations have not invested in an appropriate amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms or in in-flight refueling capabilities. Virtually all of the targeting and air tasking orders were provided by the United States, which also had to provide much of the ammunition once the allies simply ran out. In addition, a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute notes that up to 85 percent of the fuel for the air campaign in Libya was provided by the U.S. Air Force.

Read more here.

Sec. Gates apparently lit into our NATO allies in a closed-door meeting yesterday, calling out Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands but most especially Poland and Germany for not pulling their weight in Libya. (Gates also praised Canada, Belgium and most especially Denmark and Norway.) Today, broader concerns about the NATO alliance dominated a must-read public speech full of real-talking:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.  Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets. 

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed,  Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost. ...

 

It is not too late for Europe to get its defense institutions and security relationships on track.  But it will take leadership from political leaders and policy makers on this continent.  It cannot be coaxed, demanded or imposed from across the Atlantic.

Truth.

From the perspective of many U.S. legislators and tax-payers, one of the reasons the states of Europe enjoy such nice social welfare programs is because the United States has effectively subsidized the continent's defense spending since 1989. A few weeks back, I was in a meeting with some representatives from one of our NATO allies, who warned me that if the United States moved troops out of Europe, European states would respond by only developing military organizations capable of operating in Europe and North Africa.

I responded that would be a real improvement!

Currently, the European states seem unable to carry out mid-sized military operations independently. In Libya, the United States is flying 75% of both in-flight refueling and reconnaissance missions -- because the European states have not invested in either in-flight refueling or ISR platforms. Some Europeans are also unhappy the United States has sent its A-10s and A/C-130s home, because European states also lack the kind of slow-flying, fixed-wing platforms ideal for close air support -- hence the recent deployment of British rotary-wing attack helicopters.

This kind of reckoning between the United States and the states of Europe has been long overdue. Some European states have proven themselves serious about both the alliance and their own national defense. (I'm looking at you, Denmark.) Others have not. If Germans complain with justification that their workers subsidize Greek hair-dressers taking early retirements, it's perfectly fair for the United States to complain German workers enjoy comfy state benefits in part because U.S. tax-payers underwrite their national defense.

If you can get past the firewall or find a paper copy of the Financial Times today, do so in order to read Constanze Stelzenmüller's op-ed on what happened in Kunduz and the effect it's having in Germany. Among other things, it includes this peach of a sentence:

Moreover, in bombing the trucks (and, according to Nato, killing civilians), the Germans did exactly what they kept lecturing the Americans to stop doing, while the Americans are now lecturing us for doing what they used to do, but are no longer doing, at least in part because of our lecturing.

 

Yesterday we noted the difference between the Times and the Guardian over European commitments to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The two big Sunday newspapers in the United States, meanwhile, were more downbeat. Headlines from The New York Times and The Washington Post were, respectively, "Europeans Offer Few New Troops for Afghanistan" (online) and "NATO Backs Obama's Afghan Plan but Pledges Few New Troops" (A12).

Both U.S. papers just cited are, roughly speaking, center-left papers. So if the perception of their reporters and editors is that Europe is not fully backing its American allies in Afghanistan, it is safe to assume that's also the opinion of more conservative media in the United States. (Such as the Wall Street Journal, which does not publish on Sundays.) And Guardian readers and editors should be aware of that, because this perception, I would argue, has long-term consequences for NATO and the trans-Atlantic partnership.

Update: Not really related to the post, but A.A. Gill has an amusing op-ed in today's NYT. Highlights:

You often wonder what visiting dignitaries make of your country; American presidents must think that the whole world is in a constant state of riot. Wherever they go, CNN is full of angry banners, burning flags and tear gas. I went and joined the London riot. It was depressingly flabby, and half-hearted. Not so much a demonstration as a queue of arcane special pleading groups, ranging from anarchists for bicycles (who all waited politely at the traffic lights) and one-world vegans. Altogether, they looked like a collective of European street mimes.

And:

The truth is that the French have never really got over being dumped at the altar of the “special relationship.” It should have been them. It was after all, the French who gave you the Statue of Liberty and the keys to the Bastille and who think Jerry Lewis is funny. What did the English ever give you? Muffins and a burnt White House.

And here's the bottom line:

Gordon Brown was the only one to offer substantial help. He offered to send several hundred extra British soldiers to provide security during the August election, but even that fell short of the thousands of combat troops that the US was hoping to prise from the Prime Minister.

Just two other allies made firm offers of troops. Belgium offered to send 35 military trainers and Spain offered 12. Mr Obama’s host, Nicolas Sarkozy, refused his request.

The derisory response threatened to tarnish Mr Obama’s European tour, which yesterday included a spellbinding performance in Strasbourg in which he offered the world a vision of a future free of nuclear weapons.

Mr Obama – who has pledged 21,000 more troops to combat the growing insurgency and is under pressure from generals to supply up to 10,000 more – used the eve of Nato’s 60th anniversary summit to declare bluntly that it was time for allies to do their share. “Europe should not simply expect the United States to shoulder that burden alone,” he said. “This is a joint problem it requires a joint effort.”

Not that we couldn't have predicted this months ago. Just to put things in an even more depressing perspective, we are sending 4,000 more military trainers --- quite apart from the 18,000+ combat troops we are sending. And Europeans wonder why credible American commentators are calling for us to quit NATO. Kalam fadi...

P.S. I mean, you realize that 35 guys is so very few that they are probably deploying them by name. Ok, you can have Franc, and ... let's see, Pierre -- no wait, Pierre is busy -- oh, maybe Jean-Luc... %$#@ing ridiculous.

UPDATE: Stop the presses!

Barack Obama today won agreement for substantial Nato troop reinforcements in Afghanistan, when at least seven European nations, including Britain, said they would send extra troops and logistical help ahead of the presidential elections there in August.

The decision, made at a Nato summit in Strasbourg, will be a profound political relief for the US president, who badly needed to be able to show his domestic audience that his offer of a new style of parternship with Europe could reap tangible results.

The size of the overall temporary reinforcements, apart from those announced by America, was put at up to 5,000, including as many as 600 from Poland.

America and Britain have become increasingly frustrated at the unwillingness of the 28 Nato countries to commit troops to serious fighting against the Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

The British defence secretary, John Hutton, has said he is expecting a surge in Taliban activity in an attempt to disrupt the elections, the first test of Afghan democracy since 2004.

The countries agreeing to contribute further help, according to European diplomats, include Poland, Spain, Croatia, Greece and the Netherlands. Germany is expected to confirm that it will be sending extra troops to the largely peaceful north of Afghanistan for the election on 22 August.

France is sending a further 150 military police to help train an Afghan civilian police, arguing that last year it announced a large extra deployment.

It doesn't matter how much Robert Gates complains or how much Barack Obama pleads. It is highly unlikely the U.S. political leadership will win new backing for the war in Afghanistan from our NATO allies. We will be lucky, in fact, to keep European troop levels where they are now. (Update: We'll see if this new commitment changes things for the others.) Still -- and despite what some people have argued about other havens -- Robert Gates probably has a point when he says that most European leaders have done little to explain the strategic importance of the war in Afghanistan:

“I have not seen the kind of effort that I would have hoped for in terms of European governments trying to persuade their people that attacks such as those that took place in Madrid and London . . . emanated from the Afghan-Pakistani border area,” Mr Gates said in an interview with the Financial Times. ...

“The British do a good job of making that case to their people, but on the Continent I have not seen that kind of effort,” he said. “This problem out there is as big a threat to the Europeans as it is to us.”

Gates said something else in an interview with the FT that was also really interesting. As many of you know, my boss John Nagl, together with his BFF Sen. Joe Lieberman, has been calling for a dramatic expansion of the Afghan security forces. There is an objection, though, that I have aired on the blog, which worries the Afghan economy cannot sustain such a massive security apparatus. Gates, apparently, agrees with the dissenters:

As the Obama administration debated its Afghanistan strategy, some officials argued for a doubling of the Afghan army and police to about 400,000. Asked whether the Afghan army would need to ultimately number 400,000-500,000 soldiers – as the US counter-insurgency doctrine crafted by General David Petraeus would suggest – Mr Gates said “I don’t know the answer to that”.

“I don’t think Afghanistan can sustain an army that size, and I don’t think the international community is prepared to pay to sustain an army that size.”

I had a conversation with a visiting policy-maker from a NATO country yesterday in which he asked me what I thought Afghanistan held for the future of NATO. After repeating "the T.X. Hammes challenge" -- trying to think of a coalition that had ever successfully prosecuted a counter-insurgency campaign -- I laid out what I saw as two schools of thought on NATO in Afghanistan.

The first school -- more or less represented by this editorial in today's Times -- looks at Afghanistan and sees serious problems for NATO. This school frets about a two- or even three-tiered NATO, one in which one NATO fights and one NATO stays at home. (Or, in the three-tiered system, a NATO in which one NATO fights, one NATO deploys with caveats, and one NATO stays at home.)

The second school of thought says, essentially, who cares? NATO was never intended to be an organization in which military duties were equally divvied out among the member states. The United States -- and France, and the UK, and Canada -- were always going to bear a disproportionate share of the responsibilities on the battlefield. Any success in Afghanistan will depend primarily on Anglo-American leadership above all else.*

I would be curious, though, to hear what the readership thinks about all this. Which school of thought do you find to be the most persuasive? Is there another way of thinking about the issue?

*I want to stress here that by talking up the Anglo-American contribution (by which I mean USA, UK, CAN, AUS, NZ), I am not intending to in any way downplay the frankly courageous contributions of Denmark, the Netherlands, and several others in Afghanistan.

Kip admires the French soldiers in Afghanistan. He worked on the ground with them at times and saw that they could be capable when allowed to do their job. And Kip mourned as he read about the deaths of 10 French soldiers killed in an ambush in Sarobi, just outside of Kabul.

Moreover, the decision of President Sarkozy to send more troops to Afghanistan despite domestic unease is admirable and a demonstration of his commitment toward rapprochement between France and the United States, not to mention his personal commitment to Afghanistan.

Alas, Kip is also certain that the French President's trip to Afghanistan in the wake of the deaths sends an entirely different message about French resolve than the speech he made in Kabul.

The French have lost a handful of deaths over the course of the fighting in Afghanistan. These deaths were a tragedy as all loss of life is a tragedy. But when the deaths of a handful of soldiers (and undoubtedly ten soldiers is a handful in the overall war) require the French President and his top ministers to travel to Afghanistan to reiterate the resolve of France, it not only seems to the Afghans and the Taliban that France and most other NATO Allies are teetering but also must make NATO warnings toward Russia (surely direct support to the Georgians would result in far more than 10 deaths) ring hollow.

Crises, real or perceived, have plagued the Atlantic Alliance virtually since its inception. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Robert Hunter used to joke that he asked his staff to make up a rubber stamp that read, "At this critical moment in the history of the Atlantic Alliance," because he was constantly starting his cables from Brussels with the phrase. Nevertheless, Troy gets the sense that events are (slowly) coming to a head within NATO over Afghanistan.

The failure of some of those NATO members who actually have troops in Afghanistan to adopt reasonable rules of engagement (or even accept the fact that they are involved in counterinsurgency operations rather than just reconstruction) has been a constant source of criticism. Troy finds this situation all the more frustrating since ISAF has been operating in Afghanistan for nearly five years.

Commentators, particularly in the UK, have claimed that the unwillingness of countries such as Italy, Portugal and Germany to commit to Afghanistan and shoulder a "reasonable share" of the alliance’s burden has serious implications for NATO’s cohesion and credibility as a military alliance. These concerns were recently articulated by the UK Defense Secretary Des Browne who

questioned the long-term viability of NATO, saying it was not providing the forces or capabilities needed to maintain its credibility as a military alliance.

While the Brits, Dutch, and Poles undertake the majority of combat operations in the south (with the Danes, Estonians and Romanians contributing elsewhere),

Domestic opposition prevents German troops from taking on the Taliban, and Spanish and Italian soldiers in Afghanistan are restricted to non-combat roles. France only recently deployed combat troops to the south-east of the country.

It is an unavoidable fact that these sorts of caveats have a detrimental effect on the coherence of NATO's operations. According to the Telegraph, frustration with this situation has boiled over in the U.S., where

American officials are in a state of near despair about the failure of Britain's European allies to do more to beef up NATO combat power in Afghanistan.

A Pentagon adviser told The Telegraph that US commanders wish they had never agreed to NATO taking charge of major combat operations against the Taliban in the lawless south of the country.

The lack of coordination among the various national elements has prevented the emergence of a unified strategy for the south that balances nation-building and combat operations. Pulling no punches, the unnamed "Pentagon advisor" contends that

The mistake was handing it over to NATO in the first place. For many countries being in Afghanistan seems to be about keeping up appearances, rather than actually fighting a war that needs to be won.

NATO's failure to adopt an integrated political-military strategy for Afghanistan at the Bucharest summit was a significant disappointment. As former Afghan interior minister Ali Jalali contends,

In the absence of an overall counterinsurgency strategy, what the international community and the Afghan government are doing is not designed to win the war, rather not to lose.

That is a major problem. There's no campaign plan. We need a unified command of all forces that can do three things: fighting, stabilising and peacekeeping. Unless you speak with one voice it is not going to work. We need more troops to stabilise the country.

Apropos of that latter point, the Washington Post reports that a German NATO general has said that 6,000 troops are urgently needed in Afghanistan. Otherwise, "alliance members would end up paying a price later if they did not boost troop numbers now." Moreover, the article suggests that the Germans may be open to the idea of putting more boots on the ground.

The parliamentary mandate for German troops operating in Afghanistan is due to expire in October and Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung is expected to request an increase of at least 1,000 in the troop limit.

As nice as this may be, additional troops need to be deployed according to military necessity rather than domestic political imperatives in order to have a tangible impact. What is the marginal benefit of deploying more German soldiers to the north of Afghanistan when the supermajority of insurgents are in the south and the east? The intent is not to single out Germany for abuse, NATO as a whole needs to recommit to the mission in Afghanistan if there is to be a reasonable chance of achieving some form of lasting stability.

Sports commentary is full of hackneyed discussions of “Playing to Win” v. “Playing not to Lose.” Yet, there is an element of truth in that discussion. As Italy demonstrated against Spain on Sunday night, a strategy solely focused on playing not to lose isn't very effective—it surrenders the initiative and puts you on the back foot in a reactive, rather than proactive, mode. In Troy’s opinion, the preference of several NATO countries to “play not to lose” in Afghanistan does not bode well.

Global deployments of US forces have stretched them extremely thin, yet it is increasingly hard for Troy to see how counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban can succeed in the long-term without having the U.S. take a leading role in southern Afghanistan, which, as Kip has pointed out, could require the deployment of an additional two brigade combat teams.


UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting today that, in line with the WaPo article cited above, Germany will "increase the number of soldiers available for duty in Afghanistan by almost one-third to 4,500, but that it would maintain its policy of keeping the bulk of them away from the relatively violent southern provinces."

The increase requires parliamentary approval and would not happen before October. Furthermore, this appears to be largely a shift rather than a "plus up" as the number of German soldiers permitted to take part in OEF will drop from 1,400 to 800.


UPDATE II: Meanwhile, in eastern Afghanistan, where the French have pledged to deploy an additional battalion, attacks on coalition forces are up 40% in the January to May timeframe compared to a year ago.

Doctrine, as Colin Gray once wrote, is the skeleton upon which the sinew and flesh of armies are built. Perhaps then, with no NATO doctrine for the conduct of a war among the people, it should be no surprise that the NATO-led ISAF in Afghanistan has often appeared spineless.

NATO has recognized this problem and has commissioned the Dutch who have been operating in Uruzgan province alongside the Australians to write NATO's counterinsurgency doctrine.

This past month, a smattering of counterinsurgency thinkers to include the Counterinsurgency Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth met with the doctrine's lead writers to provide inputs. That said, the "A-team" for developing US counterinsurgency doctrine has not been called out to facilitate and assist. Kip hopes this is not indicative of the amount of emphasis that NATO is placing on the doctrine itself.

The effort is particularly important in light of the lack of a national strategy or regional strategy to defeat the insurgencies in Afghanistan. At the tactical and operational levels, units lack a common language to discuss what it is that they are trying to do and why certain actions may be productive or counter-productive. Whatever the doctrine that emerges looks like these are several of Kip's hopes for it:

1) The doctrine does not cave in to external pressures within the alliance and includes the importance of protecting the populace outside of the FOB (pressure would most likely come from the Germans in this regard)

2) The doctrine focuses on organizing for intelligence and the importance of developing intelligence products which can be shared with other Coalition members as well as Afghan Security Forces.

3) The doctrine develops standard mechanisms for the transmission and retention of lessons learned across the Alliance and ISAF Coalition.

4) The doctrine focuses on counterinsurgency as an inherently long-term commitment.

5) The doctrine focuses on the importance of providing national level guidance on information operations approved by the Alliance and then allowing local commanders freedom of maneuver within this guidance. The days of one-week or longer times between responses to events should be over.

6) The doctrine focuses on developing mechanisms for unity of command and unity of effort under Alliance-led counterinsurgency mechanisms. This should focus on the importance of deployments sans national caveats and the use of a multi-national command structure to which troops are generally subordinate.

7) The doctrine should focus heavily on the importance of host nation security force assistance and particularly on the desired competition and freedom of maneuver of Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams. It should detail their composition and the importance of living, eating, and sleeping with their host nation counterparts.

8) The doctrine develops a mechanism for human terrain analysis. Kip believes the ASCOPE analysis presented in US Civil Affairs doctrine and FM 3-24 is an excellent model.

9) The doctrine focuses on the importance of developing logistical support mechanisms that support simultaneously host nation economic development.

10) The doctrine emphasizes the importance of both warfighting skills and civil affairs capabilities. Particularly it focuses on the importance of dismounted patrolling capabilities while at the same time detailing the need for human intelligence, civil affairs, and political officer capabilities down to the battalion if not the company level.


There are many more, of course. But these are ten of immediate importance that come to mind. Kip is looking forward to learning from the subsequent discussion of this topic.