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January 9, 2011
How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO
By Gareth Porter
Canadian General Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan from February to August 2004, wrote that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan. "Afghanistan has revealed," wrote Hiller, "that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing..."
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The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials concerned with the alliance, according to a U.S. military officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making process.
"NATO's role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about Afghanistan," the officer, who insisted on anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told IPS in an interview.
The
alliance would never have been given such a prominent role in
Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W. Bush administration
wanted no significant U.S. military role there that could interfere with
their plans to take control of Iraq.
That reality gave U.S. officials working on NATO an opening.
Gen.
James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 2003 to
2005, pushed aggressively for giving NATO the primary security role in
Afghanistan, according to the officer.
"Jones sold [Defence
Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld on turning Afghanistan over to NATO," said
the officer, adding that he did so with the full support of Pentagon
officials with responsibilities for NATO. "You have to understand that
the NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon " both in the
Office of the Secretary of Defence and on the Joint Staff," said the
officer.
Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with
American Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid becoming
irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of
the Warsaw Pact. "NATO was in limbo for a bit," he said.
But the 9/11 attacks had offered a new opportunity for NATO to demonstrate its relevance.
The
NATO allies were opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq, but they wanted to
demonstrate their support for stabilising and reconstructing
Afghanistan. Jones prodded NATO member countries to provide troops for
Afghanistan and to extend NATO operations from the north into the west
and eventually to the east and south, where U.S. troops were
concentrated.
That position coincided with the interests of
NATO's military and civilian bureaucrats and those of the military
establishments in the member countries.
But there was one major
problem: public opinion in NATO member countries was running heavily
against military involvement in Afghanistan.
To get NATO allies
to increase their troop presence in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Jones
assured member states that they would only be mopping up after the U.S.
military had defeated the Taliban. On a visit to Afghanistan in August
2004, Jones said, "[W]e should not ever even think that there is going
to be an insurrection of the type that we see in Iraq here. It's just
not going to happen."
Reassured by Washington and by Jones, in
September 2005, NATO defence ministers agreed formally that NATO would
assume command of southern Afghanistan in 2006.
But conflicts
immediately arose between the U.S. and NATO member countries over the
NATO mission in Afghanistan. Britain, Germany, Canada and the
Netherlands had all sold the NATO mission to their publics as
"peacekeeping" or "reconstruction" as distinct from counterinsurgency
war.
When the Bush administration sought to merge the U.S. and
NATO commands in Afghanistan, key allies pushed back, arguing the two
commands had different missions. The French, meanwhile, were convinced
the Bush administration was using NATO troops to fill the gap left by
shifting U.S. troops from Afghanistan to Iraq - a war they strongly
opposed.
The result was that one NATO member state after another
adopted "caveats" that ruled out or severely limited their troops from
actually carrying out combat in Afghanistan.
Even as the Bush
administration was assuring its NATO allies that they would not have to
face a major Taliban uprising, U.S. intelligence was reporting that the
insurgency was growing and would intensify in spring 2006.
Gen.
Karl Eikenberry, who had just arrived as commander of all U.S. troops in
Afghanistan in 2005, and newly appointed U.S. Ambassador Ronald E.
Neumann were warning Washington that the well-publicised domestic
debates in NATO member states over troop commitments were "generating a
perception of NATO political weakness," as Neumann recalls in his
memoirs on Afghanistan published in 2009.
Neumann wrote that
both he and Eikenberry believed "the insurgents would see ISAF's
expansion and the U.S. contraction as the moment to rekindle the war."
But
Eikenberry assured the news media that the insurgency was under
control. In a Dec. 8, 2005 press briefing at the Pentagon, Eikenberry
asserted that the more aggressive Taliban tactics were "very much a sign
of weakness."
Asked if he wasn't concerned that the situation
in Afghanistan was "sliding towards an Iraqi scenario," Eikenberry
replied, "[W]e see no indications that such is the case..."
A
few weeks later the Taliban launched the biggest offensive since its
regime was ousted in 2001, seizing control of much of Helmand, Kandahar
and several other southern provinces.
Eikenberry, clearly under
orders from Rumsfeld, continued to carry out the policy of turning the
south over to NATO in mid-2006. He was rewarded in early 2007 by being
sent to Brussels as deputy chairman of NATO's Military Committee.
Eikenberry
acknowledged in testimony before Congress in February 2007 that the
policy of turning Afghanistan over to NATO was really about the future
of NATO rather than about Afghanistan. He noted the argument that
failure in Afghanistan could "break" NATO, while hailing the new NATO
role in Afghanistan as one that could "make" the alliance.
"The
long view of the Afghanistan campaign," said Eikenberry, "is that it is a
means to continue the transformation of the alliance."
The
Afghanistan mission, Eikenberry said, "could mark the beginning of
sustained NATO efforts to overhaul alliance operational practices in
every domain." Specifically, he suggested that NATO could use Afghan
deployments to press some member nations to carry out "military
modernisation".
But Canadian General Rick Hillier, who commanded
NATO forces in Afghanistan from February to August 2004 and was later
chief of staff of Canadian armed forces from 2005 to 2008, wrote in his
memoir "A Soldier First", published in 2009, that NATO was an
unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
He recalled that when it
formally accepted responsibility for Afghanistan in 2003, NATO had "no
strategy, no clear articulation of what it wanted to achieve" and that
its performance was "abysmal."
Hillier said the situation
"remains unchanged" after several years of NATO responsibility for
Afghanistan. NATO had "started down a road that destroyed much of its
credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every
nation in the alliance," Hillier wrote.
"Afghanistan has revealed," wrote Hiller, "that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing..."
Gareth Porter (born 18 June 1942, Independence, Kansas) is an American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. A strong opponent of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, he has also written on the potential for diplomatic compromise to end or avoid wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Iraq and Iran. He is the author of a history of the origins of the Vietnam War, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
Porter has written regular news reports and news analyses on political, diplomatic and military developments in regard to Middle East conflicts for Inter Press Service since 2005. He was the first journalist to provide a detailed account of the alleged secret Iranian diplomatic proposal to the United States in 2003, and has published an in-depth analysis of an exit strategy for Iraq