NATO's Fudges
Compromises on Afghanistan and expansion of the alliance avoid a rupture but won't win any wars.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

THE NATO alliance has a way of patching its internal quarrels by doing just enough to avoid schism or collapse. Last week's summit meeting in Bucharest was no exception. Faced with a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan -- and a threat by Canada to withdraw its forces from a southern battle front -- the alliance scraped together a bare minimum of fresh troops, including a battalion from France. The deal allows NATO to tell itself that it is rising to the Afghan challenge, despite the continued unwillingness of many of its members to commit soldiers to combat and the growing skepticism of some about the mission as a whole.

This lowest-common-denominator solution, while understandable from an association of 26 democracies, falls well short of what is needed to win -- as opposed to forestall defeat -- in Afghanistan. Even with the additional troops, and 3,500 more Marines being sent on what is supposed to be a temporary assignment, U.S. and NATO commanders will still be short of the forces they say they need to defeat the Taliban. A growing part of the force doing the actual fighting will be American; the fresh French troops, for example, will deploy to more tranquil eastern Afghanistan so that American units there can head to the south. The risk is that a few months from now, the Taliban, as well as NATO, will have grown incrementally stronger.

Debate over the alliance's second major mission -- expansion to the formerly Communist countries of Europe -- produced a similarly muddled result. Invitations for membership were issued to Croatia and Albania, but Macedonia was blocked by Greece's unreasonable demand that it first change its name. Meanwhile, requests by the newly democratic states of Ukraine and Georgia for membership action plans, bureaucratic vehicles for guiding countries into the Western fold, were deferred at the insistence of Germany and France. The Europeans were intimidated by the bluster of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to turn Ukraine and Georgia into Kremlin colonies and who declared that their NATO membership would cross a "red line." Yet a strong if belated push by President Bush produced at least a rhetorical crossing of that line: NATO's communique said that "we agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO."

With luck that statement will become a mandate that will bolster Mr. Bush's legacy as a president who oversaw, and pushed for, the democratization of southeastern Europe. But it's unfortunate that the president chose to prioritize that cause behind winning NATO's support for missile defense -- which was the main concession made by allied governments to the outgoing president. It may be that some time in the next decade Iran will deploy nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching Europe or the United States, and that the interceptor system proposed for deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic will have advanced beyond its current technical status as unfinished and unproven. For now, it looks like a premature and possibly unnecessary expenditure of financial and diplomatic capital.