You're On Your Own, Obama

The United States president wants to finally get control in Afghanistan. He wants to do it quickly, with a troop surge. But Europeans are holding back, just as they did in the Bush era.

It gets suddenly hectic in the conference room of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kandahar. “We’re getting reports of explosions in the city,” says one of the Canadian renovation workers. The PRT members, diplomats, police officers and soldiers from the U.S., Canada and Kandahar had just finished bringing reporters up to speed about their painstaking work: how they’ve been training Afghan police recruits in weapons use; teaching Afghan prison guards how to deal with inmates; how they are helping repair a reservoir dam and a college; how they’ve been inoculating Afghan children against polio and how they’ve been building schools. Then came the interruption by the enemy.

They later found that three suicide bombers had attacked the Kandahar governor’s palace. One of them succeeded in shooting several guards to death, while the two others took a dozen Afghans with them when they detonated their explosive charges.

It’s just another bloody day in southern Afghanistan, as usual. Here, where the Taliban once had their stronghold. Here, where the poppy fields are at their most luxuriant and the drug trade is at its most profitable. Here is where the fight against modernization is also at its fiercest. NATO’s military forces may no longer have to engage the Taliban in combat on the battlefield, but there are still regular firefights against organized troops.

Afghan newspapers may report 40 Taliban killed, or 80 Taliban killed, and always that innocent civilians were also killed in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) air attacks. NATO claims it isn’t engaged in body counting. Internally, however, the alliance assumes that somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 Taliban have been killed. Collateral damage figures aren’t available.

Still, NATO believes it’s on the right path. “The enemy is changing his tactics, and that shows how weak he is,” says a Dutch officer at Kandahar Airfield, a gigantic installation housing 17,000 NATO troops. Huge transport planes take off and land here at all hours of the day and night, constantly ferrying in more troops for southern Afghanistan. Helicopters, jet fighters and rocket-armed drones also thunder over the airstrip.

“The Taliban knows if it attacks us openly, it will lose, so they depend on roadside bombs and ambushes.” There were more than 2,100 of these “events,” as the military calls them, against NATO soldiers in southern Afghanistan last year, more than double the number in the previous year. And despite their armored vehicles, young soldiers (mainly Americans) continue to die.

Barack Obama wants to turn the page in Afghanistan, once and for all. He transferred more than 20,000 soldiers from the wrong war in Iraq to the right one in the Hindu Kush. The surge has already begun in Kandahar. The newly arrived troops, coming in every day, are still housed in tents, but on the perimeter of the gigantic base, bulldozers are already preparing the terrain for permanent housing.

Western European NATO members are in agreement with Obama, insofar as they support his assessment of the Iraq war, but support for the Afghan mission isn’t an issue near and dear to their hearts.

Before an audience of the Brussels Forum, a debate event sponsored by the German Marshall Fund in March that included high-ranking politicians from all over the world, Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the parliamentary Foreign Committee of Germany, admitted, “When we’re told that our security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush, it only makes us laugh.” The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentarian reminded everyone, “Sixty percent of our population opposes the Afghanistan mission.”

It may be true that Germany, with 3,500 soldiers serving with the ISAF coalition, is the third-largest presence there, but they avoid actions that appear to potentially involve combat. That’s why, apart from a few dozen communications technicians in Kandahar, they’re deployed mainly in the more peaceful northern regions of Afghanistan.

The opposition in France, the other Western European coalition member with a large Afghan presence, is pressuring the government to set a timetable for an end to the tiresome mission.

Is Afghanistan the fading echo of an alliance promise in which Europeans now scarcely believe, 20 years after the fall of the Wall? And, despite the fact that the situation in the south could stabilize, are Europeans nonetheless united in their opposition?

In spite of the bonus of Obama’s popularity, America’s foreign policy makers wonder whether Europeans really want peace in Afghanistan or whether they think it would be better to just leave Afghanistan alone. “Does Europe feel the same obligation to Afghanistan as America does?” asked Kurt Volker, the departing U.S. ambassador to NATO. He suggested it might be a good idea to try getting public opinion turned in favor of support for the project once again.

The “soft power” European Union approach has managed to result in just 177 police trainers for reconstruction and is, therefore, partially responsible for the long way Afghanistan has yet to go to achieve the independent state of security the world community wants it to have. “The police aren’t very good right now,” warned Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, in a Brussels speech. He added, “We need to increase the number, increase the quality and increase the training.” But anyone viewing the situation in Afghanistan this spring sees that the Obama-effect is barely making any changes in European policy. The European Union is leaving the difficult parts of national reconstruction in the Hindu Kush to the Americans, just as it did during the Bush years.