As prepared for delivery.
NATO and Afghanistan:
Challenges & Responsibilities for Europe and the United States
Hanns Seidel Stiftung, Muenchen
23. April 2008
DCM John M. Koenig
Thank you very much, Mr. Kornberger, for your introduction and for sponsoring this event. The Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung deserves a lot of credit for addressing key themes facing the transatlantic alliance, such as the future of NATO, Iran and Afghanistan. I am delighted with the turnout and I am honored to be part of your series on Afghanistan. I understand that you recently hosted an impressive program with former Bundeswehr physician Dr. Reinhard Erös who now leads a privately organized humanitarian aid program securing education for girls in the post-Taliban era.
Mr. Kornberger, Brigadier General Berger, Consul General Bitanga, dear guests of the Hanns-Seidel Stiftung, I am very happy to be back in Munich, my third trip to your beautiful city this year. Munich is not only a pillar of German-American friendship and a vibrant place to visit, as the New York Times recently noted in a glowing article, but also a hub for discussing security policy. The recent Munich Security Conference proved again its outstanding role as an invaluable platform for exchanging views on the most pressing security issues of our time.
At this year’s conference, Secretary of Defense Gates spoke at the conference about Afghanistan, specifically within the context of NATO because, as he said, Afghanistan embodies the security challenges that we face today. He compared the gravity of these challenges to those we faced in the early postwar years, reminding the audience that, although from the vantage point of today, victory in the Cold War seems almost preordained, 60 years ago, in 1948, the year of the Berlin airlift, few people were optimistic about the future of Europe, or the prospect of a Western alliance.
If we have learned anything in the last 60 years, it is that we need each other. In just a few weeks, we will be moving into our new Embassy building, returning to the Embassy’s pre-war location next to the Brandenburg Gate, just a few meters away from where President Reagan called upon Secretary Gorbachev to tear down the wall that divided this country and Europe. It is the closing of a circle that extended back to the time when we were enemies at war, through the long Cold War years of division, the process of reunification to the state where we are today as global partners. It is also a symbol of our commitment to the transatlantic partnership. In the 20th century, our unity ensured the defeat of fascism and Soviet Communism. For four decades, the NATO Alliance was a shield of democracy. It was the foundation for freedom’s victory in the Cold War.
Today NATO’s mission has not changed. Its main goal is still the collective defense of its members. The parameters of the security environment, however, have changed -- radically. The contours of the international arena are much more complex than at any time during the Cold War. Rather than one, single entity and one, single animating ideology, we are instead facing challenges from multiple sources: a new, more malignant form of terrorism inspired by jihadist extremism, ethnic strife, disease, poverty, climate change, failed and failing states, resurgent powers, and so on. The stark realities of this new security environment – driven home in the years since September 11th – have led to a renewed focus on the overall structure and readiness of our governments to deal with the threats of the 21st century.
After the end of the Cold War, NATO faced two fundamental challenges: first, should it remain fixed in its Cold War-era membership? Second, should it remain fixed in its Cold War activities? Three successive American Administrations – those of President George W. Bush, President Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush – have supported NATO’s transformation from a Cold War to a 21st century institution.
From 2003 to 2006, I was posted at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels. In my day-to-day work, I saw a NATO of 26 members and 40 partners across 4 continents working effectively and providing security in operations in Europe and Eurasia, North Africa, the Middle East, and in the Persian Gulf. I was involved in efforts to expand NATO’s Afghanistan operation from Kabul to the north, west, and south of the country, in launching NATO’s support for the African Union Mission in Sudan, and in activating the newly created NATO Response Force to lead a disaster relief operation after the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. What a change from the NATO of the Cold War – a security alliance of 16 countries that had never conducted military operations and had no partner relationships. When you think about enlargement, partnerships, the diversity of its operational roles, and the geographic spread of the operations it has taken on, it is obvious that NATO’s transformation is ongoing.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Afghanistan. With each passing month, all of the Allies are learning more about what it takes to wage a 21st-century counterinsurgency effort -- a combined civil-military effort that puts soldiers side-by-side with development workers, diplomats and police trainers. Whether flying helicopters across the desert at night, embedding trainers with the Afghan military and police, conducting tribal councils with village elders, or running joint civilian-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams, our institutions are reinventing the way they do their jobs.
Think back, however to September 12, 2001. The day after the attacks on New York and Washington, NATO invoked the Washington Treaty’s critical Article Five clause of collective defense for the first time. In the 52 years of NATO’s existence prior to that date, no one ever expected that Article Five would be invoked in response to a terrorist attack; an attack on the United States rather than Europe; and an attack plotted in Afghanistan, planned in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Germany, carried out inside the United States, and financed through Al Qaeda’s fund-raising network. That decision, and its implications, effectively brought an end to NATO’s debate about going “out of area.”
But in 2001, despite this landmark decision, NATO lacked the capability of responding to the challenge of September 11, or working effectively in a place as far a field as Afghanistan. Within months, however, several individual Allies, including Germany, had joined the United States in Afghanistan, and on August 11, 2003, NATO took over the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Kabul. From that moment, NATO crossed into a new world. And the NATO Alliance that never fired a shot in the Cold War has had some real operational successes with our Afghan partners.
Roads, schools, markets and businesses have been built all over the country. Six million Afghan children now go to school, one third of them girls -- that is two million girls in school. Under the Taliban, there were none. Some 80 percent of Afghans have access to health care – under the Taliban it was only eight percent. Most of the Afghan people are no less than five kilometers from a clinic today. Districts and villages throughout eastern and southern Afghanistan are more secure and more accessible than they have been in years -- in some cases, decades. Despite dire predictions, the Taliban’s much-vaunted Spring Offensive never materialized in 2007. Last year, the Taliban were on a media blitz threatening to take Kandahar. Today we hear no such claims because we stood together – Afghans, Americans, Allies, and our partners – to stare down that threat. The ranks of trained Afghan soldiers have swelled from 35,000 to almost 60,000, with Afghans themselves leading the fighting in some important combat operations. This spring, the United States sent an additional 3,200 Marines to capitalize on the gains, support the Afghans, and support the momentum -- 2,200 for ISAF combat missions in the south and 1,000 more trainers for Operation Enduring Freedom, focused primarily on Afghanistan's police forces.
But despite these achievements, we are sober about the challenges. We still have much more to do and much more to learn. Levels of violence are up, particularly in the south, where the insurgency has strengthened. Public confidence in government is shaky because of rising concerns about corruption and tribalism. The border areas in Pakistan provide a haven for terrorists and Taliban who wage attacks in Afghanistan. Civilian-military cooperation does not work as well as it should, and civilian reconstruction and governance do not follow quickly enough behind military operations.
Narcotics remain a serious problem. Efforts to counter this scourge are working in some but certainly not all parts of the country. The Taliban are using the profits from drug revenues and the instability spread by corruption and lawlessness to fund their insurgent activities. Yet there is good news too. In much of the north and east, poppy cultivation is down. In a secure environment, farmers can more easily exercise alternatives and are not subject to the same threats and intimidation by insurgents. With improved governance and security conditions, we believe it will be possible to achieve reductions in cultivation in the remaining provinces in coming years.
NATO is working hard, but needs to focus on counterinsurgency tactics, provide both more forces in order to facilitate increased and faster reconstruction assistance and improve performance in supporting robust Afghan counternarcotics efforts. Fundamentally, NATO needs to show greater political solidarity and greater operational flexibility for deployed forces.
Do we need more Allies fighting? Yes. A comprehensive approach, which we all support, requires us to be prepared to use military force against those hard-core insurgents who are bent on using violence to achieve their political ends. And as Secretary Gates emphasized at Munich, it is important that these burdens be shared equally within the Alliance. We cannot afford to become an Alliance where some Allies fight and others don't.
We also need Allies and partners to do more to train and equip the Afghan national security forces—the Army and the police. NATO is providing small embedded teams directly into Afghan forces to serve as coaches, trainers, and mentors to the Afghan Army units. Currently, there are 34 NATO training and mentoring teams -- known in NATO speaks as OMLTs -- deployed in Afghanistan. But we need at least 22 more by this time next year and we are asking all of our Allies and partners to step up and do more. We greatly appreciate what Germany is doing to increase its involvement in the training of the ANA. Not only is Germany planning to deploy an additional four OMLTs this year, bringing the total to seven, but it is also expanding its drivers and mechanics school in Kabul into a full-fledged logistics training center and looking into setting up additional ANA training centers in the north. This is all very positive.
In addition to more troops, we need to give Allied commanders on the ground more flexibility so they can use their forces most effectively. We understand the political constraints under which our Allies operate, but less flexibility requires more troops and prolongs the mission.
At the Summit in Bucharest last month, NATO issued a statement on Afghanistan that articulated the alliance’s shared vision and long-term commitment to security, reconstruction, development in Afghanistan. It outlined some key areas where we need to work more effectively to address the challenges that I just described.
Practically, that translates into extending capabilities. One current gap within NATO, for example, is tactical airlift. Helicopters that have the right equipment that are able to deploy, sustain themselves in the field, and contribute to the operations. In that regard, we strongly support a UK initiative to establish a helicopter trust fund, to assist Allies who may have the necessary helicopters, but who lack the financial wherewithal to properly outfit and maintain them for deployment into challenging combat conditions.
New coordination mechanisms are being created for special operations forces, something that NATO had never done before the efforts in Afghanistan. Working together with allies, including special operations forces, we have discovered potential for synergies in joint training and for working together.
We are also looking at ways in which we can sustain the contributions to the Response Force that was created at the Riga Summit, and actually use them. If we can break it into deployable pieces or find other ways that the Response Force can contribute to the effectiveness of NATO’s operations. It’s important to have a reserve capability so that for contingencies that arise NATO has the ability to respond, but we can’t just be tying up the resources in something that stays on the shelf. So we’ve got to make it useable, as well.
The underlying theme is that security still depends upon transatlantic cooperation. That means that at the same time that we build a more capable NATO, we also want to see a stronger and more capable EU. If Afghanistan has taught us anything, it is that we need a better, more seamless relationship between the two, in other words: better NATO-EU cooperation. Each organization brings special strengths and capabilities to the table that complement one another. In Afghanistan, for example, the EU police mission (EUPOL) fills a niche in which NATO does not have competence. That's why it is so important that EUPOL significantly expand its size beyond the current 200 -- we need literally thousands of trainers/mentors -- and begin operating at the district level in Afghanistan, where the real police mentoring needs to be done.
Several U.S. Administrations have worked assiduously to help build a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. NATO has been an indispensable instrument of this noble objective and NATO is becoming a multilateral instrument of transatlantic security for the 21st century – far afield but closely tied to its original purposes and values. This is the great undertaking that will be handed over to the 44th President of the United States in 2009, whoever he or she may be.
Thanks again for having me here today. I’d be happy to take questions.
