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Sol Sanders Archive
Wednesday, November 24, 2009     INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

NATO the great is dead,
long-live NATO?

The North American Treaty Organization [NATO] has been history’s most successful alliance. It protected Western Europe from Soviet Communist engulfment, halted intra-European civil wars which almost destroyed Western civilization, and underpinned unparalleled prosperity for 400 million. And, of course, monumentally outlived its designated enemy, the Soviet Bloc.

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Ironically, post-Soviet events were NATO’s finest hour. In 2003 NATO assumed the International Security Assistance Force command established by the UN Security Council to cleanse Afghanistan of Islamic terrorists. Its credo, an attack on any member was an attack on all, triumphed. NATO to Afghanistan was idealistic. But pragmatically it called on 28 nations to prevent future bestiality. After 9/11 European newspapers had headlined “We are all Americans”; repeated European terrorist attacks justified that universal concern.

But Afghanistan was much more. It carried NATO beyond its nominal European theater to a worldwide stage. There was a moment of hope that, finally, the world had found its policeman. It would no longer be the Americans, who, often alone, willy-nilly shouldered the burden of maintaining world peace whether in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans or the Mideast, however successfully or unsuccessfully.

But could the Afghanistan gesture have been NATO’s last magnificent flowering? NATO’s annual summit this past weekend, dedicated to finding an Afghanistan exit strategy, may have been the Alliance’s nadir. It certainly was virtual confusion.

If truth were told, whatever mistakes Washington has made pursuing a non-state but potent international enemy in Afghanistan, the Europeans — with notable exceptions — once again have not held up their end. Employing European contingents with one-arm tactically tied behind their backs has frustrated the effort.

With mission far from accomplished, the Summit waffled around an Afghan takeover. Clearly, the Alliance has not delivered Islamic terrorists the psychological and strategic coup de grace that would halt attempts to repeat their 2001 success from other dark corners, whether Yemen, Somaliland, or even closer to Europe’s heartland, North Africa. Yet Europeans, more than Americans, fear rising terrorist recruitment even among their own Muslims.

What’s at issue is NATO’s viability. Luckily, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, for all his bare-chested huffing and puffing, represents a demoralized, rapidly declining military power. As a leader of the similarly disappearing Russian melting opposition has said, US Senate START Treaty ratification or no, economics and flagging technology will further reduce Russian arms.

One could be accused of shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” for all this has been said before.

But for all the noble language, last week’s Summit even more deliberately than usual skirted pressing problems:

A meeting dedicated to Afghanistan strategy did not have an essential Pakistani presence!

Turkey, in hot pursuit of regional power is playing footsie with everyone from terrorist-sponsoring Syria to Moscow [despite its aggression on neighboring Georgia] to military exercises with the Chinese. Ankara cheapens if not completely devalues NATO membership.

There is the unfinished eastern European expansion that might have spared Georgia dismemberment, a threat still endangering Ukraine.

There are perennial coordination matters [although a new UK-France forces merger may be a start the European Rapid Deployment Force never really made].

And not least, the abandoned Bush Administration’s European anti-missile shield has been replaced with a nominal 10-year proposal, obviously behind the curve of rapidly developing Iranian and North Korean missiles. This is even replete with hints of a dangerous technological transfer to Moscow.

Over all hovers the dark shadow of inadequate resources. With only five NATO members meeting minimum defense requirements of 2 percent of GDP — much of that fattening bloated bureaucracies — Europe is looking at a defense spending free-fall. Theoretically, drastic reform would help. But bureaucrat vs. boots-on-the-ground mismatch is endemic. Some defense establishments spend more than 60 percent on personnel. Of two million men under arms, only 3-5 percent is deployable, then only 30 percent in an expeditionary force. Germany, the heart of European defense, toys with abandoning universal service — adopted early by the Federal Republic as a check on revanchist militarism. But imitation of America’s volunteer army would be even more expensive and dictate drastic force reduction.

True, Europe’s Afghanistan ambivalence was spurred by President Barack Hussein Obama earlier promising to march back down the hill on a timeline. It will be left to the military historians to judge the U.S.-UN-NATO mistakes. But a new French minister of defense — if a tired old politician -- in all too familiar French oratory calls Afghanistan a “trap”. [Who knows better with Paris’ ghosts of Indochina and Algerian catastrophes?] Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in his own metrosexual, multiculturalist world far from the origins of his Free Democrats Party, wants withdrawal of Berlin’s no-night-warfare, beer-guzzlers. [Incidentally, his own Chancellor Angela Merkel says “multiculturalism” has failed.]

With American taxpayers facing new budget trials and tribulations, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ pre-summit pep talks was a cry from the heart. But President Obama came encumbered by his Congressional defeat and what Europeans regard as his disdain for them.

Another day, another international conference.

If there is a new NATO aborning, somewhere, somehow, it was hard to see or hear through the fog of war — and mindless rhetoric — in Lisbon.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), writes the 'Follow the Money' column for The Washington Times . He is also a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com. An Asian specialist, Mr. Sanders is a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.

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