Anne Applebaum: A NATO for the 21st century
[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the WaPo.]
...Not that future historians will call NATO's Afghan mission an unqualified success: NATO wasn't prepared to fight in Afghanistan and at first had no leadership and thus no clear objectives in Afghanistan, either. Some countries put large numbers of troops on the ground and fought hard. Others hid behind national "caveats," which dictated where, when and how their soldiers were allowed to fight. Almost all of the alliance governments avoided an honest discussion of the war with their voters....
...But while NATO has enlarged itself seven times since its creation in 1949, most recently in 2009, the placement of NATO forces and institutions has hardly changed in two decades. The alliance now has 28 members, including almost all of the states that used to be the Warsaw Pact, but the three joint forces commands are all still in the south and the west of the continent, in Portugal, southern Italy and the Netherlands. American forces are dispersed in odd ways as well. More than 50,000 U.S. troops are based in Germany - a country now surrounded on all sides by NATO allies - while Poland and Norway, countries with long, non-NATO borders, have 100 and 80, respectively....
Read entire article at WaPo
...Not that future historians will call NATO's Afghan mission an unqualified success: NATO wasn't prepared to fight in Afghanistan and at first had no leadership and thus no clear objectives in Afghanistan, either. Some countries put large numbers of troops on the ground and fought hard. Others hid behind national "caveats," which dictated where, when and how their soldiers were allowed to fight. Almost all of the alliance governments avoided an honest discussion of the war with their voters....
...But while NATO has enlarged itself seven times since its creation in 1949, most recently in 2009, the placement of NATO forces and institutions has hardly changed in two decades. The alliance now has 28 members, including almost all of the states that used to be the Warsaw Pact, but the three joint forces commands are all still in the south and the west of the continent, in Portugal, southern Italy and the Netherlands. American forces are dispersed in odd ways as well. More than 50,000 U.S. troops are based in Germany - a country now surrounded on all sides by NATO allies - while Poland and Norway, countries with long, non-NATO borders, have 100 and 80, respectively....