By Leon Bruneau
Agence France-Presse, 30 July 2006
By expanding its presence to the restive south of Afghanistan, a move due to be finalised Monday, NATO knows that it is putting not only its credibility but probably also its future on the line.
Almost three years to the day after it took command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), NATO takes charge of security operations from the US-led coalition, which forced out the fundamentalist Taliban regime.
With the move the number of troops will double in the restive south, where Taliban fighters, drug runners and war lords have been increasingly active, leaving NATO to command more than 18,000 soldiers in much of the conflict-scarred country.
Later this year, probably by November, command will also be transferred in the mountainous east bordering Pakistan. Technically it will be an easier move since it will mainly involve re-flagging coalition troops to the ISAF mission.
"It is the toughest ground mission, if not the toughest mission overall, the alliance with other partners has ever embarked on," ISAF spokesman Major Luke Knittig said last week.
Given hostilities in the south, where insurgents have made hit-and-run attacks across the Pakistani border as new troops moved in, NATO could be drawn into fighting that exceeds its mission.
Coalition forces alone are charged with hunting the Taliban.
NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has warned for months that failure in Afghanistan -- renowned as a haven for international terrorism -- would plunge it back into chaos, and could even bring violence to European streets.
Senior officials acknowledge that the alliance must remain in the country -- also the world's biggest opium producer -- for at least another decade, and have urged the international community not to forget its promise of donations.
"We are putting a lot of people's lives on the line. It makes no sense to invest a lot of military resources for peace but not put in place the civilian resources," said spokesman James Appathurai.
Privately, high-ranking military officers also admit that the war in Iraq has stolen attention -- and with it, perhaps, resources -- from Afghanistan.
Beyond the repercussions for the country itself, the move into southern Afghanistan could have important ramifications for the alliance, as it reinvents itself and abandons its Cold War origins.
"The success of NATO's mission in Afghanistan will have a direct effect on the pace and future of NATO's ongoing transformation process," wrote Mihai Carp, the deputy head of crisis-management policy in NATO's operations division, in the "NATO Review".
As NATO moves from using large bases to relying on smaller, mobile forces capable of quickly reaching the world's hotspots, the Afghan mission will also its ability to act effectively beyond its member states' borders.
De Hoop Scheffer has said long and loud that NATO should not be the world's policeman.
But while the United States, by far the alliance's dominant and driving member, is eager to put up "coalitions of the willing" in Afghanistan or in Iraq in 2003, it is pushing for a "global NATO" with wide-ranging missions.
At the other end of the 26-member spectrum, France has warned that the alliance should focus on its military vocation rather than be the world's peacekeeper -- as evidenced by President Jacques Chirac's recent rejection of a NATO role in Lebanon.
The debate, far from over, weighs heavily on discussions about any new operations, and could overshadow NATO's next summit in the Latvian capital Riga at the end of November.
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Citation: Leon Bruneau. "NATO's moment of truth in south Afghanistan," Agence France-Presse, 30 July 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060730/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanunrestnato
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