Tempers are fraying in NATO. Following Canadian PM Stephen Harper’s threat to withdraw its troops from Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan if other NATO countries don’t send additional troops to help, Germany has now rejected calls for it to send more help to the south. Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy sums up views in DC:
…if NATO members cannot support the military effort in Afghanistan, you have to wonder what it is that these countries stand for.
Here at Wilton Park’s conference on European security in 2020, tempers are fraying too. There’s dark muttering in some of the discussions in the margins that whatever Germany may say about only having signed up for peacekeeping duties in the north, the reality is that Germany sent troops to Afghanistan in order to curry support for its bid for a permanent Security Council seat in 2005, but isn’t there for its overstretched allies when the going gets tough. Chatham House’s Paul Cornish takes a similar view in the Telegraph today:
“Nato is in operations now and the whole of Nato has made this commitment to Afghanistan, so why should it be mainly American and British and Canadian boys who are fighting and dying? This all goes back to the key question about the health and vitality of the trans-Atlantic security relationship. Here we are, in extremis, and other Nato member states just don’t stump up the troops.”
Interestingly enough, though, the Weekly Standard – of all publications – thinks that US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has some blame to shoulder for the fractious nature of discussions, as Michael Goldfarb sets out:
Both the content and timing of Gates’s blunt letter to his German counterpart Franz-Josef Jung, which was leaked yesterday by the center-left paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, have left even staunchly pro-American politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU parties supporting Chancellor Merkel astounded and annoyed…
Current opinion polls indicate that about two-thirds of all Germans want an immediate Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan, but despite this growing public pressure, Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU allies are strongly committed to the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission and considering doing more (like in the case of [the Quick Response Force in northern Afghanistan). Given this highly charged domestic political context, aggressive demands from abroad that Germany deploy additional combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan tend to play into the hands of those who want a complete German military pullout.
