How Afghanistan Became a War for NATOGareth Porter, IPS: The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of the countries providing troops there. In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials concerned with the alliance, according to a U.S. military officer...
'NATO's role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about Afghanistan,' [said] the officer... The alliance would never have been given such a prominent role in Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W. Bush administration wanted no significant U.S. military role there that could interfere with their plans to take control of Iraq...
[Gen. James] Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with American Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid becoming irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. "NATO was in limbo for a bit,' he said. But the 9/11 attacks had offered a new opportunity for NATO to demonstrate its relevance...
But there was one major problem: public opinion in NATO member countries was running heavily against military involvement in Afghanistan... Britain, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands had all sold the NATO mission to their publics as 'peacekeeping' or 'reconstruction' as distinct from counterinsurgency war...
[Gen. Karl] Eikenberry acknowledged in testimony before Congress in February 2007 that the policy of turning Afghanistan over to NATO was really about the future of NATO... He noted the argument that failure in Afghanistan could 'break' NATO, while hailing the new NATO role... as one that could 'make' the alliance. 'The long view of the Afghanistan campaign,' said Eikenberry, 'is that it is a means to continue the transformation of the alliance.'...
But Canadian General Rick Hillier... wrote in his memoir A Soldier First, published in 2009, that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan. He recalled that... NATO had 'no strategy, no clear articulation of what it wanted to achieve' and that its performance was 'abysmal.' Hillier said the situation 'remains unchanged.'... NATO had 'started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance.'... 'Afghanistan has revealed,' wrote Hillier, 'that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing.'
