It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Who would have predicted that the future of Nato — the most successful military alliance the world has ever seen — would come to depend on what happens in lawless Afghanistan in the next two years? Yet that is what officials on both sides of the Atlantic are saying as the alliance faces up to the reality of its ambition, announced in February 2005, to take on a bigger role in Afghanistan.

The Dutch parliament is now threatening to pull the plug on the Netherlands' 1,200-strong contribution to the expanded mission. The Netherlands is still gripped by the humiliation its country's troops suffered almost 10 years ago when they were taken hostage and then had to stand by as Muslims were herded out of Srebrenica to a massacre. Other European allies are nervous about what they may have let themselves in for during the bullish period of a year ago. Then it seemed like offering to help in Afghanistan would be a good way to mend fences with the U.S. over Iraq.

Nato has been running the International Security Assistance Force (isaf) since 2003. The plan now is to boost isaf to 15,000 troops and allow some U.S. forces to withdraw. The expanded Nato force will add a further six provinces to the 13 in which they presently operate; set up four new Provincial Reconstruction Teams or prts (the units that try to build civil administration in local areas); take some prts over from the Americans; and move the weight of the whole operation out of Kabul and the north toward the less stable west and south, where it will nudge up against the bigger U.S.-led counterterrorism operations in provinces like Kandahar and Zabul. By the end of this year isaf's "footprint" will cover 75% of a country whose security is, at best, precarious and, by most accounts, rapidly deteriorating.

But with Europeans getting the jitters, isaf may have to rely more on the Canadians and those non-Nato nations such as Australia which will also contribute to the operation. No wonder Washington is, yet again, exasperated. Only the U.K., which will lead the force into the field, is enthusiastic about the idea — and even British military officers are privately skeptical about the vague objectives and complex command arrangements they have to work with.

It was always a gamble to make Afghanistan the symbol of a reinvigorated Atlantic alliance. The country is far from the immediate interests of most European states. Over the last 150 years, soldiers from many nations have left their bones on its bleak mountainsides. It probably achieved its greatest unity under the Taliban's Islamo-fascism. Narcotics remain the lifeblood of economic activity, and warlordism rules everywhere outside Kabul. But this next phase of military operations in Afghanistan is especially problematic, because while Nato's expanding mission has tactical similarities to the continuing U.S. mission there, fundamentally, the two could not be more different. The U.S. has 19,000 troops in the country, devoted to a particular brand of counterterrorism: search-and-destroy sweeps, intelligence gathering, infiltration, targeted assassination. The Americans have never been keen on "nation building." They have run prts, but only as a second string to the imperative of counterterrorism.

The Europeans, on the other hand, are only there for nation building, albeit in a muscular way. They see this as their particular contribution to the long-term eradication of jihadist terrorism. In any case, they carry out their counterterrorism differently from the U.S., led more by police than soldiers. Europeans worry that their new role in 75% of the country will just encourage the U.S. to concentrate even more exclusively on counterterrorist search-and-destroy operations, undermining the "softly, softly" approach the European troops are equipped to handle — indeed inviting them to become targets. Of course, as in Iraq, effective local security forces might get foreign soldiers off the hook. But the new Afghan army of 26,000 is unreliable, and the new police force of 56,000 is 90% illiterate. Even more worryingly, some Iraqi terrorist tactics, such as suicide bombings and roadside explosives, have been showing up more frequently in Afghanistan.

So what started as a clever political sidestep to allow the Europeans to make up with Washington without going to Iraq now seems a lot less clever. It may end up doing more harm than good — and leave the alliance looking, once again, for a viable reason to exist.