Behind the Caveats in Afghanistan
By Michael Hanpeter

In his piece "Afghanistan and NATO - Do the Germans Do Their Share?", Detlef Puhl incisively analyzes strategic and operational dilemmas confronting the NATO partners participating in the International Security Force in Afghanistan (ISAF), and those participating there simultaneously in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).  Conducting these two integrally related missions - peacekeeping and stabilization, and war fighting - in different regions of the country with different mixes of forces exposes a set of contradictions which are putting the alliance to the test.  Indeed, he and other commentators state that if NATO fails the test in Afghanistan, the alliance is dead.  While passing this test may prove vital for the alliance's future, making mission failure synonymous with NATO's demise also contains the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In any case, the situation in Afghanistan is indisputably fraught with multiple perils of both immediate situational and historical nature.

This narrative focuses briefly on two aspects of Mr. Puhl's article.  The first concerns perceptions regarding the German role in ISAF, of which different operational concepts and rules of engagement are not only questions in themselves, but symptoms of more fundamental issues.  The second portion explores implications beyond the specific parameters in Mr. Puhl's piece.

Mutual perceptions are part of the problem concerning the terms of the German military role in ISAF.  On the one hand, German participation in Afghanistan may have been considered more self-evident in the United States, than was actually the case in Germany.  Stated differently, Americans may have tended to underestimate the political hurdles which German national leaders had to overcome in order to develop a consensus for the German military role in ISAF.  Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that the Bundeswehr's engagement would be prescribed in a priori, legalistic terms containing operational caveats designed to reinforce a clear separation in the mission elements between ISAF and OEF.  This approach was necessary within the German domestic political context both to develop, and then to sustain, sufficient political support for the German ISAF role.  The downside of this approach was the impression it could create among other allies, notably the U.S. and the United Kingdom, that the Germans were not fully sharing the same risks and burdens they themselves were confronting in the more dangerous southern portion of Afghanistan.  The response to this frustration, as Mr. Puhl points out, is that the Germans felt they were unreasonably being put under pressure to expand their mission beyond the terms under which they had originally committed. The perception among the allies operating in the South - correct or not - was that the disparate national rules reflected a problem in cohesion among the partners, not only operationally, but in the more fundamental connotation of a deficient sense of solidarity. After all, the partners operating in the North and South are part of the same NATO, in which the notion of "one team, one fight" is weakened if individual national mission delineations remain too rigid in the actual developing situational context.  All this would have become less of a problem - and perhaps not even a problem at all - if the dual mission force sets had been larger.  Both the NATO Secretary General and the SACEUR asked repeatedly for larger member force contributions than were actually committed.   

The caveats issue leads inexorably to an underlying problem the alliance is facing.  The ISAF and OEF missions in Afghanistan have exposed the problem, but they didn't create it.  The deeper problem is that different threat perceptions among alliance members affect the degree of willingness among the members' publics and their governments regarding the appropriate conditions in which to use force among other political instruments, and to provide sufficient financial resources to support the military instrument of that mix.  A recent exchange I had with a member of the Bundestag defense committee during a public event in Washington, which took place immediately after the NATO Summit in Riga, illustrates the point.  I asked him whether he thought that the differentiated threat perceptions among NATO members posed a problem for the future of the alliance, especially as the alliance expanded.  He replied: "No, it's not a problem.  If you look at the Riga Summit Declaration, you'll see we have exactly the same view of threats."  While one can assert Europeans and Americans broadly share the same sense of threat by category (as also reflected in The German Marshall Fund's latest Transatlantic Trends Report of September 2006), that is not the same as saying we all share the same sense of urgency of threat, or that we all feel equally threatened by them.  It is such disparities which affect public inclinations and political decisions on defense spending now, and they will continue to do so in the future.  Different historical experiences in Europe and North America are critically important in understanding the attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the propriety, threshold and utility of the use of force in international conflict in the 21st century.  These political cultural differences lead to the kinds of difficulties Mr. Puhl has described regarding rules of engagement, area of operations, and related factors in Afghanistan.  These factors will not only likely shape future alliance engagements in regions of conflict, but they will in all probability become progressively more serious as the alliance grows.  Such dissonance cannot be dismissed as real or purported misunderstandings by one or the other partner.  It is the inevitable result of different national perceptions, deriving from individual national domestic political situations.  In these circumstances, the caveat syndrome may simply have become a political fact of life to which we must adjust.  The alternatives could be worse.

This essay appeared in the February 16, 2007 AICGS Advisor.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.