DAVID COMMON: AFGHANISTAN DIARY
Afghanistan rages while NATO deals in caveats
November 24, 2006
Just imagine his business card.
General James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Commander, United States European Command.
NATO's supreme allied commander of Europe, Gen. James L. Jones, meets with reporters at the Pentagon on March 6, 2006 to discuss NATO operations. (Heesoon Yim/Associated Press)
It's quite a title.
In a few weeks, General Jones will retire after four decades of service with the U.S. military and, before he goes, he decided to meet with thirty or so journalists from the different NATO nations.
I was lucky and ended up with a spot at the table. During the course of the breakfast meeting, Jones rambled through the many NATO missions underway around the globe, their successes and challenges until he ended at the big one: Afghanistan.
Now, here's where he surprised me.
Jones acknowledged NATO could fail in Afghanistan. Not the usual acknowledgement you expect from a military man.
He said the enemy forces in Afghanistan — some 'Taliban' (the definition is fluid), the rest being warlords and farmers connected with the drug trade — were fighting a war of attrition.
The caveat debate
Their strategy was to continue with hit and run attacks, disrupt anything that might cause the local population to trust NATO (such as reconstruction projects) and, essentially, wait for the people in the NATO nations to lose patience with the mission and call their troops home.
This same strategy worked in Afghanistan against the Russians in the 1980s and early '90s; to some degree against the British a century early — perhaps even going all the way back to Genghis Khan!
By that measure, those "enemy forces" may already be winning. Support for the Afghan mission in Canada, at least, has dropped as more soldiers die and the violence continues.
In democratic societies, politicians are, of course, very careful about their military commitments, especially when elections are in the offing. Insurgent forces in Afghanistan know this. They will and are using it to their advantage, hoping to break the will of NATO nations.
Ultimately, those populations must decide whether the investment is worth it, whether a foreign influence can create stability. And politicians are the salespeople.
To protect themselves, those western politicians have draped many of their militaries in Afghanistan with caveats, basically rules on what their forces can and cannot do.
Germany, for instance, limits its soldiers to operations in the relatively calm north. Others won't let their aircraft fly at night, or be used for anything besides humanitarian aid delivery. Some won't let soldiers from other nations ride in their vehicles.
Short term pain
As the commander on the ground, it means you have fewer resources to be able to deal with specific problems. The most cited example was the great surge of violence in the south of Afghanistan this fall, which Canadian and British soldiers had to confront alone since other forces could not shift to the south, due to their caveats.
Not surprisingly, NATO is trying to get rid of these caveats. Gen Jones says they are targeting about 50 of them.
And the alliance isn't alone. Canadian officials say they have lobbied every NATO nation to eliminate their caveats or provide more troops. So far, only Poland has agreed to send in extra soldiers, though that deployment was already expected.
Privately, NATO officials say it will likely be months before any country might consider lifting its caveats.
But, Jones adds, the alliance's mission to Kosovo suffered the same problem and eventually everyone eliminated their caveats and completed the task at hand.
While Kosovo was a truly terrible conflict, it is not Afghanistan. The South Asian nation is a long way from most NATO countries and its violence has been escalating since the alliance's arrival, with little sign that it will let up in the short term.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
David Common is the CBC News correspondent in France, from where he covers much of Europe and often travels as far afield as Afghanistan where he has spent weeks at a time reporting on Canada's military operations there.
