Nato in Afghanistan. Waiting For a Timid Germany or a Timid President

While we focus on the three options for Iraq and wait to see if George W. Bush was gelded by the last election, here's some news on Afghanistan and NATO.

Tony Blair this week reassured Afghanistan that the British were "in for the long haul" and their support would include the economic considerations to develop an Afghan economy. That's a lot to promise, especially in the wake of Iraq. If Iraq goes down, Afghanistan will soon follow. But in the meantime...

They don't like to talk about it so we will, Canadian troops are doing a fine job in Afghanistan, and we here in the US appreciate their service.

From this November 3 Globe and Mail article:

Last month, NATO's supreme allied commander, General James Jones, more than doubled the previous estimate of Taliban losses in the major Canadian-led offensive known as Operation Medusa.

"I would say it's probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of around 1,000. . . . If you said 1,500, it wouldn't surprise me," he said. He even suggested that as many as a third of the Taliban's core of full-time fighters might have been killed.

At a recent NATO meeting in VANCOUVER, British Columbia The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry said that NATO could be in for an extended stay in the central Asian nation and called on member nations to be patient. He also:

"...urged the global community to devote more resources to the rebuilding of the country as it struggles to contain a resurgent Taliban militia."

"We need perseverance," Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry told the Asia Pacific Summit in Vancouver.

"We cannot win this in a year. We cannot win this in two years," he said via satellite from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna.

Unfortunately, a majority of Canadians want to leave Afghanistan. If US Democrats precipitate a "redeployment" from Iraq, the Canadian public will undoubtedly demand the same for their troops in Afghanistan.
After the recent missle attack on a Pakistani madrassa, Asia Times reported some encouraging news that NATO has instituted a hot pursuit policy.

KARACHI - The air attack on Monday in which up to 80 suspected militants were killed at a religious school in the Pakistani tribal area of Bajour marks the first successful operation after a tripartite meeting in Kabul on August 24 of representatives of Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Pakistan. And it won't be the last.

It was agreed at that meeting that NATO forces operating in Afghanistan would be allowed to conduct hot-pursuit operations across the border into Pakistan.

According to the Asia Times NATO is fighting the wrong battle in Afghanistan because;

Because the Taliban are honest and not corrupt, their popularity is growing.

The Taliban are the unofficial army of the Western tribes of Pakistan.

The Taliban treat the Aghanis with respect.

Western intelligence consistently underestimates their strength and size.

The Taliban do not have a close liaison with Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Military success is irrelevant to political success:

It is easy to see what makes victory over the Taliban almost impossible. Colonel Oleg Kulakov, a Soviet war veteran who served for five years in Afghanistan and teaches at the Russian military academy, recalled a few days ago that "there was no task the Soviet armed forces were assigned and failed to carry out. However, the achievements at the battalion and brigade level could not be turned into political success." Almost all war correspondents currently reporting from Afghanistan agree with the assessment that battlefield victory is becoming almost irrelevant.

The Asia Times seems to be leftist (definitely anti-Bush) and the "Taliban are kind" is totally disingenuous, but the corruption problem is real and probably too deeply and intractably rooted into the culture for us to fix. From a November 2, Reuters story:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defeating the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan will require President Hamid Karzai to lead a new anti-corruption campaign that can stop disillusioned Afghans from turning to extremism, a report released on Thursday said.

The report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said ordinary Afghans have seen five years of often corrupt leadership in the provinces since the Taliban government fell to U.S.-led forces in retaliation for the September 11 attacks.

The silent partner of NATO in Afghanistan has got to be Germany. Everyone in Afghanistan have been asking each other, "Have you seen the Germans lately?" From Der Spiegel On-line.

November 20, 2006
NATO CHAOS DEEPENS IN AFGHANISTAN
"The Germans Have to Learn How to Kill"

By Konstantin von Hammerstein, Hans Hoyng, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp and Alexander Szandar

The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate -- and NATO is squabbling about who is to blame. Some countries are tired of taking casualties while others, like the Germans in the north, refuse to get involved in the fighting.

This is a fairly long article on Germany's involvement with NATO and its role in Afghanistan. Speigel sees the situation as one that the Germans will have to face up to or come under increasing and more public criticism from its allies. The problem with the Germans is that they will not fight.

While Canadian, Dutch, British and American troops are waging war in southern Afghanistan, the Germans have established themselves in the country's relatively peaceful north. Their objective there is to address the task of reconstruction in the shattered country -- acting, in essence, as armed social workers with the authority of village cops.

It is a division of labor that will be politically difficult to sustain much longer. Berlin's allies are beginning to demand that the Germans join them at the front. Berlin, for its part, has been just as adamant in opposing any change to the status quo. Last week three members of the cabinet -- the chancellor, the foreign minister and the defense minister -- reiterated the Merkel Administration's opposition to deploying German troops in Afghanistan's more volatile south.

German politicians see their Bundeswehr as armed social workers. According to Der Speigel, the Germans are about to get a dose of Euro realism.

But now, after decades of displaying willingness to accept that Germany needed time to return to normalcy, Germany's NATO partners are becoming impatient. Their fear of a rebirth of German militarism has given way to a need for more German involvement -- and the days of German postwar pacifism could well be numbered.

The upshot is that Berlin may be entering the final phase of its return to the international stage, one in which German soldiers could soon embark on combat missions where they will shoot and be shot at. The question now is whether Germany is ready -- emotionally, politically and militarily -- for war.

Judging by the German metrosexual response to the skull scandal, Germany's "girlie-men" politicians are in for a rude awakening. Part Two goes on to detail the nature of the criticism which draw the Germans into a more actively aggressive role:

The Canadians have been especially clear. Of a total of 33,000 soldiers in the Canadian military, more than 2,000 are stationed in Afghanistan -- "with their backs to the wall," say the Canadians. It is high time, they added, for the Germans to abandon their bunks and learn "to kill Taliban."

The Germans were also criticized at a meeting of NATO parliamentarians in Quebec, Canada last Thursday. In a debate over national caveats -- limits imposed by some countries on what their soldiers in Afghanistan can be asked to do -- Bruce George, the chairman of the defense committee in Britain's House of Commons, and Labour MP Frank Cook vented their anger against the German allies. Some drink tea and beer, while others risk their lives, George fumed.

Cook told the group about of an incident in which, during "Operation Medusa," the ISAF commander-in-chief requested assistance for the beleaguered Canadians. "Five nations refused," he said indignantly, while at first declining to name the five. But then he described the specifics of the incident. According to Cook, a German commander said that although there were soldiers available under his command, Berlin had refused to authorize their deployment. Twelve Canadian soldiers, Cook said, were then killed in the operation in Afghanistan's Panjwai District.

The German government was quick to rebuff the accusations on Friday, with the defense ministry insisting that "such a request was never issued."

But the damage had been done, and the German parliamentarians were promptly taken to task in Quebec. "Our soldiers are dying while yours are drinking beer," Rainer Stinner, a member of the German parliament and of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) said in summarizing the essence of the accusations.

Speigel quotes Brent Scowcroft as saying that defeat in Afghanistan will be the deathknell of NATO. I would tend to agree with that, particularly if the Germans do not join its allies who are dying in Afghanistan, it should expect no help from those allies in the future.

Buried in the Speigel article is an interesting and disturbing revelation. I'm sure that it nothing new. Eisenhower had his own list of political do's and don'ts but it still rankles...

The chaos is already evident at the "Strategic Direction Center," the heart of NATO's military machine in Mons. This is where all foreign missions are prepared and managed, and where the various responsibilities of units from a wide range of countries are coordinated. But when Colonel David Short and his strategists bend over a map of Afghanistan to plan troop movements, the factors they must take into account are not just geographic or military. A notebook, always within reach, contains the political factors -- and they take precedence.

The book is marked "Confidential," and it cannot be removed from the room or even photocopied. It contains 102 clauses that regulate the latitude for deployments and movements of the various national troop contingents. British soldiers, for example, are not to be sent to the north, Turkish troops can only be deployed in the Kabul region, and Germans can be sent to the dangerous south and east only under certain conditions -- conditions stipulated by the Bundestag when it approved Germany's participation in the Afghanistan mission.

The Speigel goes on to set out a laundry list of reasons why the whole enterprise could go down. We are at a low point in the ebb and flow; a dangerous point where the air of defeat could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The situation in the middle east, is particularly unsettling this week with way too much uncertainty. As George Bush appears to have lost his will, the Iranians and Syria perhaps sensing his weakness have cut down another "cedar" in Lebanon and seem to be daring the world to do something about it. Another tree has been cut down and when you need them the most, the eco-wimps are nowhere to be found. The Persian and Syrian bullies are cruising the beach and the speedo wearing Euros have headed over the dunes. Now the bullies are kicking sand in George Bush's face and unless, he's thrown in the towel, he's got to get up off the beach and knock the hell out of the bullies or just roll over and be marked forever as a wimp.

It's time to act decisively now Mr. President, with no more platitudes, no more diplomatic bravo sierra, no more empty threats. They sent you a message. You've got to send them an even bigger one.

That's where we're at. What's it going to be, Tex?