NATO Plus 59

This week marks the 59th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO is often described as the largest and most successful military alliance the world has ever seen. The United States, Canada, Turkey, Greece, and most of Western Europe are members. More recently, a number of eastern European countries have joined bringing total membership to 26.

The defining feature of NATO is its common security arrangement. This means all members pledge to treat an attack on one of them as an attack on all of them, a promise referred to as the "Article 5" agreement.

When the treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, the alliance was seen as a way to curb the expansion of the Soviet Union. By 1955, the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of Soviet-dominated states, was formed. Competition between the two alliances was the defining theme of the Cold War.

NATO provided a strong framework for western military cooperation throughout the Cold War. Yet when the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, NATO's war-fighting capability had never been used. And the "Article 5" pledge had never been called into action. Then in 1994, NATO took military action to end fighting in Bosnia and again in 1999 in Kosovo. The day after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, NATO unanimously voted to invoke the "Article 5" provisions, and NATO now runs allied military operations in Afghanistan.

It is exactly this work in Afghanistan which experts fear could tear NATO apart. Here are a couple of recent blog posts which indicate the Afghan situation must be addressed if NATO is to have many more birthdays:

The Transatlantic Alliance's Afghan Strains
"For some time now, transatlantic analysts have warned that the NATO deployment of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and US troops in Afghanistan is on the precipice of unraveling, and with that will usher in grave questions and implications for the future of NATO and transatlantic ties. Given Zbigniew Brzezinski's pronouncement in his book Second Chance that the drift in transatlantic ties throughout the 1990s was one of two crucial meta-mistakes that undermined the US position globally, there is real cause for concern here," writes Sameer Lalwani in The Washington Note.

The Burden of Leadership: Afghanistan's NATO Problem and US Responsibility
I've been paying close attention to the uneasy back and forth between NATO member states and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lately. Gates, facing reports of looming state failure in Afghanistan, Gates, who is a much less high-strung SecDef than his predecessor Don Rumsfeld, has pointed to the openly-waffling members of the NATO alliance and said, 'Where you at?' The problem is, Gates is paying for the mistakes of the past, both by Rumsfeld and by the Bush White House writ large since routing the Taliban in Afghanistan years ago," writes Tarek Rizk in The Exchange.