America’s Solo Performance

More American soldiers for Afghanistan, and President Obama expects the Europeans to follow suit; partnership doesn’t work that way.

Several NATO countries have promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, thereby helping their ISAF partner, the United States government. Now the war in the Hindu Kush looks more like a grand defense alliance, and U.S. President Barack Obama can better sell his troop surge to a skeptical American public. But it doesn’t change the fact that Afghanistan has become an American war.

The strategy of forcing the Taliban to surrender by way of a troop surge was never discussed with the Europeans. The White House made that decision and is now demanding that its allies escalate their combat participation in like measure.

That’s not a partnership; it’s a demand for obedience. Alliances are supposed to have other rules. But the fact that it has come down to this is clearly, in part, the fault of the Europeans. Instead of expressing their own ideas about what was wanted in Afghanistan and making suggestions as to how to bring the war to a successful conclusion, the Europeans left the whole debate up to the Americans. They hid behind an excuse that went something like this: Washington was providing the vast majority of the combat troops, so they were, therefore, entitled to determine the entire central strategy.

It’s certainly true that those who carry the most responsibility should have the greatest voice in how the war is run, but that’s not enough to justify the sending of additional German troops. Committing soldiers to a war in a democracy must have valid reasons; just pointing to American strategy isn’t a valid reason, by any stretch of the imagination.

This also seems to be the perception in Berlin: Delaying a decision on what form and to what extent Germany’s military and civilian assistance will be, until after the Afghanistan Conference at the end of January, at least guarantees some semblance of a European debate to try to clarify how to proceed. And the debate must be more than just legitimizing any coming deployments. The Europeans must ask Obama to give answers he didn’t provide in his West Point speech.

For example: Will this be the final large-scale military effort or just one of several phases on the road to a Vietnam-like quagmire as it has increasingly started to resemble over the past few years? And what did Obama mean by his announcement that they would begin withdrawing American troops by mid-2011?

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen behaves as if no mention of any sort of timetable ever happened. If German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle really intends to turn the Afghanistan Conference into a strategic debate, then Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy has to be examined as well. It’s about time the Europeans dredge up the courage to start asking questions, or we will find ourselves tagging along behind the U.S. into the unknown. Or taking the alternative route of just not going along at all.