   Presencia-Opinión / Europa
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| NATO in Afghanistan: The Wider Picture Por Benjamín Kienzle (Canal Mundo, 02/09/2003) |
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11 August 2003 was a day of historical dimension: For the first time in its 54 years of existence, NATO took on a mission outside of its traditional euro-atlantic operational area. The alliance took command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, whose main tasks –under the mandate of the UN Security Council (Resolutions 1386, 1413 and 1444)– are to ensure a stable environment in Kabul and the surrounding area and to help the Afghan Transitional Authority. Originally, ISAF was established as a multinational force as a consequence of the Bonn Agreement of December 2001. It was led each six months by another nation, first by the United Kingdom, afterwards by Turkey and finally by Germany and the Netherlands. However, Germany and the Netherlands as well as Canada, the next leader, reached the conclusion that the permanent replacements had decreased the effectiveness of the mission, as each six months the various headquarters changed and the personnel had to adopt complex responsibilities from scratch. Therefore, these nations asked the North Atlantic Council to accept the take-over of ISAF by NATO. Yet, these reasons do not explain why NATO took on its first mission outside of Europe. Why did they not ask the UN to transform ISAF into a ‘blue helmet’ mission? In fact, ISAF has already a robust mandate by the Security Council. Moreover, the UN is a complementary organisation, in other words it has both security and economic and social means to address the extensive problems of Afghanistan, whereas NATO is basically a military organisation. A UN mission would have opened also the door for nations outside of the Western world, in particular for Islamic countries. Part of the explanation for the preference for NATO can be found in the speech on 11 August by Minuto Rizzo, NATO’s Deputy Secretary General, in which he said that “this new mission is a reflection of NATO’s ongoing transformation, and resolve, to meet the security challenges of the 21st century.” But what does this ‘ongoing transformation’ mean? The end of the Cold War deprived NATO of the principal justification of its existence, the soviet threat. But both the United States and Europe thought that they would still need NATO, since it had been, and still is, the major transatlantic organisation. Therefore, they began to transform the alliance in order to adjust it to the new post-Cold War world. As the quotation by Minuto Rizzo implies, one of the central transformations of NATO has been the adoption of ‘peace missions’ as the new justification for its existence. These missions began – rather with modest results – in Europe’s backyard, the Balkans, and have expanded now already further. Thus, NATO’s assumption of the command of ISAF is a logical consequence and, in the words of Jack Deverell, General of the Allied Forces North, a “milestone” of the transformation of NATO. However, this event should not be overrated. At a more profound level it shows that NATO is losing its power and influence. The United States were not interested in NATO’s military help during their war in Afghanistan, although, for the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article V, which contains its collective defence provisions. Rather, they preferred to go on war with a ‘coalition of the willing’ – a model that was repeated in Iraq. Besides the unilateralist ideology of the Pentagon, three reasons explain these preferences of the US government: First, from a military point of view, it does not need the Europeans, as its own forces are superior to anything the Europeans can offer. Secondly, the military failure of NATO’s ‘war by committee’ in Kosovo in 1999 served as a warning among the powerful circles in Washington, D.C. Thirdly, the European emancipation in security and defence matters after the Cold War – some EU members began in 1999 to build a (still embryonic and divided) common security policy – has provoked disagreement and disorder among the members of the alliance, the last time in Iraq. The recent enlargement of NATO has heightened this problem, as new members of the old Warsaw Pact have also own and sometimes diverging interests. Moreover, enlargement will continue and could include, in the future, Russia. The conclusion must be that NATO is not a collective defence organisation anymore but a growing security organisation, whose members can only occasionally reach an agreement about military missions, namely when the interests of NATO members coincide like in Afghanistan. In this case, the Europeans could demonstrate their loyalty to the United States without popular opposition in their respective countries. At the same time, this mission guarantees the indirect leadership of the US armed forces, as the mission’s headquarters are the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and the Regional Headquarters Allied Forces North Europe (AFNORTH), both commanded by US generals. Moreover, it is a low intensity mission, in other words only in Kabul, and, therefore, a low cost mission. However, this last point also illustrates that NATO, despite the missions it will occasionally undertake, has lost its power. |
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Benjamín Kienzle, estudiante en prácticas no IGADI. |
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ÚLTIMA REVISIÓN: 04/09/2003 |
