NATO, the US, and exit from Afghanistan

Stephen Walt calls attention to an article that looks at some merdy detail that aren't necessarily relevant to the current politics of the failure of the Afghanistan War but are important in the historical record: Sara Bjerg Moller, Five Myths About NATO and Afghanistan Lawfare 09/05/2021.

Sara Moller punctures myths re NATO &#Afghanistan: "European politicians now feigning shock at the U.S. withdrawal timeline (or opposition to it) have about as much credibility as Captain Renault did upon discovering gambling in Rick’s Café Américain." https://t.co/rieRxumi3o

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) September 5, 2021

Walt is referring to one of her points about an endless phenomenon, the jockeying between the US and European allies over how the alliance should work and who is pulling their weight and who not. In the current moment, people who are skeptical of NATO military interventions have an obvious reason to be calling attention to the sad outcome of the Afghanistan War. (Aside from the fact that it was obviously a disaster.) And people who want to see European military capacities built up also have an incentive to point to American deficiencies in Afghanistan - including sloppy claims about the withdrawal - in order to promote their point. Politics is politics, after all.

Moller explains on the last point:

Several commentators as well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair have accused the U.S. government of leaving “European countries in the lurch” as it went about the late-summer withdrawal. Some European politicians have even gone so far as to claim that they were opposed all along to the U.S. withdrawal timetable and spoke out against it during meetings with U.S. government officials earlier this year. But neither claim passes muster.

For starters, there was nothing hasty or precipitous about the U.S. withdrawal timeline, which had been in the works since the February 2020 Doha agreement. Second, President Biden announced in early April 2021 his administration’s plans to complete America’s military exit from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Third, NATO allies were briefed on the plans at a joint meeting of foreign and defense ministers on April 14 of this year by none other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin themselves. [my emphasis]

It seems obvious to me that better European defense coordination in the context of the European Union would be a good thing. Not least because it might bring a little more practical realism to issues like French military intervention in the African Sahel.

Moller makes four other points, none of them quite so relevant to the politics of the moment. One is about the historic invocation of the NATO alliance's collective defense clause:

It is true that NATO invoked Article V—which stipulates that an armed attack against one or more members “shall be considered an attack against them all” and entreats allies to take “such actions” as they deem necessary—in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. But neither of the two missions the transatlantic alliance undertook in Afghanistan—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Resolute Support—were Article V missions. Those now claiming that, by leaving Afghanistan, the United States is not only abandoning Afghans but also jeopardizing European allies’ confidence in U.S. security guarantees are either unaware of — or worse, deliberately rewriting — history.

It is still accurate to describe the Afghanistan War as a US-NATO intervention, or a US-led NATO intervention, or a US-led intervention. But the precedents on treaties can be important. The neocon and general unilateral nationalists of the Cheney-Bush Administration viewed NATO as more of a hindrance and annoyance in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks than as an asset. They were more worried about European allies constraining US action than magnifying it. She explains, "it was not until Oct. 4, 2001, that the North Atlantic Council formally invoked Article V, paving the way for NATO allies to send Airborne Early Warning and Control Force aircraft (AWACs) to patrol U.S. skies and offer other assistance, such as intelligence sharing, to Washington." (my emphasis)

The two major "NATO-led" operations in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, originally formally authorized by the UN) and the subsequent Resolute Support Mission. Neither was legally considered an Article V action under the NATO treaty.

Another of her five points argues that the US-NATO mission is Afghanistan was not a "national-building" effort. This is the only one of the five where I think she might be splitting the hairs a bit too closely. As she writes, "there is no internationally agreed upon legal definition of nation-building, evidence for what constitutes nation-building is often in the eye of the beholder." But the public diplomacy of the Cheney-Bush, Obama-Biden, and Trump-Pence Administrations presented the US effort there as defending democratic governance, the rule of law, democracy, and human rights (especially women's rights). The US did stand up a pro-US, pro-India government in late 2001 based on the former Northern Alliance rebels that stayed in place until last month. For the future, it's important to understand both how the national-building aspect failed as well as what a fraud the claims around "nation building" were. How that government figured into the strategic rivalry between Pakistan and India is a key reason it fell.

Another of her points addresses the argument that, well, some NATO allies could have left troops in Afghanistan after the US withdraw. Oh, please. As she notes, "it was neither politically nor militarily feasible for any NATO ally, either on its own or in combination with others, to maintain any kind of mission in Afghanistan after the U.S. departure."

Finally, she dismisses the argument that pulling out of Afghanistan would undermine European allies' confidence in the US commitment to the NATO alliance. "If anything, America’s treaty allies should take comfort from the fact that Washington is finally shedding a costly military misadventure and choosing instead to focus on addressing contemporary challenges facing the alliance, like Russia and China."

Trump's America First militarism - now that is a threat to European confidence in the US commitment to NATO. But not exiting from a clearly failed intervention in a country that does not represent vital interests of the US or its European allies.