Word: nato
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...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...
Reconstruction as a goal is fine, but NATO officials note that it is only possible where there is a peace to keep. As to which, consider this: the Taliban recently ordered four cell-phone companies in the country to shut down at night to prevent the U.S. military from tracking cell-phone-carrying insurgents, although the military says it doesn't actually do so. Zinni puts the situation in context. "European countries saying that, 'We contribute to NATO because we're involved in reconstruction,'" he says dismissively, "is like saying, 'I'm in charge of rearranging deck chairs...
Speaking to TIME, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer denies that the rift between NATO members is "a question of Europe vs. America." De Hoop Scheffer says he will ask for 10% more troops at Bucharest, and stresses that Europeans have suffered casualties. But he acknowledges that he will "keep pushing" all the allies to do more. He needs to. The U.S., its armed forces already stretched like a piano wire, is now being forced to dispatch another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan. The Canadian government of Stephen Harper took the unusual step of threatening to pull...