"A Corpse Decomposing"
How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO
By GARETH PORTER
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 me 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 [Defense 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
Defense 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 stabilizing 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 defense 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 modernization".
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
is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of
his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War
in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter01042011.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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