BRUSSELS (AFP) – NATO defence ministers will hope to put recent public displays of disunity behind them when they meet in Vilnius on Thursday, following open US criticism of its allies’ efforts in Afghanistan.
“This is a critical week for the alliance,” said Christopher Langton of the International Institute for Strategic Studies on Tuesday. “There is a big question over countries’ ability to sustain operations for what is now coming to a seventh year, and that is a weakness in NATO which perhaps it had not foreseen when it set out on this venture,” he said.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stoked the troop numbers row last month when he unleashed rare public criticism of the NATO forces deployed in southern Afghanistan, saying “most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counter-insurgency.” The very public attack shocked the countries engaged there even if he didn’t name them; the very US-friendly Britain, Canada and Denmark.
Diplomats at the NATO headquarters in Brussels attributed the outburst in print to the need for Gates to justify the announcement that over 3,000 additional US troops would be sent to Afghanistan, with 2,200 to be deployed in the southern Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly warned that Ottawa will pull its 2,500 soldiers out of restive southern Afghanistan if it does not get reinforcements from other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations.
However European allies whose forces are already stretched by engagements elsewhere — including Iraq, the Balkans and Africa — say they don’t have much more to give. Last week US Defense Secretary Gates upped the ante by writing letters to all the NATO allies to ask for troops and equipment, especially helicopters, for Afghanistan.
The message was aimed particularly at well-resourced European nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain with troops stationed in the capital Kabul or in the north and west of the country where they aren’t greatly exposed to Taliban attacks.
A senior US official at NATO said Tuesday that the real problem was “that the letter hit the press”. Washington has also sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice out to chivvy European allies. She headed to London on Tuesday days after British International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander joined the call for its NATO allies to start pulling more weight.
The focus is to win hearts and minds, and troop reinforcements, ahead of a NATO summit in Bucharest on April 2-4. So far the results have been mixed. While France deemed Gates’ letter “courteous”, German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung responded with a “direct and stern” letter himself, according to newspaper reports.
The US has denied the letter they sent to Germany was particularly harsh, while admitting the message was “in some cases… more specific.” Jung on Friday ruled out stationing soldiers in southern Afghanistan, saying the German mandate did not allow for sending troops into the turbulent region. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Sunday joined the call for Germany to send more troops to Afghanistan.
However a Scheffer spokesman said the secretary general wants an end to the “very public calls” for more troops and hopes to bring the force generation process back behind closed doors during the two-day meeting in Lithuania. While many others would also like to see the troop calls made discreetly, successive bouts of mainly US calls have had their effect.
In less than two years the NATO figures have gone from 16,000 to 42,000, including around 18,000 US troops and 7,000 British. There are another 20,000 with the US-led Coalition.
Eleven nations have promised reinforcements or materiel in recent months. Most recently Belgium announced Friday it would send four fighter jets and an extra 140 soldiers to Afghanistan this year, as the United States ratcheted up pressure on its NATO allies for reinforcements.
The perils that troops from anywhere face in Afghanistan was highlighted again on Tuesday when a soldier from the US-led coalition was killed by a mine in Helmand. The death brought to 14 the number of foreign soldiers killed since the start of the year in Afghanistan, with 218 killed last year, according to an AFP toll.