Pubdate: Mon, 31 Jul 2006
Source: Financial Times (UK)
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2006
Contact:  http://www.ft.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/154
Authors: Ian Bickerton, Daniel Dombey, Stephen Fidler and Rachel Morarjee
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

Why Stabilising Afghanistan Will Be A Stiff Test For Nato

The world's most successful military alliance takes on a new role in 
Afghanistan today - and it has its work cut out.

Nato, the organisation that prides itself on having won the cold war, 
is assuming responsibility for the country's perilous south at a 
critical time. Soldiers from Nato countries have already died in 
preparatory operations and much is at stake for Afghanistan itself.

Five years after the fundamentalist Taliban government was toppled by 
a US-led invasion, many Afghans are yet to see any improvement in 
their lives. The country faces a Taliban resurgence and other 
long-standing problems remain pressing, such as the power of warlords 
and heavy economic dependence on poppies destined for heroin 
production. And while reconstruction in other parts of the country 
has progressed, it is in the south that such problems are concentrated.

"It was better when the Taliban were in power. There is no peace, no 
security. Things have got much worse since last year," said Haji 
Faeda Mohammed Khan, an elder from Kajiki district in Helmand, the 
southern province that has seen heavy recent fighting.

The handover also constitutes what some people see as an existential 
test for the alliance. When the US went into Afghanistan in 2001, the 
Bush administration spurned Nato's offer of help on the ground, 
relying instead on an ad hoc "coalition of the willing". Many US 
officials remain sceptical about Nato's capabilities and usefulness. 
The mission in Afghanistan almost certainly represents the 26-member 
alliance's toughest challenge yet.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Natosecretary-general, agrees that the 
alliance has been presented with a huge task. "This is the most 
complex and perhaps the most challenging mission that Nato has ever 
taken on," he said in an interview with the FT last week. "There are 
two reasons why we have to succeed. First, to prevent Afghanistan 
from becoming once again the home of a terrorist group that threatens 
not only Afghanistan but the entire world. And second, to prevent the 
kind of massive human rights abuses that this country suffered under 
the Taliban when it was in charge."

Is this a struggle that Nato can win given that, in the five years 
since September 11, the US has patently failed to pacify the country? 
And what is really at stake in this perilous mission for the alliance 
and for the west as a whole?

Until now, the alliance has only been present in the relatively 
placid north and west of the country, as well as in Kabul, the 
capital. But today, following a low-profile ceremony, responsibility 
for the unruly south, where the bitterest fighting is now taking 
place, will pass into Nato's hands. If things go to plan, the 
alliance will take control of the whole of Afghanistan by November, 
when the leaders of the alliance gather in Riga for a summit.

But the mission - technically one of stabilisation - will confront 
some very tough facts on the ground. Mr de Hoop Scheffer explains 
Nato's goal as helping the Afghan government "exercise control over 
its whole territory". This he distinguishes from Operation Enduring 
Freedom, the continuing mission of the US-led coalition in the 
country to hunt down and destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The emphasis of the Nato operation, by contrast, is on reconstruction 
and winning hearts and minds - which means that the alliance's task 
is neither a straightforward military mission nor a long-term bid to 
bring western standards to Afghanistan.

Yet Nato ground troops will be required to operate in an active 
conflict zone. It is not clear that the difficulties of the mission 
were anticipated. In April John Reid, then UK defence secretary, told 
British troops in Afghanistan: "We are in the south to help and 
protect the Afghan people reconstruct their own economy and 
democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years' time 
without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction."

Since then, six British soldiers have died in fighting. Indeed, 
despite the formal mandate of stabilisation, military analysts say 
that, in practice, Nato troops will find themselves deeply involved 
in counter-terrorism and anti-insurgency work. This is tacitly 
admitted by Mr de Hoop Scheffer: "The spoilers will be dealt with 
robustly. What label you would like to glue on it is another matter."

But the tension between war-fighting and reconstruction in 
Afghanistan was at the heart of a series of debates within the 
alliance after it established a presence in the country in 2003. 
BenoA(R)t d'Aboville, the former French ambassador to Nato, waged a 
long campaign against Washington's plans for the alliance in 
Afghanistan. He argued that the alliance's Provincial Reconstruction 
Teams in the country risked making the same mistakes as French troops 
in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, who learnt the hard way that 
breaking down suspected insurgents' doors in the morning made it 
difficult to build bridges in the afternoon.

Nato nations have not yet dispelled all such doubts, despite reaching 
a higher level of consensus over the task facing them in Afghanistan. 
In February a junior Dutch coalition party almost brought down the 
country's government over its objections that the mission was not 
about reconstruction, which it believed would be impossible in a war zone.

Today's handover of authority will see Nato's numbers in Afghanistan 
increase to almost 18,000 as the alliance's command structure takes 
responsibility for more than 7,000 soldiers in the south, including 
the British Canadian and Dutch contingents flown in for the purpose 
earlier this year.

The next phase in the alliance's expansion - known in Nato parlance 
as stage four - would see the bulk of some 16,500 soldiers in the 
US-led coalition in the east of the country also transferred to 
Nato's command. Mr de Hoop Scheffer wants this to happen by the 
November summit. But the US insists that it will not hand over 
authority for its troops to Nato unless the alliance shows its mettle 
in the current stage.

"We need to see how stage three goes before we make any decisions on 
the timing," says a senior Nato diplomat, emphasising the need for 
Nato to be an effective fighting force that works well together as 
well as with the Afghan government.

The diplomat adds that Nato has recently made "some progress" in 
moving troops across Afghanistan to assist fellow Nato soldiers even 
if they come from different countries. "It's really, really important 
that people don't say: 'This is my square of the patchwork quilt and 
I'm not going over the line.' Afghanistan does not lend itself to 
that kind of inflexibility," she says.

But Nato is a 57-year-old alliance in which big decisions are made by 
committee. By definition, it has less flexibility than an ad hoc 
coalition and much less than a single-nation fighting force.

Although Nato haggled over the terms of the expansion of the mission 
for over a year, the debate was often Brussels-focused, dealing with 
the US and France's concerns over how command of the two concurrent 
operations should be "double-hatted", rather than examining the 
challenges on the ground.

Nato's deployments in the Balkans - a less hazardous environment for 
the troops - have been plagued by a host of national caveats, which 
severely limited the work that certain national forces could 
undertake and rendered some contingents operationally almost useless. 
Scarred by that experience, Nato officials say these caveats have 
been substantially reduced. Those that remain are mostly 
"capabilities-based", says the senior diplomat, meaning national 
contingents are mainly limited by physical constraints - such as a 
lack of night-flying capability - rather than by any politically 
motivated restrictions.

Nato also has undoubted strengths. "It has procedures and standards 
that allow a lot of countries to click into place and work together," 
says Tim Garden, a British member of the House of Lords with 
expertise in military matters. He adds that the alliance can also 
call non-member countries into theatre, as is the case with the 
37-nation mission in Afghanistan.

But there are other limitations. Some observers are worried that 
troops may be rotated in and out too quickly, giving local tribal 
leaders little incentive to throw in their lot with Nato. "You get to 
know the local warlord and then you're gone," says one.

In a bid to address this, assignments in the south have been for 
spells of at least two years for big contributors. But there can 
still be frequent rotations of specific troop contingents, such as 
the Dutch, whose soldiers will spend only four-month tours in bases 
in the country.

There are also concerns about Afghanistan's intrinsic challenges. The 
country is made up of disparate ethnic groups, has been battered by 
almost three decades of war and has a topography seemingly made for 
guerrilla operations. The mountains and remote plains make the 
establishment of state institutions intensely difficult. As a result, 
Afghanistan has long been terrain for the drugs industry - still the 
mainstay of the economy.

There is a tension between destroying poppy fields - thereby 
depriving the Taliban and other adversaries of funding - and winning 
the hearts and minds of a population with few other means of support. 
But the strategy also suffers from finger-pointing: the government of 
Hamid Karzai in Kabul, ostensibly responsible for counter-narcotics 
strategy, has done little and in turn accuses the west of not doing 
enough to provide farmers with alternative livelihoods.

This is one illustration of a fundamental problem for Nato: the lack 
of capacity within the Afghan government that makes it a weak 
partner, according to some diplomats and officials. And if the main 
interlocutor inside the country is weak, some Nato officials and 
diplomats also say the international support for the country has been 
inadequate. Nato's secretary-general concedes that without outside 
help, the alliance cannot hope to succeed.

Nato and US officials do little to disguise their belief that 
Pakistan could do much more to crack down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda 
leadership they believe is hiding just across the border from eastern 
Afghanistan.

And without more investment and training from bodies such as the 
United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union, the 
reconstruction mission seems doomed to fail. The world may - once 
again - pay a high price for neglecting Afghanistan.

"If it is not a combined and joint activity of the international 
community, we have a problem," Mr de Hoop Scheffer says.

His struggle to increase international commitment faces formidable 
obstacles. Further international foreign investment will depend on 
the stabilisation of Afghanistan - a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

The alliance is no longer the guarantor of western Europe's 
territorial security against a Soviet threat. Nor is it likely to be 
used in European wars, as with Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. 
Instead, its role is now one of making perilous countries safer, 
building up institutions and wrapping states and territories into the 
western bloc.

Nowhere is that more important than in Afghanistan. "I do not think 
Nato's survival is at stake but if you say it is very important for 
the further development and the credibility of the Nato alliance, 
that's quite true," says Mr de Hoop Scheffer.

"The day that the international community packs up and leaves, the 
next thing would be a civil war," says Nader Nadery, head of the 
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "We really need the 
troops. If they were to leave, the Taliban would return and al-Qaeda 
would return."

If Nato fails in Afghanistan, much else will also be damaged - not 
just US plans but also the military reputation of many European 
nations, Washington's readiness to engage in military multilateralism 
and the prestige and clout of the west as a whole.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman