Redefining NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, was created for one purpose: to deter Soviet aggression against Western Europe and North America. It was designed to operate in the territories of its member states and in the seas and oceans that connected them: the North Atlantic ocean, the North Sea and the Meditteranean. It was a nice, simple, cohesive package with a membership united by a strong community of interest.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO lost its defining purpose. The alliance needed to be scrutinized and redefined but, instead, it just sort of wallowed along, picking up former satellite states of the defunct Warsaw Pact.

NATO found a new job when it chose to intervene against Serbia to thwart genocide in Kosovo. This consisted of member states assembling a combined air force that bombed Serbian military targets and civilian infrastructure until Slobodan Milosevic cried "uncle." After that, NATO and Russian ground forces rolled into Kosovo as peacekeepers.

Kosovo took NATO into a new dimension. None of its members had been attacked by Serbia so, legally, it really had no right to attack. Hardly anybody paid any attention to such niceties and the alliance was allowed to morph into something new yet still undefined.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 saw the United States invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, the provision that obliges all member states to consider an attack on one of them an attack on all. At first there was some confusion about the true identity of the attacker but, in the emotionally-charged shadow of the collapsed twin towers, that really didn't seem important.

It didn't take long to identify the enemy as the terrorist group, al-Qaeda. This wasn't a country or some alliance of states. It was a terrorist faction, a criminal organization. Other NATO members had themselves endured attacks by criminal, terrorist movements but the alliance didn't mobilize to intervene. This, however, was an attack on the United States and that made all the difference. Faced with a president who proclaimed "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" the distinction hardly seemed to matter. Five years down the road it's becoming clear that we ignored that vital distinction at our peril.

NATO was intended to confront real threats to the very sovereignty of its member states. The al-Qaeda attacks, while undoubtedly traumatic to generations who had no experience of attacks on their own country, fell far short of the threats NATO was created to deter. Not to worry, we managed to come up with a country - Afghanistan. Now we had something to invade and defeat, at last.

We all know that Afghanistan didn't attack the United States. It had allowed a bunch of former, anti-Soviet fighters, mujahadeens calling themselves al-Qaeda, to maintain bases and training facilities in Afghanistan. Like al-Qaeda, the governing Taliban were religious fanatics. Okay, close enough - let's get'em.

Fortunately for us, the good guys, the bad guys had been at each other's throats in a vicious civil war that had gone on for years, leaving them exhausted. We chose our bad guys, the Northern Alliance, and helped them oust the other bad guys, the Taliban. Washington then installed its boy, Hamid Karzai, and everything was supposed to be sweetness and light.

With the Taliban ousted and driven into the hills along with al-Qaeda, it could be argued that NATO still had a role to play in helping the Americans track down and eliminate these fugitives. In for a penny, in for a pound. It was decided that we would secure Kabul for the fledgling Karzai government while the United States finished the job in the hills of Tora Bora.

Warning bells should have sounded furiously when the U.S. commanders decided not to go after the terrorists themselves but to hire rag-tag forces from the Northern Alliance to do the job for them. Wait a second, weren't these guys on the run the very people who had planned and executed the 9/11 attacks? Of course they were. Who could the Americans possibly want more than these animals? Oh, I suppose maybe Saddam Hussein.

When the Americans called off their war in Afghanistan, NATO should have done the same. Washington clearly didn't consider itself in mortal danger from al-Qaeda any longer or it wouldn't have dumped the Afghanistan effort to pursue an unnecessary war of whim in Iraq. Yet, once again, NATO had failed to define what it was actually doing in Afghanistan and so, we were stuck there. We stayed so that George Bush could pursue his lark in Iraq. We served as an adjunct to this man's folly, enablers of America's quagmire.

As an aside, imagine how this all might have played out if, when the Bushies turned their gaze toward Baghdad, NATO had stood up for itself and publicly announced that, if the U.S. withdrew forces from Afghanistan, the NATO forces would be withdrawn. The whole Iraq disaster might never have happened. The al-Qaeda leadership might have been hunted down and destroyed. The Northern Alliance warlords might have been restrained from asserting de-facto rule over Northern Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai might, just might, have had a chance to establish a genuine, legitimate and effective national government. Today, five years down the road, these are all just "might have beens", opportunities long lost, perhaps irretrievably.

We're still playing dupe to Washington's imperial strategies. Britain moved into Helmand province while Canada took over neighbouring Kandahar province to take some of the Afghanistan load off the shoulders of U.S. forces who find themselves in dire straits in Iraq. Other NATO nations and associates have sent troops into the northern Afghan provinces. Even with the remaining American contingent, NATO fields roughly a quarter of the force deployed in Iraq to control a rugged, mountainous country half again larger than Iraq.

Bush is using NATO as his Foreign Legion and we'd better come to realize that. It wasn't that long ago that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice made loud noises about NATO shouldering some of the load in Iraq itself. It took quite a while for them to realize that idea was a complete non-starter.

It's clear that the United States intends to continue looking to NATO to advance its own foreign policy. Just today, neo-con loudmouth David Frum (yes, Barbara's little boy), is floating the idea of NATO expanding into Asia to oppose North Korea and (I'm not making this up) China:

"A new approach is needed: step up the development and deployment of existing missile defence systems; end humanitarian aid to North Korea and pressure South Korea to do the same; encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent; and invite Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to join NATO - and even invite Taiwan to send observers to NATO meetings.

"Perhaps North Korea and China imagine that the nuclear test has tilted the strategic balance in the Pacific in their favours. Now would be a good time to disabuse each of them of any such illusion. We need a tighter and stronger security arrangement in the Pacific region, one from which rogue states and those who support them are pointedly excluded. The NATO allies have agreed to expand the organisation well beyond Western Europe; now we need to persuade them to make it global ...

"Countries such as North Korea and Iran seek nuclear weapons because they imagine that those weapons will enhance their security and power. The way to contain them is to convince them otherwise. When proliferation can be prevented by negotiation, that is always preferred. But when negotiation fails, as it has failed in North Korea and is failing in Iran, rogue regimes must be made to suffer for their dangerous nuclear ambitions."

The North Atlantic alliance is already straining to the point of fracture over the Afghanistan fiasco. Even if Washington and Ottawa refuse to see how the organization is coming undone, the people of many of its member states see that quite clearly and question whether NATO has outlived its purpose. Without their backing, NATO may not have much of a future. I think the alliance is doomed if it continues to do little more than shore up America's foreign policy blunders.