NATO Versus Democracy

If the Afghanistan experience accomplishes nothing else, it may provoke a thoughtful analysis of what the alliance is and, more importantly, what it is not.

Politicians and pundits alike moan that a failure of the Afghan mission will doom NATO. Unfortunately they don't tend to explain why that fate must befall the alliance.

From the outset, Afghanistan wasn't a natural fit for NATO intervention. Yes, the United States had been attacked but not by Afghanistan. The attackers were a gang of Islamic radicals, mainly Saudi, and not a single Afghan among them. What blame fell to the Taliban is simply that they tolerated al-Qaeda training camps in their territory. Remember, al-Qaeda was all too welcome in Afghanistan, even by the US, when it first arrived to fight the Soviet forces. It played a significant role in ousting the Soviet occupation and, as such, it would have some standing with the Taliban afterwards.

Five years later and no one has shown the slightest participation in or even knowledge of the 9/11 plot by the Taliban nor, for that matter, their participation in any other al-Qaeda skullduggery.

So the United States was not being attacked by Afghanistan or by the Taliban but, by virtue of the attack alone, we all agreed to intervene in the ongoing civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, siding with the northern warlords.

After routing the Taliban and al-Qaeda into the mountains of Tora Bora, the United States showed gross negligence in failing to finish them off. Instead it diverted its forces into a contrived war of choice against Iraq.

When the US invasion toppled Saddam and destabilized Iraq, al Qaeda took full advantage of the opportunity to regroup and redeploy into this fertile territory. Note that there's been no similar Taliban insurgency or terrorism in Iraq. The hard truth is that the Taliban is no more threat to America in Iraq today than it ever was in Afghanistan prior to the American intervention.

The Taliban is, however, a very real threat to the government of Hamid Karzai, America's handpicked President of Afghanistan. I suspect the northern warlords might be an equal threat to Karzai were he to move to control their provinces, disarm their militias and meddle in their affairs. This raises the difficult question of whether the Taliban resurgence is an actual insurgency or merely a civil war in which the West is, again, taking sides.

These unanswered, often unasked, questions run through the public aversion to the Afghanistan mission in several NATO nations. Without answers it is very difficult to weigh the true merits and necessity of this intervention and it creates the appearance that NATO is simply doing George Bush's bidding.

If a NATO member's populace strongly oppose a mission such as Afghanistan where no member is genuinely under attack, does the alliance have any business trying to coerce support? Surely that will doom NATO more certainly than the success or failure of the Afghan mission. The strength of NATO rests in it not being called to action except when it is absolutely necessary to defend another member state. That is what it was intended to do and nothing more. We stray from that path at our peril.

NATO cannot be allowed to trump democracy.