Nato: Struggling at sixty

This weekend Nato celebrates its 60th birthday. 2009 promises to be a decisive year for the alliance. 'The world has changed; Nato must change too.'

Nato's main claim to fame is that it brought peace and stability to post-war Europe. But as the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation celebrates its 60th birthday this weekend, Nato is at war again. When the North-Atlantic alliance celebrated its 50-year existence in Washington ten years ago, Nato had been bombing Yugoslavia for over a month and the outcome of the conflict was still unclear.

This year, Nato's 60th birthday party in Strasbourg on April 3-4 will be overshadowed by the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Never before in its existence has the alliance been at such a war footing. With 55,000 troops spread out over the country, Nato is trying to stabilise Afghanistan and pave the way for reconstruction. Apart from the 28 Nato members, thirteen other countries are involved in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan.

Nato's reputation at stake

Isaf headquarters in Kabul offers a glimpse of what Nato looks like at sixty. You can tell them apart from the little flags pinned to their uniforms: the Americans, Brits, Germans, Canadians, French, Turks and of course the Dutch. But also: Polish, Romanians, Macedonians, Lithuanians, Fins and Albanians. That's what Nato is today: a large multinational coalition under American leadership, a political and military alliance with far-reaching ambitions, strong and not so strong members, aspiring members and partners of convenience. They all share a strong bond and together they form a military force that has no equal in the history of the world.

But can it also win a war?

So far the Afghanistan operation has been a disappointment. The Taliban, Al Qaeda and other "Opposing Military Forces", as they are known in military speak, have proved to be a tough opponent. The mightiest military alliance on earth has so far failed to conquer a bunch of irregular insurgents in one of the poorest countries on earth. Time and again they have hit the alliance with roadside bombs, suicide or other surprise attacks. They are increasingly doing so in areas where they had no real presence before, and in the capital Kabul.

This is not just a problem for security and stability in Afghanistan - it is also a blow to Nato's reputation. In Afghanistan the alliance wanted to prove that it still has an important role to play in a post-Cold War world. Afghanistan, the refrain went at Nato headquarters in Brussels, was going to be "a test-ride for the new Nato". But the test-ride has hit a bump in the road, forcing the alliance to reflect on its task and its ambitions. To fail in Afghanistan would do terrible serious damage to Nato's credibility.

Nato has often been called the most successful military alliance in history - and for good reason. During the cold war Nato stood its ground against a powerful opponent. It also succeeded - with the help of the European Community, later the European Union - in forging a tight alliance between countries with very different backgrounds, some of which had been sworn enemies not so long before. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote in The Dawn of Peace in Europe, Nato won a decisive victory without ever firing a shot.

That was in the days when Nato's ambitions were crystal clear: to protect Western Europe against the Soviet Union through a combination of guaranteed mutual military assistance and the threat of America's nuclear arsenal. In the much quoted words of Lord Ismay, Nato's first secretary general, the goal of the alliance was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down".

Out of area, out of business

But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were abolished in 1991, Nato lost its biggest opponent. The alliance went through an identity crisis. What was its mission now? Russia was no longer a threat and while Germany had grown large again it was now a normal country with a pivotal role in the European Union. All that was left of Lord Ismay's mantra was "to keep the Americans in". But one could hardly maintain a military alliance this size just to preserve the link between the US and the old continent. Nato seemed destined for the history books.

As it turned out, reports of the alliance's imminent death were greatly exaggerated. In the Balkans, it took Nato under American command to end the wars of the 1990s. Only Nato proved capable of stabilising the region. Next, the alliance started looking outside its own sphere of influence - the euro-Atlantic region. Nato's new motto became "out of area, or out of business".

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the allies for the first time in Nato's history invoked the crucial article 5, the very foundation of the alliance: an attack on one member state is considered an attack on all. But then the US decided to overthrow the Taliban on its own - with a few allies but not as a Nato-operation. It was only two years later that Nato, with a UN mandate, was asked to take over the command of Isaf.

The impasse in which Nato's Afghanistan effort finds itself now has revealed a painful division within the alliance - about the approach and the goal of the mission, and about how the burden is shared. Some countries feel they have to do all the dirty and dangerous work while others don’t pull their weight. US defence secretary Robert Gates said last year that Nato has no future as an "alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not".

There is also discordance about the way the war is being fought. Aren't the Americans focusing a little too much on the military aspect? Do the Europeans really want to win, given all their preconditions for committing troops? And what exactly are Nato's tasks in Afghanistan anyway? Do they include the fight against drug trafficking, which is used to finance the insurgency?

The divisions over the war in Afghanistan reflect a much larger debate about the alliance's very reason for existing, and about its ambitions and potential. Should the disappointing results in Afghanistan humble the alliance? Or rather, is the time right for a much more versatile and flexible Nato, capable of fighting an insurgency and of cooperating with civilian reconstruction workers, local government and police? And how much money are we prepared to put into that kind of Nato?

Georgia: on everybody's mind

Internally, another deeply divisive debate is raging about Nato's relationship with Russia and the question who can join the alliance. When Russian tanks rolled across the Georgian border last summer to come to the aid of the separatist Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Nato members reacted in different ways.

See? said the former Eastern Bloc countries that joined Nato in the past ten years, our territory is not safe from the Russians. We still need Nato's security guarantee, including article 5, in case we come under attack from Russia.

But the countries of "old Europe" learnt a very different lesson. What if Georgia had already been a Nato member, they said, and president Saakashvili had invoked article 5? Then we would have had to send our troops to the Caucasus and go to war with Russia - all because Saakashvili had provoked Russia by sending his army into South Ossetia.

Nato was not a party to the 2008 Georgia war but it was damaged by it regardless, Paul Cornish of the British think-tank Chatham House said last year. Nato stood accused of encouraging Russia's fear of encirclement by inviting more and more former Eastern bloc countries to join the alliance. It was accused of giving Georgia hope of Nato membership - and the security guarantee that came with it - only to abandon the small nation in its hour of need.

The Georgia conflict begged the crucial question: what was article 5 really worth? If Georgia had already been a Nato member, would the other members really have gone to war with Russia over Georgia? And is it even good policy for Nato to keep expanding eastwards, accepting any nation that wants to join the alliance no matter how much it angers Russia? Wouldn't it be wiser to put expansion on the shelf for a while, even if this might be seen as bowing to Russian pressure?

2009 promises to be a crucial year for all these questions and dilemmas. There is a new president in the White House who has made it a priority to restore the bonds with the European allies. Nato remains "the basis of our common security, Obama's national security adviser James Jones said last month. Jones knows Nato well; he used to be its Supreme Allied Commander Europe. But what kind of Nato do the American imagine?

Jones: "The world has changed so Nato must change too." The alliance should broaden its scope to better confront new threats - from piracy to cyber-terrorism, from failed states to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Some US members of congress also see securing the energy supply as a task for Nato. Cutting off the oil and gas supplies, as Russia did last year during its conflict with Ukraine, should be valid reason for Nato members left in the cold to invoke article 5, they say.

Many of these issues will be brought up during Nato's anniversary summit this Friday and Saturday. A new Strategic Concept is needed in which the future course of the alliance is laid out. But for this to happen, the Europeans, Canadians and Americans need to redefine the nature of their partnership.

Many pro-Atlanticists in Europe fear that Nato will become like a toolbox where member states take what they need depending on the needs of the mission. It is an existential fear that was brought on by US defence minister Donald Rumsfeld's 2001 statement that "the coalition must not determine the mission" but the other way around.

Rumsfeld's statement was sacrilegious at the time - it flew in the face of the 'all for one, one for all' concept that was the very essence of Nato when it was created. But eight years later it has become common practise. Afghanistan made it clear that there are two kinds of countries: those that fight with the coalition in the restive south and east, and those whose troops are only allowed to operate in the safest parts.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants France to play a bigger role in Nato again, said in February that Europe faces a test.

"Does it want peace? Or does it want to be left in peace? If you want peace you have to give yourself the means to make that happen. If you only want to be left in peace, you can curl up and close your eyes and ears but in the end the dangers will always find you."