Also In This Issue Related stories are available to subscribers only: Q&A: Beyond The North Atlantic Related Resources On NationalJournal.com National Journal Cover Story: "Charm Offensive" (2/18/05) · National Journal: "Washington on the Senne" (2/18/05) · National Journal: "NATO Metamorphosis" (2/8/02) · National Journal: "NATO Is Too Busy To Be Irrelevant" (2/8/02) · Well-Read Wonk: "Opening NATO's Door" (1/23/03) · Poll Track: National Polling On NATO (6/13/99) · [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair Discuss the Role of NATO at Brussels (2/22/05) · Remarks by President Bush and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the White House (11/11/04)/A> · NATO Statement Invoking Article Five of Its Charter in Response to 9/11 Attacks (9/15/01) ·

By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 7, 2006

BRUSSELS -- When the history of the West's long war with violent Islamic extremism is finally written, the current period of turmoil and setbacks may be marked as decisive. In the past year, a radical ideologue has risen to power in Tehran, proposing to wipe Israel off the map and provoking a showdown with the international community over Iran's possible quest for nuclear weapons. In the Palestinian territories, democratic elections swept the Islamist militant group Hamas into power. In Iraq, a badly stretched U.S. military and its coalition partners have proven incapable of stemming the mounting sectarian violence pushing that nation toward civil war.

In Afghanistan, U.S. and NATO forces have confronted a resurgent Taliban and a marked increase in suicide bombings in recent months that bear the indelible signature of Al Qaeda. Both groups and their fugitive leaders are thought to have found sanctuary in the lawless tribal lands of neighboring Pakistan -- a Muslim country and the possessor of nuclear weapons that remains one successful assassination attempt away from chaos and potential radicalization.

In Europe, Qaeda-affiliated terrorist cells have struck repeatedly since 9/11, with major attacks in Madrid, London, and Istanbul. More recently, France was forced to declare a state of emergency late last year to stanch countrywide riots by its disaffected Muslim youth, and cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that were published in a Danish newspaper recently sparked worldwide protests from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur. Those protests left 11 people dead and included the first-ever mob attack on NATO troops in Afghanistan, where five Norwegian soldiers were injured in the northern town of Maimana.

Confronted by these divergent crises, a Western alliance already weakened by divisions over the Iraq war might have retrenched or splintered even further. Instead, Washington and the capitals of Europe have responded to the mounting pressure by forging a degree of strategic consensus not seen since shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The essence of that accord is the belated recognition that united the Western alliance stands, divided it could fall.

"I think it goes back to President Bush's visit to Brussels in February 2005, which the media underestimated in terms of its impact, because that was a rather decisive moment of outreach," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO secretary general, told National Journal. Along with many senior officials and security experts, de Hoop Scheffer believes that a major miscalculation in the prelude to the Iraq war was Washington's failure to use the North Atlantic Council -- the main decision-making body at NATO -- to try to reach a strategic consensus among the Western democracies. By contrast, senior U.S. officials and security experts have constantly shuttled to Brussels over the past year.

"One of the problems in the run-up to Iraq was that the Atlantic Council was underused for political consultations," de Hoop Scheffer said. "We don't always have to agree, because 26 democracies will argue and disagree from time to time, but since Bush's visit last year, the political dialogue at NATO has deepened considerably. And because the United States' participation is absolutely necessary to address any crisis or hot spot around the world -- be it Iran, or proliferation, or the fight against terror -- then NATO is the only place to have that political and military discussion," he continued. "It has led to a common recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that if we don't face these threats and challenges together, well, can we face them at all?"

Strategic Convergence
Signs of greater strategic cooperation are evident on numerous fronts.

The West's recent response to Iran's nuclear brinkmanship has so far stood in stark contrast to its response to the Iraq war, when France and Germany eventually sided with Russia and against the United States. Recently, Paris and Berlin have joined the United States and Great Britain in taking the crisis to the U.N. Security Council to bring greater pressure on Iran, despite the resistance of Russia and China. Meanwhile, Western nations have largely spoken with one voice in denouncing Russia for temporarily cutting off European energy supplies over a price dispute with Ukraine in January. And within the alliance, members have been offering blunter criticism about Russian President Vladimir Putin's backtracking on democratic reforms.

In response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a flash point of trans-Atlantic tensions in Bush's first term, both the United States and its allies have so far remained steadfast in their mutual insistence that Hamas must renounce violence and recognize Israel before it can be considered a viable partner in the peace process. Regarding Asia, in contrast to last year, there has been very little talk in Europe about the European Union lifting its arms embargo on China, something Washington has fought vigorously.

"There is a definite feeling across the European Union and in European capitals that for all its complexity, the trans-Atlantic relationship has improved markedly in both style and substance over the past year," said a knowledgeable E.U. official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "When Bush came to Brussels last year and visited European Union headquarters for the first time, we understood that it was a big gesture and that we needed to seize America's outstretched hand."

Since Bush's visit, the senior E.U. official noted, the United States and Europe have not only narrowed their differences on Iran and the China arms embargo; they've also worked together on crises in Lebanon and Darfur, Sudan, and helped to bolster Ukraine's nascent democracy. "We haven't reached decisive breakthroughs on many of those fronts, but that's not because of any rivalry between the United States and Europe," the official said. "It's because these are intrinsically very difficult matters."

By far the most remarkable display of allied resolve has been NATO's decision to steadily assume greater control of military operations in Afghanistan. In the midst of the cartoon-driven riots and some of the fiercest fighting to date with Taliban forces, the Dutch parliament voted on February 2 to send 1,400 more troops to NATO's International Security and Assistance Force, which operates in Afghanistan under a U.N. mandate. Along with thousands of additional British and Canadian troops, the Dutch force will soon spearhead the riskiest and most ambitious operation in NATO's history as the alliance pushes into the nation's volatile southern region.

As part of that "Stage 3" expansion, NATO plans to nearly double its troop levels in Afghanistan (from 9,000 to approximately 17,000) and to increase its area of operations from 50 percent to 75 percent of the country. If the subsequent "Stage 4" expansion is completed as expected, the alliance's troop levels would increase to as many as 25,000, with operations spread over the entire country, including the eastern border area with Pakistan where resistance to the Afghan government in Kabul is strongest. Not coincidentally, the United States now plans to reduce its separate "Operation Enduring Freedom" force in Afghanistan by 4,000 troops (out of 18,000 today).

"What NATO is doing is huge, and not just for the alliance and for Afghanistan itself -- it's also huge for the trans-Atlantic relationship," said Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO. "Everyone understands that southern Afghanistan is dangerous. This is not blue-hat peacekeeping. You can get shot at, and you had better be ready to come back at those doing the shooting."

A Risky Plunge
Nuland views the recent lengthy debate in the Dutch parliament over the expanded NATO mission as helpful in marshaling political will in Europe. "What happened with the Netherlands debate, which was watched very closely by the wider European public, was a reaffirmation that what happens in Afghanistan is of manifest security importance to Europe," she said, noting that an overwhelming majority in the Dutch parliament eventually endorsed the deployment. "If nobody were to stand up to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan went south again, everyone understands that the threat they pose could eventually roll across the plains and into the towns and cities of Europe. So we've had a convergence of views that this is the right place to put NATO's blood and treasure on the line."

Like many senior officials in Brussels, Nuland believes that Afghanistan will prove to be the crucible for decisively transforming NATO from the strictly defensive and static alliance of the Cold War to one able to "project stability" far from European borders, a metamorphosis long championed by U.S. officials. With each stage of its expansion into Afghanistan, NATO moves a step further from the divisive debates of the 1990s about whether it had any business operating outside the European theater. As part of their current move south in Afghanistan, NATO forces have also adopted a wider concept of operations that goes well beyond peacekeeping. Those efforts include training the Afghan army and supporting the Afghan government's anti-narcotics offensive in a nation that accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the world's opium production -- much of which ends up in Europe.

"NATO's spectrum of operations in Afghanistan now covers everything from potential high-end combat all the way to training up local security forces," Nuland said. "So NATO is now making adjustments in Afghanistan that mirror what a transformed U.S. military has done to adjust to 21st-century operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the world."

What worries some longtime NATO observers, however, is that the alliance is staking its fundamental credibility on a mission for which it remains ill-prepared. A recent study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London pointed out that since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, key NATO allies -- including Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain -- have actually cut their active-duty troop levels. In that same period, U.S. defense spending has grown from 3 percent of gross domestic product to 3.7 percent. The other NATO nations have cut defense spending collectively from 2 percent to 1.8 percent of GDP. Only seven nations now meet NATO's official goal of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. That chronic funding shortfall has left well-documented gaps in NATO's strategic and tactical airlift, airborne reconnaissance and surveillance, precision-strike weapons, state-of-the-art communications, and modern logistics infrastructure.

"The politicians prefer to gloss over it, but there is still tremendous suspicion of American leadership of NATO in European public opinion as a result of the Iraq war, and that makes it very difficult to gain support for defense-budget increases that will allow NATO to play the role of globo-cop," said Fraser Cameron, a senior adviser at the European Policy Center in Brussels. "And NATO's Afghanistan mission is only in its infancy. Who knows whether the member nations will have the stomach to hang in there for many years, if not decades, especially when body bags start coming home?"

Test Of Wills
Even those who support NATO's expanded mission in Afghanistan often note that in both attitude and culture, the alliance retains much of the defensive posture of the Cold War. As observers discovered during riots last year in Kosovo, many NATO nations secretly place "caveats" on the use of their forces in the field that greatly restrict them. Eight years into the Kosovo deployment, national forces operating under NATO's flag have also retained separate logistical pipelines to their individual countries, leading to an expensive and inefficient duplication of effort.

"When you visit NATO operations in Kosovo, you see 16 separate intelligence cells, 15 canteens, numerous hospitals, and no one helps each other or eats the other guy's food. It's stupid!" a senior NATO official said. "My favorite example is the Italians building a hospital in Herat, Afghanistan, at a cost of $3 million, and then packing it up and bringing it home so that the nation taking its place had to start from scratch! We have to change this mind-set so that when NATO decides to do something as an alliance of 26 nations, we only do it once together rather than 26 separate times."

On a recent trip to Afghanistan to observe NATO troops, Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution witnessed that old attitude firsthand. He was stranded in Herat when one of only two C-130s devoted to NATO operations developed mechanical problems. Asked why the other aircraft could not be used, NATO commanders admitted that the nation that owned it had included a caveat restricting the plane from flying at night.

"When you go to Afghanistan, you can't help but be impressed by NATO's admirable commitment to that country, with over 37 different nations working under the alliance flag to make life better for the Afghan people," said Gordon, the director of Brookings's Center on the United States and Europe. "I also couldn't help getting a queasy feeling, however, thinking about whether NATO truly has the capability and staying power to see the Afghan mission through, especially if the going gets tough."

NATO leaders in Afghanistan know that Taliban and Qaeda fighters are intent on testing the alliance's will by increasingly adopting methods honed by the insurgency in Iraq. For starters, they point to a marked increase in violence targeted at Westerners. But they also note that of the nearly 30 suicide attacks against NATO forces since the Afghan mission began, two-thirds have taken place within the past six months. Since April 1, 2005, 127 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan, more than double the number in 2003 or 2004. On March 29, Taliban fighters mounted a rare coordinated assault on a base used by multinational forces in southern Afghanistan. An American and a Canadian soldier died in the fighting.

"We understand that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are trying to send the message, with this increase in suicide bombings and violence, that if NATO sends troops to the south, they will kill them," said Hikmet Cetin, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan. "If NATO were to flinch or lose its nerve in the face of such tactics, we would sacrifice our credibility. And if we leave Afghanistan before the job is done, the question will immediately arise: What is the purpose of NATO?"

Farther Afield
When Marine Corps Gen. David Jones became supreme allied commander, Europe, in January 2003, the alliance was in the midst of one of the worst crises in its history. The allies were so bitterly divided in the run-up to the Iraq war that a simple request by member-nation Turkey for air defenses in anticipation of Iraqi missile attacks paralyzed NATO for weeks. Some observers doubted that an alliance built on the principle of unanimous consent and shared values would ever fully recover from the Iraq debacle.

However, after leaders on both sides of the Atlantic stared into the Iraq abyss and stepped back, the alliance recommitted to finding common strategic ground, according to numerous NATO officials. That recommitment, in turn, ushered in a period of almost unprecedented change for an organization known for its cautious, often lowest-common-denominator approach.

"I can tell you when I arrived at NATO, the only operation really on the agenda was the Balkans, and no one was even talking about Afghanistan," Jones said during an interview in his office at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). "Now, three years later, NATO is about to undertake its most ambitious and difficult mission in Afghanistan, and at great strategic distance. And as long as we keep in mind that this is a challenging mission with an element of risk, I think NATO has the political will and military capability to succeed."

Although Afghanistan remains NATO's No. 1 priority, a visit to the Strategic Direction Center at SHAPE, in Mons, Belgium, underscores Jones's point that the alliance's ambitions stretch much farther. Video and computer screens in the center provide windows into NATO missions on five continents, including peacekeeping in Kosovo; maritime counter-terrorism operations in the Mediterranean; logistical assistance to African Union peacekeepers in Darfur; an officer-training program in Iraq; and a recently completed disaster-relief effort in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, an exercise planned for this summer on the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa, will serve as the coming-out party for the new NATO Response Force, a 25,000-troop unit capable of deploying on only a few days' notice -- virtually the speed of light under traditional NATO standards. The headquarters element of the unit passed a major test last year, when it oversaw NATO operations after a devastating earthquake in Pakistan. The alliance transported more than 1,750 tons of supplies to remote mountain villages and evacuated more than 7,650 victims.

Historic Crossroads
The Strategic Direction Center is also a good place to gauge the significant distance between NATO's lofty ambitions and its current reach. The alliance was able to deploy troops to Pakistan, for instance, only because an already stressed U.S. Transportation Command contributed 10 strategic airlift flights to the Reaction Force (that assistance was still not enough to complete the job).

"The No. 1 'lesson learned' from Pakistan was that NATO badly needs its own strategic lift," said Marine Lt. Col. Chris Pollard, a deputy in the direction center. "In trying to lease airlift from Russia and Ukraine, NATO found itself in a bidding war with the United Nations and various nongovernmental organizations who were also trying to reach Pakistan to help. Some NATO nations were even bidding against each other to try and lease aircraft! So we have an acute shortage of strategic airlift."

The dramatic increase in NATO operations around the world in recent years has also stressed a workforce that has shrunk as a result of tight budgets. "Since 2004, we have cut 30 percent of our manpower across the NATO command structure, even while real-world missions have snowballed," said British army Col. David Short, director of the Strategic Direction Center. "Somewhere in that dynamic of constantly trying to do more with less, there are real risks involved."

As supreme allied commander for Europe, Jones speaks out often and publicly about NATO's funding shortfall, as well as the dangers of a collective outlook that is still defensive and reactive in a world of rapidly evolving threats and adaptive enemies. Especially in regard to Afghanistan, he appreciates that real-world operations will likely expose NATO's weaknesses in ways that member nations can simply no longer ignore.

"There's a curious divergence in Europe right now, and within NATO itself," Jones said. "As we've clearly seen over the last three years, there's the political will for the alliance to do much more, but there's an equal and offsetting political desire to cut defense budgets. At some point, if we don't reconcile those impulses, there's a train wreck out there waiting to happen. At the same time, there's a dramatic change in mind-set and culture under way. NATO is truly at a historic crossroads, and I think it's choosing the right path. If the alliance can accomplish everything that is now on its agenda, it will be a defining moment, and a tremendous relief for the United States, as NATO comes on line as an even stronger partner."

When the history of the long war with Islamic extremism is finally written, it may reflect that in this period of disorder and uncertainty the alliance of democracies rediscovered some common strategic ground, at least for a time. Such unity, though, may not necessarily be a prelude to victory. Much as the United States did in staking its flag in Iraq, NATO has now wagered its credibility on success in Afghanistan. If either venture should decisively fail, this period of history may mark the point when the West began a long and collective retreat in its confrontation with radical Islam.

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