MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

Why Stabilising Afghanistan Will Be A Stiff Test For Nato

The world's most successful military alliance takes on a new role in
Afghanistan today - and it has its work cut out.

Nato, the organisation that prides itself on having won the cold war,
is assuming responsibility for the country's perilous south at a
critical time. Soldiers from Nato countries have already died in
preparatory operations and much is at stake for Afghanistan itself.

Five years after the fundamentalist Taliban government was toppled by
a US-led invasion, many Afghans are yet to see any improvement in
their lives. The country faces a Taliban resurgence and other
long-standing problems remain pressing, such as the power of warlords
and heavy economic dependence on poppies destined for heroin
production. And while reconstruction in other parts of the country
has progressed, it is in the south that such problems are concentrated.

"It was better when the Taliban were in power. There is no peace, no
security. Things have got much worse since last year," said Haji
Faeda Mohammed Khan, an elder from Kajiki district in Helmand, the
southern province that has seen heavy recent fighting.

The handover also constitutes what some people see as an existential
test for the alliance. When the US went into Afghanistan in 2001, the
Bush administration spurned Nato's offer of help on the ground,
relying instead on an ad hoc "coalition of the willing". Many US
officials remain sceptical about Nato's capabilities and usefulness.
The mission in Afghanistan almost certainly represents the 26-member
alliance's toughest challenge yet.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Natosecretary-general, agrees that the
alliance has been presented with a huge task. "This is the most
complex and perhaps the most challenging mission that Nato has ever
taken on," he said in an interview with the FT last week. "There are
two reasons why we have to succeed. First, to prevent Afghanistan
from becoming once again the home of a terrorist group that threatens
not only Afghanistan but the entire world. And second, to prevent the
kind of massive human rights abuses that this country suffered under
the Taliban when it was in charge."

Is this a struggle that Nato can win given that, in the five years
since September 11, the US has patently failed to pacify the country?
And what is really at stake in this perilous mission for the alliance
and for the west as a whole?

Until now, the alliance has only been present in the relatively
placid north and west of the country, as well as in Kabul, the
capital. But today, following a low-profile ceremony, responsibility
for the unruly south, where the bitterest fighting is now taking
place, will pass into Nato's hands. If things go to plan, the
alliance will take control of the whole of Afghanistan by November,
when the leaders of the alliance gather in Riga for a summit.

But the mission - technically one of stabilisation - will confront
some very tough facts on the ground. Mr de Hoop Scheffer explains
Nato's goal as helping the Afghan government "exercise control over
its whole territory". This he distinguishes from Operation Enduring
Freedom, the continuing mission of the US-led coalition in the
country to hunt down and destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The emphasis of the Nato operation, by contrast, is on reconstruction
and winning hearts and minds - which means that the alliance's task
is neither a straightforward military mission nor a long-term bid to
bring western standards to Afghanistan.

Yet Nato ground troops will be required to operate in an active
conflict zone. It is not clear that the difficulties of the mission
were anticipated. In April John Reid, then UK defence secretary, told
British troops in Afghanistan: "We are in the south to help and
protect the Afghan people reconstruct their own economy and
democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years' time
without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction."

Since then, six British soldiers have died in fighting. Indeed,
despite the formal mandate of stabilisation, military analysts say
that, in practice, Nato troops will find themselves deeply involved
in counter-terrorism and anti-insurgency work. This is tacitly
admitted by Mr de Hoop Scheffer: "The spoilers will be dealt with
robustly. What label you would like to glue on it is another matter."

But the tension between war-fighting and reconstruction in
Afghanistan was at the heart of a series of debates within the
alliance after it established a presence in the country in 2003.
BenoA(R)t d'Aboville, the former French ambassador to Nato, waged a
long campaign against Washington's plans for the alliance in
Afghanistan. He argued that the alliance's Provincial Reconstruction
Teams in the country risked making the same mistakes as French troops
in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, who learnt the hard way that
breaking down suspected insurgents' doors in the morning made it
difficult to build bridges in the afternoon.

Nato nations have not yet dispelled all such doubts, despite reaching
a higher level of consensus over the task facing them in Afghanistan.
In February a junior Dutch coalition party almost brought down the
country's government over its objections that the mission was not
about reconstruction, which it believed would be impossible in a war zone.

Today's handover of authority will see Nato's numbers in Afghanistan
increase to almost 18,000 as the alliance's command structure takes
responsibility for more than 7,000 soldiers in the south, including
the British Canadian and Dutch contingents flown in for the purpose
earlier this year.

The next phase in the alliance's expansion - known in Nato parlance
as stage four - would see the bulk of some 16,500 soldiers in the
US-led coalition in the east of the country also transferred to
Nato's command. Mr de Hoop Scheffer wants this to happen by the
November summit. But the US insists that it will not hand over
authority for its troops to Nato unless the alliance shows its mettle
in the current stage.

"We need to see how stage three goes before we make any decisions on
the timing," says a senior Nato diplomat, emphasising the need for
Nato to be an effective fighting force that works well together as
well as with the Afghan government.

The diplomat adds that Nato has recently made "some progress" in
moving troops across Afghanistan to assist fellow Nato soldiers even
if they come from different countries. "It's really, really important
that people don't say: 'This is my square of the patchwork quilt and
I'm not going over the line.' Afghanistan does not lend itself to
that kind of inflexibility," she says.

But Nato is a 57-year-old alliance in which big decisions are made by
committee. By definition, it has less flexibility than an ad hoc
coalition and much less than a single-nation fighting force.

Although Nato haggled over the terms of the expansion of the mission
for over a year, the debate was often Brussels-focused, dealing with
the US and France's concerns over how command of the two concurrent
operations should be "double-hatted", rather than examining the
challenges on the ground.

Nato's deployments in the Balkans - a less hazardous environment for
the troops - have been plagued by a host of national caveats, which
severely limited the work that certain national forces could
undertake and rendered some contingents operationally almost useless.
Scarred by that experience, Nato officials say these caveats have
been substantially reduced. Those that remain are mostly
"capabilities-based", says the senior diplomat, meaning national
contingents are mainly limited by physical constraints - such as a
lack of night-flying capability - rather than by any politically
motivated restrictions.

Nato also has undoubted strengths. "It has procedures and standards
that allow a lot of countries to click into place and work together,"
says Tim Garden, a British member of the House of Lords with
expertise in military matters. He adds that the alliance can also
call non-member countries into theatre, as is the case with the
37-nation mission in Afghanistan.

But there are other limitations. Some observers are worried that
troops may be rotated in and out too quickly, giving local tribal
leaders little incentive to throw in their lot with Nato. "You get to
know the local warlord and then you're gone," says one.

In a bid to address this, assignments in the south have been for
spells of at least two years for big contributors. But there can
still be frequent rotations of specific troop contingents, such as
the Dutch, whose soldiers will spend only four-month tours in bases
in the country.

There are also concerns about Afghanistan's intrinsic challenges. The
country is made up of disparate ethnic groups, has been battered by
almost three decades of war and has a topography seemingly made for
guerrilla operations. The mountains and remote plains make the
establishment of state institutions intensely difficult. As a result,
Afghanistan has long been terrain for the drugs industry - still the
mainstay of the economy.

There is a tension between destroying poppy fields - thereby
depriving the Taliban and other adversaries of funding - and winning
the hearts and minds of a population with few other means of support.
But the strategy also suffers from finger-pointing: the government of
Hamid Karzai in Kabul, ostensibly responsible for counter-narcotics
strategy, has done little and in turn accuses the west of not doing
enough to provide farmers with alternative livelihoods.

This is one illustration of a fundamental problem for Nato: the lack
of capacity within the Afghan government that makes it a weak
partner, according to some diplomats and officials. And if the main
interlocutor inside the country is weak, some Nato officials and
diplomats also say the international support for the country has been
inadequate. Nato's secretary-general concedes that without outside
help, the alliance cannot hope to succeed.

Nato and US officials do little to disguise their belief that
Pakistan could do much more to crack down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda
leadership they believe is hiding just across the border from eastern
Afghanistan.

And without more investment and training from bodies such as the
United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union, the
reconstruction mission seems doomed to fail. The world may - once
again - pay a high price for neglecting Afghanistan.

"If it is not a combined and joint activity of the international
community, we have a problem," Mr de Hoop Scheffer says.

His struggle to increase international commitment faces formidable
obstacles. Further international foreign investment will depend on
the stabilisation of Afghanistan - a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

The alliance is no longer the guarantor of western Europe's
territorial security against a Soviet threat. Nor is it likely to be
used in European wars, as with Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
Instead, its role is now one of making perilous countries safer,
building up institutions and wrapping states and territories into the
western bloc.

Nowhere is that more important than in Afghanistan. "I do not think
Nato's survival is at stake but if you say it is very important for
the further development and the credibility of the Nato alliance,
that's quite true," says Mr de Hoop Scheffer.

"The day that the international community packs up and leaves, the
next thing would be a civil war," says Nader Nadery, head of the
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "We really need the
troops. If they were to leave, the Taliban would return and al-Qaeda
would return."

If Nato fails in Afghanistan, much else will also be damaged - not
just US plans but also the military reputation of many European
nations, Washington's readiness to engage in military multilateralism
and the prestige and clout of the west as a whole.