Afghanistan and NATO

Where the sniping has to stop
Feb 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition


Infighting is not helping Afghanistan

MIGHT Afghanistan’s “forgotten war” yet defeat the most successful military alliance in history? Last year saw NATO-led troops engage in their deadliest fighting yet in support of the government of Hamid Karzai. The winter snows that blanket Afghanistan’s mountains have for now quietened the frontlines. But roadside bombings and suicide attacks—tactics the Taliban have picked up with increasingly lethal effect from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq—still take their toll among Western forces and ordinary Afghans.

Yet it is not the spectre of military defeat that haunts NATO. It is a failure of political will. This week, as alliance defence ministers gathered in Vilnius, and Condoleezza Rice, America’s secretary of state, and David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, dropped by unannounced in Afghanistan, all could agree that the job of stabilising the country needs more troops and a better co-ordinated reconstruction effort. But the political sniping over who should be doing what has reached an intensity that only the Taliban can celebrate.

More soldiers will turn up before the snows melt and before NATO leaders gather for a summit in Bucharest in April. America is sending an extra 3,200 marines; a report by two prominent former officials, Thomas Pickering and General James Jones, recommends deploying still more as troop levels drop in Iraq. Poland hints it may add to the more than 1,000 soldiers it deployed last year. France has just sent more aircraft, may soon send a few extra troops to help train and fight alongside Afghan army units, and is thinking of other ways it might help. The fresh troops Britain is shortly to rotate in will have more armoured vehicles and helicopters.

The trouble is that “there are certain allies that are in much more dangerous parts of the country,” as Miss Rice put it not-so-diplomatically this week—and some who just won’t go. Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, the NATO members, along with America, bearing the brunt of the fighting in the volatile south and east of the country, would welcome some relief. A report commissioned by Canada’s government recommended last month that the hard-pressed Canadian contingent in Kandahar province stay on beyond 2009 only if another 1,000 soldiers can be found from somewhere to help out. No volunteers so far, though Canada’s withdrawal would be a serious blow.






Germany is under greatest pressure to help: its soldiers are confined by parliamentary edict to the safer north. Some German commentators fret that this is badly straining NATO and putting the country’s loyalty to the alliance in doubt. But few politicians are ready to make the public case for deploying forces to the more dangerous south.

America’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, also gets a medal for damaging alliance solidarity. He infuriated both Britain and the Netherlands by suggesting that European troops operating in the south were not much good at counter-insurgency tactics. Yet even he knows that one thing worse than fighting a war by coalition is having to fight without one.

Another blow was President Karzai’s decision to veto the appointment of Britain’s Paddy Ashdown as the UN’s much-needed co-ordinator of the disparate international reconstruction effort. Mr Karzai was reportedly miffed at British plans to entice some Taliban to camps, offering them basic military equipment if they would join the fight against extremists—rather as America has been doing with Sunni groups in Iraq.

But Afghanistan’s problems—desperate poverty, fragile and corrupt government, and a drug-financed insurgency—can’t wait for prickly politicians to sort out their differences. It is those politicians, rather than the troops battling the Taliban, who are courting defeat.

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Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.