Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lack of spare parts for armored vehicles to uniforms that are insufficiently camouflaged. German soldiers have taken to buying their own gun holsters because the army-issue variety do not fit properly under their bullet-proof vests. German helicopters, according to a source at the International Security Assistance Force (NATO's military arm in Afghanistan), can't fly at night because they do not have the required navigation equipment. "They are fundamentally good helicopters," says the ISAF source, "but they are fundamentally useless." Then there is training: one in four German soldiers, according to a recent parliamentary report...
...Madrid's Foundation for International Relations and Foreign Dialogue, explains. "But as the operation has become more military in nature, support has dropped." Even in France, which has superb armed forces held in high regard by the public, and which is on the verge of cementing its "reintegration" into NATO's command structure, there is still concern about answering NATO's call for more troops in Afghanistan. "It's a question of political acceptability," explains François Heisbourg, a special adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris. Any spike in French casualties, he says, could produce...
...Fight, to Build, or Both? Despite the americophile tendencies of Sarkozy, many French - like other Europeans - see NATO and the Afghanistan operation as an endorsement of a U.S. agenda. More than that, they see NATO's role in Afghanistan as a manifestation of a particularly American way of solving problems, one that puts too much emphasis on combat at the expense of nation-building. The European dream is that its armed forces can specialize in development without having to pick up a gun. "The question is not which of the NATO countries is the toughest, but which strategy is most...
...building schools and giving vaccine shots. Indeed, in the most recent issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army's professional journal, Zachary Selden notes that "Many of the capabilities required to transform the current security environment ... are no longer military but civilian. Europe has latent civilian capabilities that ... would make NATO more balanced...
...such capabilities need the right culture in which to thrive, and Afghanistan, today, is not it. Last year was the bloodiest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, with 6,500 deaths, according to the Associated Press - mostly insurgents but also civilians. Coalition forces, which include non-NATO countries such as Australia and South Korea, suffered 232 casualties. Opium exports have skyrocketed. Retired Marine General James Jones, NATO's supreme commander in Europe until 2006, now at the Atlantic Council of the United States, a think tank, told Congress in January that there is "a loss of momentum...