NATO in Afghanistan

Max Boot has an informative article related to where Afghanistan has been going and where the military resources are coming from.

I found this a bit disturbing:

European officers pride themselves on taking a softer approach to counterinsurgency than the supposedly gun-happy Americans. ISAF troops are supposed to focus on providing security, jumpstarting economic development, and, above all, on facilitating the work of 21 civil-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams spread across the country. They are not supposed to chase bad guys.

That's all well and good in theory but difficult to implement in practice. What do commanders do if they get intelligence on Taliban fighters gathering a few miles away? Wait to be attacked, or strike first? For American officers it would be a no-brainer. But NATO troops have the difficult task of interpreting rules of engagement laboriously negotiated among 26 nations. They are not allowed to mount offensive operations, but they can engage in "proactive self-defense operations." Meaning what? That will be up to individual commanders to decide.

One can be pretty confident that some contingents, for instance the British and Canadians, will take a broad view of their mandate. Others, however, are likely to take a narrower interpretation, which is why so many Afghan government officials are pleading with U.S. troops not to turn over their areas to NATO replacements. And it is not only Afghans who are concerned: During our visit to Kandahar Airfield, a British officer was overheard berating a Dutch air force officer for limiting his activities to tame convoy escorts and not having the guts to engage in real combat.

It sounds like the activity in Afghanistan will be dependent on who is in command. And NATO is the force that is supposed to be coming in and expanding the governments control in the southern and eastern provinces where they haven't had much control.

There are some 70 separate national caveats limiting what NATO troops can do. Some of these restrictions are relatively innocuous - e.g., troops are not allowed to operate outside of Afghanistan. Others forbid some troops from taking part in combat operations or even from using chemical riot control agents like tear gas. The complete list of caveats is secret - you don't want to let the enemy know what your forces cannot do, not to mention that many European nations would be embarrassed to have the full list of their caveats revealed.

That must be an interesting play book. 70 caveats sounds too complicated to me, though I imagine that some are fairly obvious. Well, at least there is some comfort in knowing that these are NATO troops and not those under the control of the UN.

This is quite a challenge for any military force, much less one with NATO's limited resources. It's hard enough to get member states to cough up troops; harder still to get are transport helicopters and aircraft, of which there is a notable deficit outside of the U.S. armed forces. And no wonder: Defense spending outside America is anemic. For years, NATO has urged members to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. The actual average, excluding the United States (which spends more than 3.5 percent), is 1.94 percent - and falling. And that figure is inflated by high levels of defense spending in Greece and Turkey, where the armed forces are preparing not for NATO missions but for fighting one another.

It has taken a lot of public prodding and behind-the-scenes diplomacy on the part of the Bush administration (for which it has gotten scant credit among critics who bemoan American "unilateralism") to get NATO to commit a force as substantial as the one in Afghanistan. There are already 9,000 coalition troops in the country (not counting American soldiers), a number due to grow to 17,000 by the end of the summer and larger still in the fall. But will European states keep sending soldiers for the many years that it will take to make any significant progress? And how will they react when they take the inevitable casualties?

The question of casualties is quite important. Though I'm worried that there will be very limited casualties because the commanders will decide to minimize the risks, which sadly will minimize the benefits of their being there as well. Fortunately, the largest contingencies are from Canada and Britain, who seem enthusiatic in assisting in this part of the war on terror.