NATO's Role Under Review After Attacks

U.S. officials began unveiling their new agenda for NATO at the meeting of allied defense ministers in Brussels on Sept. 26. When and if the U.S. proposals prevails, NATO will have a new target - terrorism - and a new set of tools, including economic, diplomatic, and law-enforcement measures, to help it reduce the terrorist threat to Western countries.

A U.S. defense official speaking on background before the NATO meeting listed six specific areas for enhanced NATO cooperation. First and foremost is sharing intelligence on the terrorists and their infrastructure. Allied countries are already exchanging information on Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda group, but the cooperation came too late to stop the attacks on New York and Washington. We will never know if the terrorist acts could have been prevented with better intelligence cooperation. However, given that the perpetrators apparently planned their operations in Germany and their associates have since been arrested in France and in Spain, better sharing of intelligence among NATO allies can clearly increase the chances of preventing future attacks.

The United States, the unnamed defense official said, will need active diplomatic support from its allies. All NATO allies expressed the strongest possible support for U.S. actions; the alliance evoked Article V of its charter to call the attack on United States an attack on all allies. But the support can and, in some ways already does, go further. The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and a trio of high-level European Union (EU) representatives, for example, flew to Iran to win Tehran's support for global anti-terrorist operations. Washington itself could hardly succeed in winning Iran's sympathies given the history of enmity between the two countries, and U.S. legislation prohibiting official contacts. But Iran's support may be essential in keeping Muslim countries on the coalition's side and in strengthening domestic opposition against the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The European intervention points to possible future role for NATO allies - building diplomatic bridges between the United States and countries which, for a variety of reasons, fell out of favor in Washington but whose support may be essential for future anti-terrorist operations.

The above two points stretch NATO's traditional roles, but still fall firmly in the realm of the alliance's expertise and past activities. NATO's intelligence experts and diplomats meet regularly in peacetime as well as wartime. And while NATO is primarily a military alliance, its diplomatic role has always been important. NATO cohesion more so that its bombing of Yugoslavia has been credited with forcing Slobodan Milosevic to back down over Kosovo. However, the other areas of cooperation outlined by the United States take the alliance out its traditional areas of responsibility.

The U.S. official outlining Washington's agenda also emphasized the need for allied help in law-enforcement as well as economic measures, both in attacking enemy financial infrastructure and in assisting people displaced and impoverished in the course of the campaign. It is unclear whether Washington foresees a NATO role in coordinating these activities. Law enforcement agencies have long been cooperating outside the NATO framework. The United States and the European Union have a long track record of coordinating their economic assistance activities, with the European Union actually playing a much more active and substantive role in assistance than Washington, at least in recent years. It is likely that law enforcement and economic actions will remain outside NATO's purview; allied help can and likely will be secured through separate channels.

Last but not least, the United States will need NATO's military assistance in its fight against terrorism, but the allied role in this effort is likely to be limited. Ironically, the alliance that spent more than 50 years harmonizing its military plans and exercising together, finds it has little to offer militarily to the U.S. military campaign against terrorism. It is partly a function of the peculiar character of the current campaign - NATO trained for conventional war, but there is nothing conventional about the current threat. There is no enemy infrastructure to be attacked, no columns of troops and armor moving across battlefields.

But two other factors also are to blame.

First, NATO allies have in the past resisted U.S. attempts to make terrorism a high priority for the alliance. Military plans for anti-terrorist operations thus played a minor role in alliance planning. Even though the campaign against terrorism will involve some military measures, they will not be of the kind NATO practiced for. Special forces, for example, are slated to play a large role. While the United States special forces routinely work with their European - mostly British - counterparts, these exercises occur outside NATO framework and mostly on a bilateral basis. The alliance, as such, has little to contribute to a joint special forces operation. This is likely to change in the future.

Second, NATO forces were slow to change from their Cold War era posture. Most allies responded by cutting their budgets while the pace of restructuring their forces for peacekeeping and other recent kinds of operations has lagged behind. "We all overdrew the peace dividend," said the U.S. official, "but I think they overdrew it more than we did." Virtually every single European ally has a plan in place to trim and lighten its armed forces in order to improve their mobility and sustainability. Together with more effective and accurate weaponry, these are some of the main prerequisites for successful peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions, as well as for the likely operations against the terrorist networks. But the changes will take time, attention, and money. The recent attacks will force alliance's attentions on the adequateness of its armed forces, and Washington will likely provide the necessary pressure to nudge up defense spending in Europe.

Most of the changes outlined before the Brussels meeting will take time to implement. At least for the near term, NATO's role will be limited as U.S. officials strive to keep the military coalition as narrow as possible. The United States has two competing needs. It must secure broad diplomatic support, especially from Islamic states, to isolate the terrorists and the regimes supporting them. It also needs effective and efficient intelligence and military help from its allies to help it carry out military operations, as needed.

But for all their symbolic significance, coalitions complicate decision-making and increase chances of security leaks. In some cases, they compromise actual military operations, even if the coalition in question is NATO itself. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the 1999 Kosovo war concluded that the U.S. military violated its own fighting doctrine in order to maintain NATO cohesion. The compromises, GAO concluded, may have "resulted in a longer campaign, more damage to Yugoslavia, and greater risk to alliance forces than likely would have occurred if doctrine had been followed."

For the time being, U.S. officials clearly lean on the side of a simple, ad-hoc coalition, most likely outside NATO's confines. "The mission will define the coalition," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "we will not let the coalition define the mission." NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson confirmed on Wednesday that Washington has not asked NATO for any specific action or cooperation

By Tomas Valasek
Senior Analyst
tvalasek@cdi.org

 
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