Word: nato
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...what exactly is NATO's purpose? That question hangs like a cloud of existential angst over the Atlantic Alliance's 60th birthday celebration this weekend. The festivities, which will span the Franco-German border, are suffused with the symbolism of a Cold War that brought NATO into being but whose end left the Alliance with no clear mission or identity. Hence the title of this anniversary summit: "NATO in 2020: What Lies Ahead...
...Today's world is vastly changed from that of 1949, when the U.S. and Europe agreed to pool their military resources and combine to resist any westward encroachment by the Soviet Union. Most of today's leaders of NATO member states were not yet born when the Alliance was forged, and almost two decades after the Soviet Union's collapse, military analysts see the Alliance as being mired in an identity crisis. "It's entirely unclear what NATO's reason for existence is after 1989 [the year the Berlin Wall came down]," says Tarak Barkawi, a senior lecturer in international...
...Originally conceived simply as a mutual-defense pact among its members, the Alliance began to adopt a more expansive role during the 1990s, tackling the crises of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo as Yugoslavia collapsed. Today, NATO forces continue to provide the bulk of peacekeeping troops in those countries...
...only once in NATO's history has it invoked Article 5 of its charter, which deems an attack on any one member state an attack on all and obliges all to respond collectively. That was the day after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., and it laid the groundwork for NATO's current role in Afghanistan. That's the prime focus of the summit media packages, which include hours of footage of NATO forces in Afghan villages, highlighting projects such as health clinics and schools. "I didn't even know the [Afghan] provinces when I came to NATO five years...
...Afghanistan, however, is far away from the North Atlantic region where NATO pledged to keep the peace, and the Alliance is staking its credibility on a war in which Western forces are struggling. "The Taliban does not accept defeat, so how can you win?" says Karl-Heinz Kamp, director of the research division of the NATO Defense College in Rome, which trains all ranking NATO officials and diplomats. "NATO might not be able to lose or win in a classic military way," he adds...