What’s next for NATO in Afghanistan?

This non-combat mission involving 12,000 personnel and 40 partner nations has raised several questions concerning both NATO’s timing in introducing it as well as the future of Afghanistan without NATO.  Of course it’s not up to NATO to solve all the problems the country is facing. In fact, it is perfectly normal that the role of the Alliance is very limited in many areas, but we cannot forget the fact that NATO has spent more than a decade in Afghanistan. It goes without saying that its presence ultimately has had an impact on the Afghan nation.

 

“The security situation in my country is deteriorating day by day,” said one Afghan journalist at the press conference during the last meeting of the NATO Defense Ministers.  We prefer seeing the glass half full, but it would be unwise not to listen to the people who actually live in Afghanistan and will continue living there with or without NATO. 

 

This said NATO almost certainly has to face the fact that announcing a non-combat mission in a region extremely vulnerable to the ISIL threat on one hand and the Taliban on the other may have been a mistake. When everyone’s attention is focused on the threat of hybrid warfare in Europe after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it is only natural that Afghanistan will drop down the list of priorities, so to speak, but this however shouldn’t be the case.With this in mind we must highlight the fact that there are important overlaps between hybrid warfare and the type of operations that NATO practiced for the past decade in Afghanistan. To some extent the landmark of hybrid warfare resembles a melting - pot, it combines a little bit of everything - conventional, irregular, military, non-military, kinetic, not-kinetic means - in a tailored/scalable package of tools. In other words, the boundaries of traditional warfare categories are shifting. Some experts call this emerging reality  “comprehensive warfare” describing the ability that Russia was able to master in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, displaying this “almost perfect coordination of military and non-military actors” (András Rácz).  In fact, in Brussels, at the NATO HQ, the emerging consensus is that the Alliance should work together with the EU to combine military tools with civilian ones in order to project an integrated civil-military response.   This is something which is highly familiar and recognizable for the NATO practitioners in the Afghan theater over the past decade. In the end, a core necessity of any recent or future stabilization operation that has a counterinsurgency component requires “a proactive, cross-government approach, shared understanding between departments, outcome-based thinking and collaborative working”, as Alexander Alderson emphasized in his article “Learn from experience or never again” published in the RUSI Journal, March 2014.

 

It is exactly this, which makes NATO’s presence in Afghanistan an experience worth learning from but it is also this experience that begs the question ‘Why end the combat mission now?’ ISIL is a global danger and its influence in the region is a threat to security. Perhaps the time has come for NATO to further explore its new Train, Advise and Assist role in the wider region and provide us with another lesson. It is worth noting that some of the lessons learned by NATO in the Afghan theater and incorporated in its institutional memory may in fact also be useful against hybrid threats. 

 

As a result of its operation in the country, the international coalition can now speak of a much calmer Afghanistan, where civilians are not being killed in mass anymore. However, it will take some time for the Afghans themselves to figure-out how to solve problems without the use of weapons. Afghan soldiers are genuinely trying, and this is cause for optimism.  

 

With the Resolute Support mission being one step before the civilian led post-Resolute Support takes over, NATO’s military role in Afghanistan will very soon be very limited if any at all. The future of Afghanistan is on the brink of something new. We will never know how history will judge Western involvement in Afghanistan. The processes that started under our watch will direct Afghanistan into the future. We will find out sooner rather than later if the country is capable of dealing with enormous challenges, not just in the security area, but in economy, rule of law, education, women’s right etc. Afghanistan was a costly lesson for the Alliance paid with the blood of fallen soldiers. For the first time NATO troops were dying in a conflict far away from the transatlantic region. But if nothing more, hopefully this lesson will also lead to better interoperability and perhaps even more importantly to a real sense that if needed we should fight together as allies.