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Taliban tests NATO’s resolve

NATO troops plunged into a vicious new round of fighting with the Taliban on Wednesday as hundreds of Afghan civilians fled their homes in villages around Kandahar. The violence, in which about 50 militants reportedly died, again underscored how insecure and ungovernable large tracts of the south and east remain six years after “victory in Kabul.”

The impact of the continuing bloodshed, said to be the worst since 2001, is being felt far beyond the battlefields of Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan. Simmering tensions between NATO members over “burden-sharing” are bubbling to the surface in Berlin, Washington, and London. All agree the alliance’s mission is under-resourced and underfunded; none has a ready answer to the problem.

Despite the growth of force levels from about 5,000 in 2003 to more than 40,000 today, the fight grows ever more desperate.

Few deny that NATO’s first operation outside Europe is in trouble. According to a senior European diplomat, the alliance’s cohesion and credibility are increasingly on the line.

“We are now in the most difficult phase in Afghanistan,” NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in a recent interview with The International Herald Tribune. “If we do not prevail, the consequences ... will be dire.” Not only was Afghanistan’s future as a democratic, unified state in the balance; so, too, was Europe’s security in the face of reviving terrorist threats from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Speaking after meeting Afghan President Hamid Karzai in London last month, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed Afghanistan would “never again” become the failed state used by Al-Qaeda to plot the 9/11 attacks.

But other NATO members seem less certain. Germany’s parliament recently debated pulling out its 3,700 troops; public opinion supports withdrawal. Despite urgent American appeals for Germany, France, Italy, and Spain to drop their “caveats” and switch troops from peacekeeping and training to combat duties, there is no sign they will comply. Even Canada, on the Afghan frontline from the first, is reviewing its role.

Winter will bring a lull in fighting. But spring will see the bloody cycle begin anew. Unless something breaks the pattern, this year’s NATO fissures may become next year’s all-out ruptures. The death toll will mount. And Mr. Brown, with 7,700 British troops in the firing line, may find himself trapped between U.S.-dictated strategic imperatives and a growing desire to bring the boys home. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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