Word: nato
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...skepticism over the efficacy of the alliance, however, didn't start with President Bush. Clinton Administration officials had bitterly complained of the political meddling and command confusion that hampered NATO's 1999 air war to push Serb troops out of Kosovo...
...yardstick by which the success of NATO's summit in the Latvian capital of Riga would be measured was always going to be Afghanistan. By engaging 32,000 troops there - its first full-scale military action outside of Europe - against a now resurgent Taliban, the Western alliance had posed itself a cruel test of solidarity in one of the world's most historically ungovernable patches. Last week it effectively failed the test...
...President George W. Bush and his key allies - Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian leader Stephen Harper and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer - wanted a greater sharing of the burden, and to give ground commanders full authority to deploy troops as they see fit, rather than be required to refer back to defense ministries in Europe's capitals. But the caveats that keep Italian, French, German and Spanish troops out of the heavy combat zones in the south of the country were not significantly relaxed. The Poles offered up an additional 1,000 troops toward...
...NATO in Afghanistan has become an institutional fig leaf for an ad hoc and unstable coalition of the willing. The crux of the Atlantic alliance is its mutual defense clause, the all-for-one principle, in which an attack on any member is considered an attack on them all. But that clause's limitations were first displayed after Sept. 11, 2001, when it was invoked in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, only to be spurned by a Bush Administration set on keeping tight reins on its response...
...rebuff is coming from the other side, for equally understandable reasons. Mutual defense of NATO territory is one thing; the call to stand shoulder to shoulder in a bedeviled country thousands of miles away from Europe is a more troublesome proposition. It isn't simply a question of resources: Canada is on the front line despite an anemic defense budget. For all the lip service paid to Afghanistan as a war that cannot be lost, there seems to be a lack of political will to do what is necessary...