No quick fix

NATO’s success in Afghanistan appears slow, and Martin Jay believes the EU could – and should – do more

Chris Patten once grumbled that wars were rather like great banquets played out by international players which ‘usually left the washing up to the EU’. Six years of NATO troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan is proving to be harder than originally envisaged and is leaving both US and European soldiers with a lot on their plate. Defeating the Taliban was relatively straight-forward, but the NATO coalition of Canadian, US, British and other European soldiers is beginning to realise they it is fighting a harder battle on the ground each day: convincing the Afghans themselves that their intentions are good and that the long-term plan is beneficial to all. This is a hard sell in Kabul – where a car bomb goes off, on average, once every eight weeks – and in a country where the ruined infrastructure punishes its citizens, rather than serves them.

The various roles and responsibilities of the contingent of European troops are incoherent at best – and at worst almost ridiculous. It only serves to remind the Afghans that international interests are often not entirely genuine. Belgian troops have no mandate to leave their compound; the Dutch have reduced their numbers while the French were so low-key that even their presence in Afghanistan wasn’t known by their own people. Many of the European units are in areas of the country which has no security threat whatsoever – making them the laughing stock of the more ‘hardcore’ NATO forces in the south, not to mention resented by locals.

In many respects, Afghanistan’s problems stem from corruption, which has reached colossal proportions – fuelled by dire poverty and Afghans encouraged by foreigners getting rich on international agency contracts. But security, which is linked to corruption, is the real problem, and the central focus of NATO. Government officials are so worried about car bombs that ministries have mounted machine guns at their entrances and barricaded themselves in. Police in vehicles never stop at traffic lights. Without even a token level of security in Kabul, the Taliban insurgents have won a key battle, as people fear to go out, businesses have stopped and anarchy rules.

MEPs who are visiting Afghanistan at the moment would do well to remember what NATO’s chief role is there – to sustain security, allowing the state to rebuild the infrastructure, while crushing the insurgents – a plan that some generals believe could take decades, not years, to achieve. Yet this parliamentary delegation appears to have a starry-eyed vision for Afghanistan. Could the EU – under the guise of a new EU foreign policy (after adopting the new treaty next year) pull together these European ‘contingent’ armies and give them their own mandate there? Some leading MEPs are already talking of this.

Convincing poor Afghans that there is a bright future without the insurgents is a hard sell, but some European soldiers are having success in changing the way people think. The problem is that the success is so tenuously held together. In some cases, troops have been forced to invest in local communities to convince them of their role: an Italian unit has built a hospital and a school in a valley 30km south of Kabul known as a hotbed for insurgents, for example. “What is important is to convince them that there is a different alternative than the one offered by the Taliban,” said the unit’s commander, Colonel Michele Risi.  

But the hospitals and schools were built with Italian government funds, and not the EU’s. Currently Brussels is only assisting with €600m for water management, tree forestation and some hospital support to NGOs. MEPs say that the amount is capped because the security needs to be improved first. Few understand the irony of this: building confidence in the country means getting sewers to work again, rebuilding electricity networks and cleaning up the streets, and that takes money as much as anything else.

Infrastructure has been pushed aside, unfortunately, for much bigger ideas. Leading the delegation of MEPs is French General Philippe Morillon who believes it is time for the European armies to have a special mandate inside NATO. “It’s Europe which is waiting beside the Americans, but not under the Americans,” he told Parlez-Vous magazine before he left. One British MEP and a former serving officer who will not be joining him is Geoffrey Van Orden, who is fighting this initiative and says that the EU should leave military operations to NATO. “The EU should drop its military ambitions and focus on the areas where it can be helpful,” he says. “We need a strategic review of how we are getting on in Afghanistan…What we need is reconstruction first, supported by the military.”

In the meantime, Afghanistan is being neglected; public services are falling to pieces and basic foods like flour have risen in price three-fold in just six weeks. This trip, hopefully, will forge in the minds of the delegation the importance of social and economic reconstruction and institution-building. How is it after all that 300 EU police officers are heading to Kabul soon to ‘mentor’ Afghan officers while at the same time the EU is not providing doctors and economists? Isn’t that part of Chris Patten’s ‘washing up’ too?