F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

36 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JULY-AUGUST 2008
F OCUS ON A FGHANISTAN
NATO AND AFGHANISTAN:
MADE FOR EACH OTHER?
At first glance, NATO
and Afghanistan might seem made for each other.
Faced with ongoing problems of insurgency despite the
overthrow of the Taliban regime in November 2001,
Afghanistan continues to require outside assistance to
bring a modicum of security to the lives of ordinary people.
NATO, for its part, faces the challenge of proving
meaningful in a post-Cold War world where its role can
no longer be to keep America in, Russia out and
Germany down. So the advent of new threats was, at
least in one sense, remarkably fortuitous.
Yet in significant respects, the Afghanistan experience
has proved a testing one for both. The need to engage
in serious combat operations — mercifully avoided during
the period of the Cold War — has proved a notable
practical challenge for NATO, exposing problems of
political will and operational coordination. Afghanistan
has also brought into sharp focus the question of what
kind of leadership from the United States will be politi-
THE AFGHANISTAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS
IS PROVING TO BE A CRITICAL TEST OF
NATO’S CAPACITIES.
BY WILLIAM MALEY
William Maley is a professor and director of the Asia-
Pacific College of Diplomacy at The Australian National
University in Canberra. He is the author of The
Afghanistan Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and
Rescuing Afghanistan (UNSW Press, 2006).
cally acceptable in the context of a “Global War on
Terror” that means different things to American and
European observers and publics.
The government of President Hamid Karzai is confronting
the need to balance the use of kinetic force
against the threat of a revived nationalism that could turn
the Afghan people against the U.S. and allied militaries
that were warmly welcomed when they arrived in 2001.
More broadly, Kabul is seeking an international approach
that goes beyond Afghanistan itself to recognize
the impact of regional threats, especially from the east.
The West’s failure to bite this particular bullet has left
Kabul deeply frustrated, although political change in
Pakistan may be opening new opportunities for positive
action.
As a result of all these factors, the Afghanistan theater
of operations is proving to be a critical test of
NATO’s capacities in the post–Cold War world. If it is
ultimately seen to have failed, its future may come
under increasing scrutiny. There is obviously no shortterm
threat to the Atlantic alliance, broadly speaking.
But it is perhaps worth recalling that two military
alliances that were set up a generation ago as parallels
to NATO — CENTO and SEATO — have both disappeared
into the mists of time.