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ABSTRACT
The article examines the findings of the Commission of Inquiry established by the Norwegian government in 2014 to evaluate all aspects of Norway’s civilian and military contribution to the international operation in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. Concerned with the wider implications of the Commission’s findings, it focuses on two issues in particular: (1) Norway’s relations with the US, a close and long-standing strategic ally whose resources, capabilities and dominance of decision-making dwarfed that of all other coalition partners in Afghanistan; and (2) Norway’s record in the province of Faryab, where, from 2005 to 2012, a Norwegian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team was charged with bringing security, good governance and development to the province. How Norway prioritised and managed relations with the US highlights and helps to problematise the challenges – political, practical and moral – facing small and medium-sized powers operating in a coalition alongside the US. Norwegian efforts in Faryab are revealing of the dilemmas and contradictions that plagued and, ultimately, fatally undermined the international intervention as a whole. As such, Norway’s experience provides a microcosm through which the inherent limitations of the attempt to transfer the structures of modern statehood and Western democracy to Afghanistan can be better understood.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 ‘NATO Secretary General’s Opening Remarks’, 17 December 2014, www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_116104.htm?selectedLocale = en.
2 ‘Longer-term strategy for NATO in its ISAF role in Afghanistan’, 8 October 2003, S/2003/970, UN Document, p.3.
3 Mujib Mashal and Eric Schmitt, ‘Afghan Security Crisis Sets State for Terrorists’ Resurgence’, New York Times, 2 December 2016.
4 Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have all set up inquiries and/or commissioned studies into aspects of their Afghan involvement. In all these cases, however, the scope of officially sanctioned investigations has been hedged about by restrictions. In none of these cases, for example, has the contribution of Special Forces been critically evaluated.
5 En god alliert – Norge i Afghanistan 2001–2014 (A Good Ally: Norway in Afghanistan, 2001–2014), NOU, 2016:8, 6 June 2016 (henceforth Godal Report). An English language version of the report is scheduled for release in late 2017. All references to the report in this article are from the original Norwegian version, available at https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/09faceca099c4b8bac85ca8495e12d2d/no/pdfs/nou201620160008000dddpdfs.pdf.
6 The Commission was not granted access to the verbatim records or minutes of Cabinet meetings, nor was it able to examine the records of the Cabinet Subcommittee (Underutvalget), which brought together a smaller number of key ministers and coalition Party leaders to resolve contentious and sensitive issues, including over Afghanistan. The workings of the Cabinet Subcommittee, which operated more informally under the government of Kjell Magne Bondevik (2001–5), became more regularised during Stoltenberg’s second period in office (2005–13). Otherwise, the source material available to the Commission was rich and extensive, and included evidence from interviews and closed hearings with more than 330 individuals. See, Godal Report, p. 14 and pp. 209–212. For the increasingly important, if informal and unacknowledged, role of the Cabinet Subcommittee, see Kristoffer Kolltveit, ‘Concentration of Decision-Making Power: Investigating the Role of the Norwegian Cabinet Subcommittee’, World Political Science Review, 9/1, (2013), 173–195.
7 ‘Government appoints commission on Afghanistan’, Press Release, 21 November 2014 https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/commission_afghanistan/id2341692/).
8 Some 9000 Norwegian soldiers served in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014. Norway spent 20 billion Norwegian kroner (NKR) on its involvement, of which 11.5 billion was spent in support of military operations. Although a modest contribution overall, in some areas, notably development aid, Norwegian efforts surpassed those of most comparable smaller and medium-sized coalition members. Norway’s 2.3% share of the total ODA provided bilaterally to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014 exceeded that of Netherlands (2.2%), Sweden (1.8%) and Denmark (1.1%), and it compared favourably to larger donors such as Germany (6.9%) and the UK (6.3%). Godal Report, p. 78.
9 Report of Iraq Inquiry (henceforth Chilcot Report), 6 July 2016, available in full at http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/.
10 For a systematic exploration of these contradictions, see Astri Suhrke, When More is Less – The International Project in Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Company, 2011).
11 The regional context, discussed in the Commission’s report, is also critical to an understanding of policy outcomes but is not directly related to the foci of this article.
12 Godal Report, pp.193–4.
13 Ibid., p. 194.
14 Ibid., p. 196.
15 NORSOF deployed in support of OEF on three rotations (2002, 2003 and 2005). A detachment of 6 F-16 aircraft, operating out of Kyrgyzstan alongside Dutch and Danish aircraft, provided close air support for US combat forces operating in the border areas with Pakistan over a six-month period in 2002–2003. See Godal Report, p. 213. For the operations in the border areas, see Operation Enduring Freedom, March 2002-April 2005, US Army Center for Military History, 2016, p. 21.
16 Craig Pyes and Mark Mazetti,‘US probing alleged abuse of Afghans’, La Times, 21 September 2004; ‘Senator Patrick Leahy to Hon. Donald Rumsfeld’, 1 October 2004, Congressional Record – Senate, (www.congress.gov/crec/2004/10/09/CREC-2004-10-09-pt1-PgS10979-3.pdf.)
17 Godal Report, pp.196–97. A further, arguably still more important, reason for the government’s shift away from OEF was that ISAF was operated by NATO and had an explicit UN mandate, both institutions seen as critically important in Oslo.
18 Espen Barth Eide, ‘Redegjørelse av utenriksministeren om utviklingen i Afghanistan og Norges engasjement i landet’, Stortinget, 4 juni 2013.
19 See, Jessica Donati and Habib Khan Totakhil, ‘A New US Front in Afghanistan?’, Wall Street Journal, 18 Nov. 2016 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-u-s-front-in-afghanistan-1479489075); Michael Gordon, ‘US General Seeks a “a few Thousand” More Troops in Afghanistan’, New York Times, 9 February 2017.
20 Godal Report, p. 11.
21 Ibid., p. 11.
22 Ibid., p. 126.
23 ‘Quarterly Report to Congress – Special Inspector General Report for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), 30 October, 2016’; UNAMA, Reports on the Protection of Civilians In Armed Conflict – 2017 Midyear Report (released July 2017) (https://unama.unmissions.org/protection-of-civilians-reports) p. 72; ‘“Mortar attack kills 13 civilians” in Faryab province’, Al Jazeera News, 12 August 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/mortar-attack-kills-13-civilians-faryab-province-170812132524533.html; Bill Roggio, ‘Taliban Threatens another provincial capital in Afghan North’, 21 October 2016 (https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/10/taliban-threaten-another-provincial-capital-in-afghan-north.php).
24 “Afghanistan: ICRC reduces its presence in the country”, News Release, ICRC, 9 October 2017, https://www.icrc.org/en/document/afghanistan-icrc-reduces-its-presence-country
25 Robert Gates, Duty (London: WH Allen, 2014), p.203.
26 Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy we Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970–2011 (London: Hurts & Co., 2012), p. 326.
27 Mike Martin, An Intimate War – An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict (London: Hurst & Co, 2014), p.195.
28 For the critical importance of local and historical context to an understanding of the patterns of violence and conflict in Afghanistan, see study by Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser – Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (London: Hurst & Co., 2013).
29 For the crystallisation of the post-2001 political economies see also, Vanda Felbab-Brown, ‘Afghanistan Affectations – How to break Political-Criminal Alliances in Contexts of Transition’, UNU Centre for Policy Research, April 2017, pp. 9–13. (https://cpr.unu.edu/how-to-break-political-criminal-alliances-in-contexts-of-transition-afghanistan-affectations.html)
30 Amin Saikal, ‘The UN and Afghanistan: Contentions in Democratization and Statebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, vol. 19, no. 2, April 2012, p.227.
31 Discussed more fully in Chapter 9 of the Godal Report.
32 Godal Report, p.29. See also Kate Clark, ‘How the Guests Became an Enemy: Afghan Attitudes towards Westerners since 2001’, Middle East Institute Viewpoints, Afghanistan, 1979–2009: In the Grip of Conflict, www.mei.edu, pp. 50–52.
33 Godal Report, p. 115.
34 Ibid., p. 115.
35 Ibid., pp. 114–115.
36 See Suhrke, When More is Less, p. 91.
37 Godal Report, p. 115.
38 Ibid., p. 12.
39 The Germans (who were leading RC North) initially and strongly opposed the expansion of operations due to the political caveats on German operations imposed by the Bundestag. In the end, a solution was found that entailed changing the Afghan provincial boundaries. Karzai made clear, however, that including Ghormach district in Faryab as requested by the Norwegians was to be temporary and for military purposes only. Godal Report, pp. 123–124.
40 Godal Report, p. 123.
41 Ibid., p. 123.
42 Ibid., p. 130.
43 Ibid., p. 130.
44 Chilcot Report – Section 9.8: Conclusions the Post-Conflict Period, p. 501.
45 Godal Report, p. 120.
46 Ibid., p.54.
47 Ibid., p.119.
48 Ibid., p.125.
49 Ibid., p. 125.
50 For the bitterness that sometimes broke through to the surface of the debate, see this Op Ed piece by a former PRT-chief. Rune Solberg, ‘Bistand på Ville Veier’, Aftenposten, 6 December 2010 (https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikk/Bistand-pa-ville-veier-202744b.html).
51 ‘Redegjørelse av utenriksministeren og forsvarsministeren om Afghanistan, inkludert rapporten fra det regjeringsoppnevnte utvalget som har evaluert og trukket lærdommer av Norges sivile og militære innsats i Afghanistan for perioden 2001–2014’, https://www.stortinget.no/no/Saker-og-publikasjoner/Saker/Sak/?p=67464.
52 The Commission endorsed the principle of separation of military and civilian roles in stabilisation operations while, at the same time, recognising the importance of coordinating of civilian and military efforts.
53 Godal Report, p. 10.
54 See in particular, Chilcot Report – Section 9.8, Conclusions: The Post-Conflict Period, pp. 501–505.
55 Chilcot Report – Executive Summary, p. 58.
56 Ibid., p. 59.
57 Godal Report, pp. 66–70.
58 In much the same way that the UK PRT in Helmand developed a better and more sophisticated understanding of the political economy of Helmand over time. See, Capturing the Lessons from the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, Wilton Park Report, WPR1322, March 2015.
59 Godal Report, p. 130.
60 Ibid., pp. 68–69.
61 The Socialist Left Party was the second largest party in the Stoltenberg II coalition after Labour, having received 8.8% of the popular vote in the elections that brought the coalition to power.
62 Part of the problem with this position was the blurring of the line between OEF and ISAF operations in the south, again an expression of the multiple and contradictory objectives of the engagement and associated complicated and obscure (at least to most outsiders) lines of command.
63 Godal Report, p. 88.
64 Ibid., p. 77.
65 Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown, Great than the Sum of its Parts? – Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ approaches to Fragile States (New York: International Peace Academy, 2007).
66 We are grateful to one of our anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to this point.
67 Kristoffer Kolltveit, Cabinet Decision-Making and Concentration of Power – A Study of the Norwegian Executive Centre, PhD dissertation, University of Oslo, 2013, p. 8.
68 Patrick and Brown, Great than the Sum of its Parts? p. 6.
69 Ibid., p.7.
70 Lene Ekhaugen, ‘Central government coordination structures for international operations: The emergence and design of Norway’s Afghanistan Forum’, Research paper (unpublished), Institute for Defence Studies (Oslo), p.10. We are grateful to Lene Ekhaugen for kindly sharing this and other research findings with us.
71 Chilcot Report – Executive Summary, p.51.
72 Ibid., p. 51.
73 Ibid., p. 51.
74 Godal Report, p. 193.
75 Ibid., p. 9.
76 Paal Sigurd Hilde and Helene F. Widerberg, ‘NATOs Nye Strategiske Konsept og Norge’, Norsk Militært Tidsskrift, No.4, 2010, p. 14.
77 Svein Efjestad, ‘Norway and the North Atlantic: Defence of the Northern Flank’, in NATO and the North Atlantic – Revitalising Collective Defence, ed. by John Andreas Olsen, RUSI Whitehall Paper 87, (Abingdon: Routledge Journals 2017), 64.
78 In June 2008, Norway’s Defence Minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, presented a paper at an informal meeting of NATO Defence Ministers, which, in the words of her principal policy advisor Svein Efjestad, ‘highlighted a sense that NATO was drifting in a direction where its relevance to the defence of member states was becoming questionable’, Efjestad, ‘Norway and the North Atlantic’, p. 62. Efjestad served as Director General for Security Policy at the MoD from 1995 to 2013.
79 Rolf Tamnes, The United States and the Cold War in the High North (Oslo: Ad Notam Forlag, 1991), p. 250.
80 See ‘Redegjørelse av forsvarsministeren vedrørende EUs innsatsstyrker, forhåndslagring og den videre innsats i Afghanistan’, Stortinget, 2 June 2005 (Statement in Parliament by Minister of Defence Kristin Krohn-Devold), p. 2005.
81 ‘USAs militære forhåndslagre blir i Norge’, Aftenposten, 5 June 2005. ‘MOU Governing Prestockage and Reinforcement of Norway’, 8 June 2005, (https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/180656.pdf).
82 Godal Report, p. 55.
83 Ibid, p. 194.
84 The other two being the Norwegian-led PRT in Faryab and the early (starting in 2007) and continuing involvement of Norwegian diplomats and interlocutors in various clandestine efforts to establish a meaningful political dialogue with Taliban in the hope of reaching an overall political settlement to the Afghan conflict.
85 Godal Report, p. 54 and 119.
86 The US also raised the issue of deploying Norway’s ‘Telemark Battalion’ – a company-sized and mechanised Task Force of which had been deployed to provide security during the Constitutional Loya Jirga in Kabul in December 2003 – to Afghanistan in 2008. See ‘US Emb. Oslo to SecState’, 31 May 2007 (https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07OSLO573_a.html).
87 This included request for Norwegian troops to relieve pressure on Dutch troops in Uruzgan.
88 Godal Commission, p. 33.
89 See ‘US Emb. Oslo to SecState, 31 May 2007’, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07OSLO573_a.html); and Godal report, p. 33. In October 2006 and September 2007, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defence both recommended that Norwegian forces be deployed to southern Afghanistan in order to support NATO allies. The recommendations were strongly opposed by the Socialist Left Party within government and rejected. Godal Report, p. 196.
90 Godal Report, p. 196. Again, there is an interesting parallel to the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry, which, in a similar vein, concluded: ‘Had the UK stood by its differing position on Iraq – which was not an opposed position, but one in which the UK had identified conditions seen as vital by the UK Government – the Inquiry does not consider that this would have led to a fundamental or lasting change in the UK’s relationship with the US….’. Chilcot Report – Executive Summary, p. 53.
91 From 2007 onwards, Norwegian SOF played a central role, together with US and New Zealand forces, in building up, training and providing operational support to the Crisis Response Unit 22 (CRU 22), a counterterrorism unit of the Afghan police based in Kabul. ‘Godal Report’, chapter 5.
92 Although the government refused to support the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it did feel compelled to provide a ‘symbolic’ contribution in the form of military engineers from June 2003 to 2005; a deployment which the government, in order to defuse strong domestic criticism, insisted was entirely ‘humanitarian’ in nature. ‘Bondeviks fiksjon’, Dagbladet, 18 November 2003, http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/bondeviks-fiksjon/65927698.
93 Rolf Tamnes, ‘The Significance of the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Contribution’, in NATO and the North Atlantic – Revitalising Collective Defence, ed. by John Andreas Olsen, RUSI Whitehall Paper 87, 2017, pp. 21–26.
94 Godal Report, pp. 70–71. For the history and intimate character of that relationship, see Olav Riste, The Norwegian Intelligence Service 1945–1970 (London: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 289–291; and relevant chapters in Tamnes’ definitive account of US-Norwegian relations during the Cold War, Rolf Tamnes, Cold War in the High North.
95 The decision in principle to expand ISAF’s counter narcotics role was taken at the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Budapest in 2008 and supported by Norway. Godal Report, p. 170. For details of the policy change, see Judy Dempsey, 'NATO allows strikes on Afghan drug sites', New York Times, 10 Oct. 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/world/asia/10iht-nato.4.16856342.html). For a background to the controversies surrounding JPPL and the focus on kill-and-capture more generally, see ‘A Dubious History of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan’, 28 December 2014, Spiegel Online (www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-docs-reveal-dubious-details-of-targeted-killings-in-afghanistan-a-1010358.html).
96 Felbab-Brown, ‘Afghanistan Affectations’, p.15.
97 Godal Report, p.170.
98 Sherard Cowper-Coles, ‘Reflections from Afghanistan’, in P. Lewis and H. Wallace (eds.), Rethinking State Fragility (London: British Academy Publication, April 2015), 20.
99 For an overview and comparison of the contributions made by different ISAF members, see Marion Bogers, Robert Beeres and Iren Lubberman-Schrotenboer, ‘Dutch Treat? – Burden sharing in Afghanistan’, in Mission Uruzgan – Collaborating in Multiple Coalitions for Afghanistan, ed. by Robert Beeres, Jan van der Meulen, Jospeh Soeters and Ad Vogelaar (Utrecht: Pallas Publications, 2012), pp.267–281.
100 In 2016, Norwegian Special Forces deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Initially deployed to Jordan, Norwegian troops later joined Special Forces from the US and the UK at At Tanf in southern Syria to help ‘train, advise and support local Syrian groups fighting ISIL in Syria’. The deployment confirmed the Godal report’s findings about the increasingly close relationship developed with US in ‘CT and other SOF operations’ resulting from years of cooperation in Afghanistan. At the same time, the deployment also raised questions about the extent to which ‘the aims of [Norwegian] involvement were clear and [had been] properly communicated to parliament and the wider public’, as the Godal Commission, insisted should be done when deploying to active conflict zones. To many, being ‘a good ally’ was again the driving factor for becoming involved. Godal Report, p. 203; ‘Pressemelding, 2 May 2016, Forsvarsdepartementet’ (http://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/nyyt-bidrag/id2499023/); Nabih Bulos and W. J. Hennigan ‘US Airstrike hit Pro-Assad Forces in Syria’, Los Angeles Times, 18 May 2017.
101 Godal Report, p. 12.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mats Berdal
Mats Berdal is Professor of Security and Development in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Email: [email protected]
Astri Suhrke is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen. Email: [email protected]