The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 t first glance, NATO and Afghanistan might seem made for each other. Faced with ongoing problems of insurgency despite the overthrow of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Afghanistan continues to require outside assistance to bring a modicum of security to the lives of ordinary peo- ple. NATO, for its part, faces the challenge of proving meaningful in a post-Cold War world where its role can no longer be to keep America in, Russia out and Germany down. So the advent of new threats was, at least in one sense, remarkably fortuitous. Yet in significant respects, the Afghanistan experience has proved a testing one for both. The need to engage in serious combat operations — mercifully avoided dur- ing the period of the Cold War — has proved a notable practical challenge for NATO, exposing problems of political will and operational coordination. Afghanistan has also brought into sharp focus the question of what kind of leadership from the United States will be politi- cally acceptable in the context of a “Global War on Terror” that means different things to American and European observers and publics. The government of President Hamid Karzai is con- fronting the need to balance the use of kinetic force against the threat of a revived nationalism that could turn the Afghan people against the U.S. and allied militaries that were warmly welcomed when they arrived in 2001. More broadly, Kabul is seeking an international ap- proach that goes beyond Afghanistan itself to recognize the impact of regional threats, especially from the east. The West’s failure to bite this particular bullet has left Kabul deeply frustrated, although political change in Pakistan may be opening new opportunities for positive action. As a result of all these factors, the Afghanistan the- ater of operations is proving to be a critical test of NATO’s capacities in the post–Cold War world. If it is ultimately seen to have failed, its future may come under increasing scrutiny. There is obviously no short- term threat to the Atlantic alliance, broadly speaking. But it is perhaps worth recalling that two military alliances that were set up a generation ago as parallels to NATO — CENTO and SEATO — have both disap- peared into the mists of time. F O C U S O N A F G H A N I S TA N NATO AND A FGHANISTAN : M ADE FOR E ACH O THER ? T HE A FGHANISTAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS IS PROVING TO BE A CRITICAL TEST OF NATO’ S CAPACITIES . B Y W ILLIAM M ALEY A William Maley is a professor and director of the Asia- Pacific College of Diplomacy at The Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author of The Afghanistan Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Rescuing Afghanistan (UNSW Press, 2006).