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NATO in Afghanistan

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................ixIntroduction......................................................................11 The Nature of the Atlantic Beast................................................92 A Benevolent Alliance...........................................................253 NATO and Afghanistan............................................................414 Original Sins: A Benevolent Alliance Goes to War, 2001-2005.....................715 Crisis and Comeback: Confronting the Insurgency, 2006-2008......................1116 The Reckoning: Searching for a Strategic Purpose, 2008-2012.....................157Conclusion........................................................................207Notes.............................................................................221Index.............................................................................263

Chapter One

THROUGH HISTORY AND LITERATURE we typically encounter two Afghanistans. One is a type of roundabout for commerce and cultural transactions that originate in East and West and meet in the plains surrounding the Hindu Kush Mountains, notably to the north in the region once known as Bactria. The forebears of Western civilization come from this region, writes Adda Bozeman, and it was a land of crossroads "where conquest was transmuted into coexistence" and "cultural interpenetration and political cooperation." It is a source of inspiration for Afghan politicians today, among them President Karzai. Another Afghanistan is the country impossible to conquer, most vividly illustrated by the January 1842 massacre of the 4,500 British forces retreating from Kabul and the first Anglo-Afghan war and hoping to reach the safe haven of Jalalabad. Legend has it that Ghilzai guerrillas allowed one soldier to live to tell the tale, and though the legend exaggerates British losses it has nourished the idea that foreign powers are destined to fail in Afghanistan. 2 It matters enormously whether we frame NATO's Afghan campaign in light of one of these Afghanistans. If Afghanistan is truly the graveyard of empires, it should not surprise us that NATO has encountered problems, and we should in fact applaud it for doing so well for so long. If Afghanistan holds potential for coexistence and cultural interpenetration, one might instead ask why NATO has made such a mess of it.

It is possible to assume that both Afghanistans are real and important and then to look to NATO's own history to judge the Alliance's performance. From the vantage point of NATO there was no question that operational pressures from the Balkans had caused the Alliance to change. "This ain't your daddy's NATO," is how Lord Robertson, secretary general of NATO from 1999 through 2004, put it. This history tells us that NATO was adaptable, at least to an extent, but it does not suffice as a yardstick for the Afghan campaign. Historical differences are simply too great, even though Balkan and Afghan operations both somehow fit into the wider business model of crisis management and conflict resolution. In the Balkans, NATO began with a peace plan; in Afghanistan, there is no peace agreement. In the Balkans, NATO began with a grand deployment—60,000 in the case of Bosnia in 1995-1996—and drew down this number over time as belligerents grew less belligerent; in Afghanistan, NATO began with a few thousand only to build up beyond 100,000. The Balkans are right next door to NATO territory and logistics; Afghanistan is landlocked and thousands of miles of away.

Some of the best books on the Afghan war that began in 2001 are cognizant of the dual nature of Afghanistan, its potential and pitfalls, but they pay scant attention to NATO. One of these books is written by the regional expert and journalist Ahmed Rashid. It is not an upbeat assessment. The international community, including NATO but with a notable focus on the United States, has not grasped Afghanistan's potential for progress and as a consequence has nourished the forces that make Afghanistan a graveyard of empires. Rashid's message is that Western policy needs to be less focused on hunting bad guys and more focused on empowering good guys. This liberal message reverberates through Seth Jones's equally insightful work on the Afghan campaign. Seth Jones focuses on the United States, though, and Jones is not particularly happy with his country's ability to handle Afghanistan. NATO is present in the book but not centrally so, and it appears mainly in the context of allied disputes and bickering. It is one face of NATO but far from the only one. Two big overview books should be mentioned: Jason Burke, a Guardian correspondent, brings together a number of campaigns, conflicts, and tensions in what he calls the 9/11 wars, and Peter Tomsen, former special envoy to the Afghan resistance, provides an admirable overview of Afghanistan's wars. Neither makes the Alliance his subject matter but both are excellent books. Tomsen's book tends to read history to derive policy implications for the United States, though, and Burke's book is more contemporary and wider in its gaze and assessment and ultimately of greater importance for observers of the Atlantic Alliance. Britain's former ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is fond of allied disputes and especially the frustrations that American planning—or the lack thereof—can engender among allies and himself in particular, perhaps. Cowper-Coles's strong message is that counterinsurgency (COIN) is a means, not an end, and that the COIN surge of 2009-2010 did not sufficiently define the ends of the campaign. His book deals squarely with the predominance of American thinking that came with the surge, as well as British Afghan politics, and it has become a reference point in the debate on what is wrong with the campaign, but it does not tell us why the United States, much less NATO as a whole, has failed—by Cowper-Coles's yardstick—to grasp the nature of the campaign. Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, British lecturers of defense studies and history, seem to tackle NATO head-on in their book on "how the West lost its way." It is a smooth narrative of the war up to 2011 and a stinging critique of Western strategy. Like Cowper-Coles, they take the Western allies to task for mistaking means and ends—COIN is not strategy—and claim, moreover, that NATO has been obsessed by its own internal affairs as opposed to Afghanistan. This part of the story is incomplete. NATO has been able to focus on Afghanistan and in fact strengthen its grasp of the campaign. Moreover, NATO shortcomings result not so much from allied disagreement—often noted—but from the way in which they have framed the campaign mistakenly, which in turn has to do with how common liberal values have become the means for managing Alliance diversity and, in consequence, how NATO's campaign has developed within a fixed conceptual space ill suited to the realities of Afghanistan and the dynamic and innovative character of the adversary.

WHAT IS NATO?

NATO was never a congregation of fully aligned nations. It remains an amalgamation of nations with long histories and national interests within distinct geographical confines—be it the Arctic, the Baltic, Eastern Europe,...