How NATO got into its Afghan mess

Some good analysis from Fred Kaplan:

...it's worth recalling how NATO got involved in this war to begin with. What's happening now should be no surprise whatsoever.

In early 2006, NATO made plans to relieve the United States of command over operations in Afghanistan. The mission was seen as vital, above all, to NATO. It was a test of whether, in the post-Cold War era, the alliance had any role to play as a unified expeditionary force. To get all the nations involved, "caveats" were negotiated. Some nations would send troops, but only if they didn't have to fight; others would fight, but not at night; and so forth. Troops under NATO command, in general, could engage in "proactive self-defence," a deliberately vague term that permitted commanders to fire when fired upon and go after insurgents if they were spotted nearby. But they could not initiate offensive operations. (For that reason, the United States would keep 13,000 troops, mainly airmen, under its own command -- in addition to the 7,000 it was placing under NATO's -- so that somebody could continue to go after Taliban forces on the Pakistan border.)

The assumption, on the part of the NATO nations, was that the mission would be shifting away from "counterterrorism" to "counterinsurgency" -- that is, from "going after bad guys for the sake of going after bad guys" (as one British officer snidely put it to me when I visited Afghanistan that summer) to securing areas for the sake of promoting economic development.

In other words, most of the NATO nations agreed to send troops on the premise that they'd be engaged in peacekeeping, not warfighting.

Then, in the spring of 2006, the Taliban threw a wrench in the works by staging offensives throughout southern Afghanistan -- a huge area, about the size of Germany -- after four years of relative calm. (Actually, they'd been infiltrating the region all this time; they resumed their offensives only to resist the returning Western troops.)

The alliance isn't "evolving into a two-tiered alliance," as Gates said. When it comes to Afghanistan, it's been that kind of alliance from the start. As the fighting has grown fiercer, the inadequacies of this crazy quilt have become clearer...

I am sure that when we made our decision to take over at Kandahar in 2005 we also did not foresee anything like the Taliban resurgence that occurred in 2006. Though we did not exactly expect an easy time of it.