Europe's take on Nato's Afghan role

Rather than simply parroting the Bush Administration's increasingly hysterical line, I've been looking at the European position. Yesterday I posted about Spain refusing to send more troops. I've posted about why Germany, Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands won't send any troops. Italy is mired in parliamentary gridlock ahead of the April elections, and is reluctant to spend any more money on the disaster anyway. Belgium has made promises of a small temporary (4 month) deployment some months from now. That leaves everyone looking at France, who has made such a show of being Bush's best buddy of late. That's right, we're now depending on the French Army, the country whose military prowess got us into Vietnam, to save the day and cough up enough troops that Canada will stay in the fight until after Bush leaves office.

Bush is irritably demanding somebody in Europe come up with a thousand troops, and soon. Not that 1000 new troops will make any difference, but that is the number needed to keep Canada's 2500 troops in Kandahar or else they will withdraw in January 2009.

The European view of the NATO/Afghan crisis:

While Gates and the Harper government were pleading for more troops, the commander of the 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, landed a bombshell. If proper U.S. military counter-insurgency doctrine were followed, McNeill admitted, the U.S. and NATO would need 400,000 troops to defeat Pashtun tribal resistance in Afghanistan.

When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, they deployed 160,000 troops and about 200,000 Afghan Communist troops -- yet failed to crush the mostly Pashtun resistance. Now, the U.S. and NATO are trying the same mission with only 66,000 troops, backed by local mercenaries grandly styled the Afghan National Army.

The hunters are becoming the hunted. Cutting off invaders' supply lines is a time-honoured Pashtun military tactic. They used it againstAlexander the Great, the British and Soviets, and are at it again.

What angry Gates fails to see is that by pushing NATO into a distant Asian war without political purpose or seeming end, he is endangering the very alliance that is the bedrock of U.S. power in Europe.

Europeans increasingly ask why they need the U.S.-dominated military alliance, a Cold War relic, in which they continue to play foot soldiers to America's atomic knights, to paraphrase the late German statesman, Franz Josef Strauss.

Why does the rich, powerful European Union even need NATO any more? The Soviet threat is gone -- at least for now. Nuclear-armed France and Britain are quite capable of defending Europe against outside threats. Why can't the new European Defence Force take over NATO's role of defending Europe and protecting EU interests?

In short, most Europeans see no benefit in playing junior members in an alliance whose historic time has passed and that serves primarily as an instrument of U.S. power. Washington's sharpest geopolitical thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls NATO a "stepping stone" the U.S. uses to project power into Europe.

By pushing NATO towards a bridge too far, the Bush administration may end up fatally undermining the alliance and encouraging anti-American forces in Europe.

In fact, it's becoming evident that the cash-strapped U.S. needs the EU more than the EU needs the U.S.

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Italy, one of the other nations being asked to send more troops to Afghanistan, is paralysed by the upcoming April 13 elections:

On the foreign policy front, the Prodi government was meanwhile reluctant to involve its troops in combat in Afghanistan due to pressure from left wing allies in parliament whose support provided Prodi with his majority.

“A Berlusconi government could be prepared to send more troops to Afghanistan, but not necessarily to spend more,” analyst Vecchio said. “Given the center-right’s recent record, Berlusconi’s return could be negative for spending.”