Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west's postwar resistance to the Soviet Union's nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats' Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday's Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia's frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia's defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato's intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that "the age of spheres of influence is over". In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush's neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?

The US's two greatest bugbears at present, Russia and Iran, both have grounds for feeling encircled by hostile forces. However badly they behave, they too are vulnerable to the politics of irrational fear. Both countries display the rudiments of democratic activity, with paranoia playing on pluralism.

The glib response of Nato's leaders has been hawkish, that the only thing "these people" understand is tough talk and big sticks. But that just apes Russia's attitude towards Georgia and Ukraine, which at least Russia has the power to enforce.

The west is not threatened by Russia. Turning its border into a zone of bluff and counter-bluff, so Nato can boast 10 extra flags outside its headquarters, has proved destabilising and provocative. Intelligence, like morality, is supposedly the tribute power should pay to reason. Russia is boorish and belligerent enough already. Why encourage it?

With Russia, Nato is playing with fire. In Afghanistan/Pakistan - which should always be yoked together - it is playing with dynamite. Here Osama bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld must be laughing in unison: the former because Nato's conduct of the war against the Taliban has been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida in Pakistan; the latter because everything he said about nation-building has proved true. "Get in fast and get out fast" was his strategy, and he was right.

The fall of Pervez Musharraf might be good news for Pakistan's democrats. It is dreadful news for Nato's proconsuls in their fortified enclaves in Kabul. The likelihood of political turbulence in Pakistan can only increase the hold that pro-Taliban tribes have over the long frontier with Afghanistan and, with it, the certainty of an escalating war.

Nato's performance here has been dreadful. A half-hearted peacekeeper, it had displayed divided counsels, divided leadership and divided rules of engagement. It has reflected the view of the US general in Kosovo, Wesley Clark, that US units should never again be placed under international command. International command means no command at all.

A Pentagon report by General Barry McCaffrey, revealed last week, criticises the lack of command unity in Kabul. "Afghanistan is in misery," it says. "A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the Afghan theatre of operation does not exist."

There is said to be a plan for a 12,000-strong reinforcement of US troops to stage a Baghdad-style "surge", outside the remit of Nato. The idea that the rural Taliban might be susceptible to the same handling as Iraq's urban militias may be senseless, but is on the cards. Such a surge would mean three rival armies - Afghan, Nato and American - roaming this troubled land, a gift to any enemy.

The newly triumphant coalition in Islamabad must long for the days when its Afghan backyard was quiet. The Taliban regime was funded by opium and the Saudis, and of no strategic (as opposed to terrorist) concern to the west. There were no US Predators bombing villages, no CIA phone-tapping, no suborned Pakistan intelligence officers, no outside interference. Pakistan's sphere of influence might not be to every taste, but it was roughly stable.

We shall now have the world's sixth largest country, and with an active nuclear arsenal, in internal turmoil because of a doomed Nato adventure on its border. Taliban units are operating freely throughout the south and east of Afghanistan and within miles of the capital, Kabul, flatly contradicting the mendacious spin of Nato spokesmen over the past two years.

Western governments seem never to learn. Counter-insurgency wars of this sort never work if they become drawn out. At best they leave broken, corrupted, failed states such as Lebanon and Kosovo - and, soon, Iraq. At worst they mean defeat. If ever America were walking into another Vietnam, it is now in Afghanistan, fast replacing Iraq as the mecca for every anti-western fanatic on earth.

Peace in Afghanistan might not matter over much. But its absence will grossly destabilise Pakistan, and that matters greatly. Is this to be another feather in Nato's cap?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/20/nato.usforeignpolicy

Originally posted by Al Jassas Hello Kevin   Well, the problem with the Nato is that it is driven by what America decides. If it says Terrorism is the most important threat then everyone has to agree even if they weren't targeted. If it is Iraq then Iraq it is even if that country ceased to be of any threat even to Kuwaite a long time ago. And now we see them making a fuss about Iran despite the fact that that regime is known for its pragmatism, I dare say the Bush administration is more ideologue than the mullas of Tehran, and that the regime in Iran can be bought and will be more loyal than many people in their own countries.   As I have been saying long ago, terrorism is only a hoax, not that it is not real but the threat that comes from it. It massacred 100k Algerians and yet failed to topple the regime. It kills more people in the Islamic world in one year than what was killed from westerners in the last 30 years. With simple measures terror, which till today never has managed to topple a regime period, terror can be handled easily. Yet the US insists to this day on it being the greatest threat to the free world which is BS. It is a vote grab and succeeded in netting some votes and even helped to make the public favourable for the Iraq scam.   Yet the real threats, the countries that can actually do something, that is China and Russia, were left behind and were even considered allies against the "Islamic threat" as one conservative cook once said and the result is more than obvious, China is now calling the shots in Africa, Russia is much more stronger and more nationalistic and the west is now not only without allies but helpless against the Sino-Russian tide that swept everything in its way. And now the alliance in in shambles with no clear path to go to and preoccupied by the little detailes without any knowledge of what the big picture looks like.   AL-Jassas

To say that the reason NATO is in shambles due to  American overbearing would be false in my honest opinion, I see the current failings and strugglings of NATO in regards to Russia and Afghanistan and the war on terror to be the result of a failing to form a united front due to inter-squabbling and competing interests within the organization it's self.

In regards to the threat posed by violent Islamic extremism, I still see it as one of the top threats to the United States and the Western World as it still has the ability to carry out spectacular terrorist attacks upon the West and the ability to carry out terrorist attacks on US and other Western interests both at home and aboard which also carries the ability to cause credible harm to political and economic ones as well. Islamists in many cases violent ones, do in my opinion have the ability to topple regimes in the Islamic World, Just look at Iran and Afghanistan as examples and with successes almost occurring in Somalia and a  very dangerous and explosive situation in Pakistan as examples. So Islamists of this nature can do so much more as was almost evidenced in Iraq where they also came close to defeating one of the best military forces that ever crossed the face of the Earth or actually defeat one such as was seen in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Violent and radical Islam doses have the ability to sway influence and cause harm and I feel, which is a scary thought that it could do more.                
              


Edited by Kevin - 20-Aug-2008 at 19:34