Global Policy Forum

By Craig S. Smith

Nearly a year after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed to expand its peacekeeping operations beyond this sprawling, mountain-ringed capital [Kabul], the program is bogged down because member states are reluctant to send troops into the increasingly unstable countryside, NATO officers say.

"Stage Two is stalled,'' said Col. Hans Rudkiewicz, a French member of NATO's International Security Assistance Force at the peacekeeping mission's headquarters here, referring to a four-phase program to set up provincial bases across Afghanistan.

The sluggish response to a gaping need - about 80 percent of Afghans live in rural areas beyond the reach of the current central government - has left the country open to increasingly powerful drug lords and, in some areas, resurgent Taliban forces. The NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has warned that without greater resolve from its members the alliance risks failing in its first mission outside of Europe.

NATO has managed to coax as many as 1,500 additional troops from reluctant members for temporary duty over the next few weeks, spanning the period around the national elections on Oct. 9. Most of those troops have already arrived to reinforce the roughly 6,500 troops of the security force on the ground and some may remain after the elections. [The Pentagon said this week that it would send about 700 to 1,000 troops to Afghanistan to help run the elections in a secure way.]

But because NATO is still looking for countries willing to send soldiers into the western provinces, the alliance is only providing election security in Afghanistan's relatively stable north. Left out are regions around Herat, which has been engulfed by violence since the central government removed the governor, Ismail Khan, on Sept. 11.

Under a United Nations resolution passed in October 2003, NATO is supposed to expand its peacekeeping presence into the Afghan hinterland to help the fledgling central government extend its power beyond the capital. For now, the interim government of President Hamid Karzai is little more than an alliance of regional warlords and most of the country remains beyond Kabul's control.

At the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul this year, President Bush pressured members to commit more troops for provincial reconstruction teams in northern Afghanistan. Five such NATO-sponsored teams now exist, including a forward support base in Mazar-i-Sharif operated by Britain. The teams are made up of civilians and military personnel engaged in community services and security.

But those teams only fulfill the first phase of the United Nations-mandated plan. No country has stepped forward to take responsibility for reconstruction teams in the less stable western provinces, where the United States military has set up two teams on its own. "NATO was correct to go into Afghanistan, but now needs to move more quickly to deploy a greater presence to defend the people," said the American ambassador to the alliance, R. Nicholas Burns.

Because there is no schedule for their disengagement, the reconstruction teams require an indefinite commitment of men and equipment. Although the teams are only 100 to 300 people strong, regular rotations and logistical support mean a commitment of 1,000 or more troops to maintain the teams in isolated and potentially hostile areas of the country.

NATO is clearly in Afghanistan for years to come: the alliance's exit strategy is to train a national army of 70,000 men by 2009 to take over from NATO and the 18,000 American troops operating separately in the south of the country. But only 15,000 Afghans have been trained. "In the meantime, we're filling a power vacuum," Colonel Rudkiewicz said.

That makes the commitment to provincial bases a politically difficult one. NATO members have been far quicker to send troops to low-tension peacekeeping operations in the Balkans. About 7,000 NATO peacekeepers are stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and nearly 20,000 in Kosovo, for example, even though the need for such troops is clearly more critical in Afghanistan.

With the first phase of the provincial expansion completed in the north, NATO is now looking for countries willing to establish teams in the troubled west. But no movement is being made on this second phase, which is to have four NATO bases, including a forward support base in Herat. The United States operates non-NATO reconstruction teams in Herat and Farah, which would eventually be taken over by NATO forces.

The Italians have tentatively agreed to cosponsor the forward support base in Herat. But Italy, already stretched by financial constraints at home and military commitments in Iraq, is not able to provide the helicopters and fighter jets necessary for the emergency rescue and close air support that will back up other proposed NATO teams in the region. No country has stepped forward to sponsor the Herat base with the Italians.

Without a forward support base, NATO officials say, getting volunteers to sponsor smaller provincial teams in Qala-i-Nau and Chaghcharan is out of the question.

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