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Abstract
In 2003, NATO set out to support the establishment of ‘a self-sustaining, moderate and democratic Afghan government able to exercise its authority and to operate throughout Afghanistan.’ The article examines why NATO’s attempt to bring stability to Afghanistan over the decade that followed failed to advance its initial and highly ambitious vision for the country. A fundamental inability to recognise and engage with the drivers and dynamics of conflict within Afghanistan provides an important part of the answer. Underlying divisions and tensions among key allies over strategic objectives in Afghanistan were also major sources of fragmentation and incoherence in NATO’s involvement. Above all, the failure to prioritise the search for an inclusive political settlement among parties to the conflict and to tailor operations on the ground to a realisable political objective ensured growing insecurity and instability over time. The experience holds important lessons for the theory and practice of stabilisation.
Acknowledgements
This contribution draws in part on an essay entitled ‘A Mission too Far?—NATO and Afghanistan 2001–2014’, first published in Daniel Marston and Tamara Leahy (eds.), Strategy and History: Essays in Honour of Professor Robert O’Neill (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016). I am grateful to Roberto Belloni, Francesco Niccoló Moro and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of the present article.
Notes
1. Douglas Lute was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009. He stayed on under President Obama, serving as Special Assistant and Senior Coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan before becoming US Ambassador to NATO in 2013.
2. According to data released by UNAMA in February 2019, the number of civilians killed and injured as a direct result of armed conflict in Afghanistan in 2018 was 10,993. Compared to the previous reporting period, this amounted to a five per cent increase in overall casualties and an eleven per cent increase in civilian deaths. See https://unama.unmissions.org/civilian-deaths-afghan-conflict-2018-highest-recorded-level-–-un-report. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that 147,000 people—including nearly 40,000 civilians—have been killed during the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2018. See Neta Crawford, ‘Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and Need for Transparency’, November 2018. Retrieved from https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.
3. ‘Longer-term strategy for NATO in its ISAF role in Afghanistan’, 8 October 2003, S/2003/970, p. 3.
4. For a thoughtful analysis of the shift in NATO’s focus from collective defence towards so-called ‘crisis management’ operations after the Cold War, see Nick Williams, ‘Crisis Management versus Collective Defence—The NATO Experience’, Center for War Studies Policy Paper 1, University of Southern Denmark, March 2018. Available at https://misc.sam.sdu.dk/files/P.pdf
5. UN Security Council Res.1368, 12 September 2001.
6. UN Security Council Res. 1510, 13 October 2003.
7. In a few cases, PRTs were run by a group of two or three nations.
8. Numbering some 5,000 and confined to Kabul in September 2003, NATO ISAF troop levels grew to 33,000 in 2006 and would eventually peak at more than 130,000 in July 2011.
9. For an account of those methods as conceived and developed by Stanley McChrystal in Iraq, see Urban (Citation2011). For SOF operations in Afghanistan, see also Naylor (Citation2015, pp. 351–376).
10. Brahma Chellaney quoted in Thakur (Citation2015, p. 220).
11. For a detailed discussion of this in relation to the province of Faryab in northern Afghanistan, see Berdal and Suhrke (Citation2018, pp. 70–73). For the importance of local context and ‘small places’ see also important work by Malkasian (Citation2013).
12. Subject: Tactical Directive, 6 July 2009, ISAF HQ (Kabul).
13. For widespread disregard among some US SOF units for the need to verify targets, apply the principles of distinction and proportionality and, generally, to minimise the risk of collateral damage during operations in Afghanistan, see the revealing account by (Naylor, Citation2015, pp. 359–367).
14. Subject: Tactical Directive, ISAF HQ, Kabul, 6 July 2009.
15. A point also strongly emphasised by Fishstein and Wilder (Citation2012), see pp. 57–59. Overdue recognition of this fact, born of hard experience, helps explain the emphasis now given in the UK approach to stabilisation on placing ‘engagement with the politics of conflict at the heart of its stabilisation activity’ (UK Stabilisation Unit, Citation2018, p. 7)
16. For the Dutch domestic politics of involvement in Afghanistan, see Meulen & Mantas, Citation2012.
17. Philip Berry’s study of the UK’s ill-fated decision to assume responsibility for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan in 2002 offers valuable insights into the range of factors that influenced UK decision making towards policy in Afghanistan, including Tony Blair’s perceived need ‘to take on a role that was commensurate with its international stature’. See Berry, Citation2003, p. 721.