Combat and Reconstruction

In Europe, many NATO member countries are getting fed up with demands, primarily from Washington, for greater military involvement in Afghanistan -- demands that have persisted ever since the launch of the NATO mission. For years, Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has been doing the rounds of the European capitals lobbying for more troops, helicopters and transport aircraft, only to be fobbed off with vague promises. Germany has finally agreed to extend its broad activities in Afghanistan by deploying reconnaissance tornados, but it refuses to send soldiers to the hostile south of the country. Given the public's waning support for the mission and Berlin's political status quo, this is simply out of the question.

Other countries have pledged a total of several hundred more troops, but it remains to be seen if and when they will ever arrive.

But interestingly, the focus of US demands has shifted. Both De Hoop Scheffer and Afghan President Hamid Karsai are attaching new significance to training the Afghan forces. According to NATO's secretary general, the country needs to stand on its own two feet. Subsequently, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung announced at Noordwijk in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Oct. 24, that Berlin would be tripling the number of German military trainers in the strife-torn country.

The principle that Afghanistan needs to stand on its own two feet should be the bedrock of NATO's entire Afghanistan mission. But this obvious truth has long been forgotten. Not only the number of military casualties explains the skepticism on the part of the European public. Basically, people feel that the Afghanistan mission is a potentially bottomless pit. Theoretically, no help will ever be enough.

Will the country ever reach a point when it can look after itself? These days, military leaders are intelligent enough to know that naming a date is futile. Observers say that day will never come, but it looks as though NATO forces might remain in the Hindu Kush for years, if not decades. The western countries have little option but to stay put, even if the mission is a waste of human life and taxpayers' money. Clearly, it calls for considerable sacrifice -- every soldier who dies is one too many. But what would be the cost of another fundamentalist government in Afghanistan? Were this ever to happen, NATO would most certainly have been wasting its time.

As it stands, NATO has no choice but to persevere in its Afghanistan project. Whether Germany likes it or not, the project is about fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda. But Washington appears to have recognized that this fight is not only a question of military might.

What is needed is a comprehensive strategy consisting of military deployment, civilian rebuilding and training local security forces. In Iraq, this realization came too late. In Afghanistan, there's still time for NATO to act.

DW-RADIO's Christoph Hasselbach is a current affairs expert.