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Weekly UpdatesAt the heart of the alliance is article five of the North Atlantic Treaty: if one NATO member is attacked, all will respond. Now, as US President Obama reminded us in Strasbourg, NATO "remains the strongest alliance that the world has ever known." NATO's summit, however, revealed the weakness of that alliance. Contrary to the spirit of the NATO treaty, some countries are doing much more in Afghanistan than others. The discrepancy is so great that it is almost misleading to call it a NATO mission. Countries cannot share the benefits of collective security without sharing its burdens too. Troops are needed to support the upcoming Afghan elections, to train Afghan soldiers, and to rebuild the country. But all of this depends on the security situation; the most urgent need is for troops to fight the Taliban.
There are three inequalities here. First, too many countries want do too little. Before the summit, the United Kingdom had 4.6 percent of its forces in Afghanistan. Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Estonia all had between 2.5 and 4 percent, and the United States had just over 2 percent of its forces there. Similarly, other leading European countries--Germany, Italy, and France--are all deploying significantly lower proportions. At the summit, only 17 out of the 28 NATO members offered anything at all. Even after the promised soldiers arrive, the proportion of the non-US soldiers there will not rise, or even stay the same. It will actually fall. The second inequality is that many of the governments in the alliance have negotiated "national caveats" that prevent them from doing certain types of work. In total, there are 76 of these national caveats, enabling troops to opt out of NATO command and obey their own national governments. The net result is that many NATO troops will remain shielded from combat. Only a minority of countries' soldiers will actually provide the security on which the whole operation depends. The third inequality is that some governments have said they will deploy troops only if other countries do as well. This does nothing to help the spirit of NATO's commitment to collective security.
These three inequalities--uneven deployment, uneven operational commitment, and conditional deployment--mean that on the ground, Afghanistan does not look like a NATO mission, but a deployment of an adhoc alliance. This impression is bolstered given that eight non-NATO countries are also contributing troops. This arrangement calls into question how genuine and useful the alliance will be in the future. It is no good to argue that NATO countries should share the burden more equally. That will not be enough to persuade skeptical governments to offer more troops. The truth is that the differences in deployment levels reflect real differences of public and political opinion. Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect that they should agree in the future either, as there is no longer agreement on what constitutes NATO's mission in Afghanistan.
There has been a variety of recent suggestions about how to repair this problem. Ex-Soviet countries argue that NATO should prioritize protection from Russia in light of her action in Georgia. Others argue that such talk threatens the global balance of power and that Russia should join the club. Other suggestions include addressing nuclear proliferation, helping against Islamist terrorism, or promoting democracy. The range of suggestions is a sign that the organization has lost its way. Nobody knows what the central security challenges of the future will be. Moreover, nobody knows whether NATO countries will see the same things as security challenges.
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO's role has evolved ad hoc according to the challenges it has undertaken and the varying willingness of members to participate in different tasks. Afghanistan is only the example which most clearly illustrates this. In that context, what is the merit of assuming that in the future NATO should remain the centerpiece of Western defense strategy? When thinking about what strategic alliances might be necessary to face the security threats of the future, it often appears that the mere existence of NATO constrains the imaginations of policymakers. We should ask ourselves, given future security threats, what kind of alliance might we need? If we were designing an alliance most suitable to face the threats of the future, would it look like NATO? Given the divisions over Afghanistan, the answer is no, it would not.
AZEEM IBRAHIM is a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also involved in public policy at the University of Chicago and is Director and Policy Board Member of the United Kingdom National Defense Association.
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