NATO in Afghanistan: The Liberal Disconnect

by Sten Rynning

The war in Afghanistan has run for more than a decade, and NATO has become increasingly central to it. In this book, Sten Rynning examines NATO's role in the campaign and the difficult diplomacy involved in fighting a war by alliance. He explores the history of the war and its changing momentum, and explains how NATO at first faltered but then improved its operations to become a critical enabler for the U.S. surge of 2009. However, he also uncovers a serious and enduring problem for NATO in the shape of a disconnect between high liberal hopes for the new Afghanistan and a lack of realism about the military campaign prosecuted to bring it about. He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2012

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rynning presents the evolution of the NATO alliance through the Afghanistan War. He has a few basic points to make: 1. NATO has a liberal disconnect in that it sees the world through a liberal prism but often can't reconcile itself to the reality that force is often needed in international politics. The US remains the outlier in this area, pulling NATO allies along towards greater burden-sharing. 2. NATO is nevertheless reasonably adaptive. In Afghanistan, it developed provincial reconstruction teams, adjusted to COIN warfare, and participated in many development and training projects. The national caveats each country imposed on its involvement severely hampered the war and belied NATO's unity 3. For the first half of the Afghan War, NATO was unsure of its role in the theater. It wanted to do PRT's without the force to back them up. It's presence was scanty, and it largely ignored security problems by treating Afghanistan as only a development and governance problem. By 2007/2008, it found a useful role as an enabler of American combat forces, taking care of development, political, and logistical issues while the Brits and Americans bore the combat load. This was not necessarily a fair deal, but it was useful in playing to the strengths of different NATO allies and not pretending they could handle major combat operations. 4. As dozens of scholars have noted, the Iraq War drew resources and attention away from Afghanistan and severely hampered NATO cooperation. Many opportunities to stabilize and develop Afghanistan were lost because of Iraq.

Running finds the middle ground between the NATO-haters and those who think it should globalize its role in the 21st century. Rather, he sees NATO as a European security organization that should generally remain focused on Europe and its immediate surroundings while only occasionally venturing as far afield as Afghanistan for serious crises. Rennin's judgements are balanced and persuasive, but the book is a stale read. About half of it is about NATO command and political structure, which is a crazy boring topic. He doesn't go into detail on NATO campaigns, nor on the caveats that became such a controversy during the war. This is a concise and useful book, but it isn't very interesting. Stick with Seth Jones or Ahmed Rashid for the most readable and thorough books on Afghanistan.