Simon Jenkins is a right winger, no?  



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/20/nato.usforeignpolicy

  

In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe
This outdated military alliance is playing with fire in Russia. In 
Pakistan and Afghanistan it is playing with dynamite
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          o The Guardian,
          o Wednesday August 20 2008
      

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it 
failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a 
rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined 
by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its 
hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west's postwar 
resistance to the Soviet Union's nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now 
it has become a diplomats' Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of 
extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday's Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the 
latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian 
intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South 
Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that 
they must not play games with the west along Russia's frontier. Nato, 
which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of 
Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and 
consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border 
states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place 
missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-
aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. 
There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close 
to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of 
Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.

Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia's defence of Russian 
minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato's intervention to 
defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. 
Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.

George Bush said earlier this month that "the age of spheres of influence 
is over". In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, 
Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory 
that underpinned Bush's neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world 
for democracy?

The US's two greatest bugbears at present, Russia and Iran, both have 
grounds for feeling encircled by hostile forces. However badly they 
behave, they too are vulnerable to the politics of irrational fear. Both 
countries display the rudiments of democratic activity, with paranoia 
playing on pluralism.

The glib response of Nato's leaders has been hawkish, that the only thing 
"these people" understand is tough talk and big sticks. But that just 
apes Russia's attitude towards Georgia and Ukraine, which at least Russia 
has the power to enforce.

The west is not threatened by Russia. Turning its border into a zone of 
bluff and counter-bluff, so Nato can boast 10 extra flags outside its 
headquarters, has proved destabilising and provocative. Intelligence, 
like morality, is supposedly the tribute power should pay to reason. 
Russia is boorish and belligerent enough already. Why encourage it?

With Russia, Nato is playing with fire. In Afghanistan/Pakistan - which 
should always be yoked together - it is playing with dynamite. Here Osama 
bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld must be laughing in unison: the former 
because Nato's conduct of the war against the Taliban has been a 
recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida in Pakistan; the latter because 
everything he said about nation-building has proved true. "Get in fast 
and get out fast" was his strategy, and he was right.

The fall of Pervez Musharraf might be good news for Pakistan's democrats. 
It is dreadful news for Nato's proconsuls in their fortified enclaves in 
Kabul. The likelihood of political turbulence in Pakistan can only 
increase the hold that pro-Taliban tribes have over the long frontier 
with Afghanistan and, with it, the certainty of an escalating war.

Nato's performance here has been dreadful. A half-hearted peacekeeper, it 
had displayed divided counsels, divided leadership and divided rules of 
engagement. It has reflected the view of the US general in Kosovo, Wesley 
Clark, that US units should never again be placed under international 
command. International command means no command at all.

A Pentagon report by General Barry McCaffrey, revealed last week, 
criticises the lack of command unity in Kabul. "Afghanistan is in 
misery," it says. "A sensible coordination of all political and military 
elements of the Afghan theatre of operation does not exist."

There is said to be a plan for a 12,000-strong reinforcement of US troops 
to stage a Baghdad-style "surge", outside the remit of Nato. The idea 
that the rural Taliban might be susceptible to the same handling as 
Iraq's urban militias may be senseless, but is on the cards. Such a surge 
would mean three rival armies - Afghan, Nato and American - roaming this 
troubled land, a gift to any enemy.

The newly triumphant coalition in Islamabad must long for the days when 
its Afghan backyard was quiet. The Taliban regime was funded by opium and 
the Saudis, and of no strategic (as opposed to terrorist) concern to the 
west. There were no US Predators bombing villages, no CIA phone-tapping, 
no suborned Pakistan intelligence officers, no outside interference. 
Pakistan's sphere of influence might not be to every taste, but it was 
roughly stable.

We shall now have the world's sixth largest country, and with an active 
nuclear arsenal, in internal turmoil because of a doomed Nato adventure 
on its border. Taliban units are operating freely throughout the south 
and east of Afghanistan and within miles of the capital, Kabul, flatly 
contradicting the mendacious spin of Nato spokesmen over the past two 
years.

Western governments seem never to learn. Counter-insurgency wars of this 
sort never work if they become drawn out. At best they leave broken, 
corrupted, failed states such as Lebanon and Kosovo - and, soon, Iraq. At 
worst they mean defeat. If ever America were walking into another 
Vietnam, it is now in Afghanistan, fast replacing Iraq as the mecca for 
every anti-western fanatic on earth.

Peace in Afghanistan might not matter over much. But its absence will 
grossly destabilise Pakistan, and that matters greatly. Is this to be 
another feather in Nato's cap?