France has decided more ground troops to Afghanistan for combat missions against Taliban insurgents in the mountainous battle zone close to the border with Pakistan, according to press reports in Paris.

The French commitment, which includes elite special forces, comes at a critical moment for NATO, which it direly needs reinforcements to ratchet up its campaign against guerilla fighters infiltrating eastern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan.

By sending in fresh combat units, expected to number up to 500 men, President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be acting on his pledge that France wants to work more closely with NATO. With the Bush administration asking European nations for more military help in Afghanistan, a Sarkozy adviser was quoted in Le Monde newspaper saying that “France is the only country that can — if it decides to – make the crucial difference.”

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By James Leathers

A growing sense of crisis about NATO’s mission in Afghanistan crystallized in Washington early this year with the release of near-simultaneous reports on the outlook there – all sounding similar warnings to the effect that the campaign to restore government authority against insurgent Taliban forces and pacify the country has been neglected, under-resourced and damaged by conflicting views about the mission’s purpose.

“Make no mistake,” began one of these reports: “NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.” This study, entitled “Saving Afghanistan” and published by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, emphasized the need for greater progress in civilian reconstruction, at least in areas free of insurgent attack. In the long run, it argued, no amount of Afghan and Western military power can completely defeat the Taliban as long as its fighters can still find a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan.

The need for a major new effort to succeed in Afghanistan was also the theme of major new independent reports by Afghanistan Study Group and by the National Defense University. All three reports concur that without prompt actions by the U.S. and its allies, the mission in Afghanistan may fail – causing severe consequences to U.S. strategic interests worldwide, including the war on terrorism and the future of NATO. The U.S. cannot afford to let Afghanistan continue to be the neglected, or forgotten, war. All said that the Taliban cannot “defeat” NATO, but concluded that a quasi-stalemate would be a very serious blow to the alliance.

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From the Guardian (UK) (Feb 23, 2008):

The Bush administration yesterday urged the EU to stop dithering over the building of a $6bn (£3bn) gas pipeline from the Caspian basin to central Europe and reduce its growing dependence on Russia’s Gazprom.

“Follow your wallet,” Matthew Bryza, US deputy assistant secretary of state, said, arguing that the troubled Nabucco project made sound commercial sense and would cut Europe’s dependence on Gazprom by up to a quarter.

Bryza’s outspoken comments came after talks with senior EU officials, including energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs, and took sideswipes at the “gigantic rents” [excessive prices] Gazprom is charging Europe for gas. They underline the growing geo-political importance of gas.

“Helping Europe diversify its gas supplies has become extremely urgent,” said Bryza, adding that US backing for Nabucco was in the country’s national interests even though no American companies are involved….

“We want to help Gazprom to move from a monopoly towards more market-based behaviour,” he said. “We want it to be reliable and produce more gas at home in a more competitive domestic market rather than buying up as much infrastructure here in Europe or the cheapest possible gas it can find in Central Asia.”

Related Article: U.S. official says Europe needs alternatives to Russian natural gas, Associated Press, 22 February 2008.

By David Young

At the time of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the premise of Western governments was that confronting ethnic cleansing was more important than respecting the international borders. The message was that would-be tyrants in future needed to know – and be deterred by – the cost that would be imposed on them by the international community if they sought to inflict such atrocities. The U.S. decision to throw its full political-military weight into Kosovo reflected eagerness to make up for perceived moral failures in the 1990s (notably Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia). President Bill Clinton was eager to restore America’s image as the global policeman backing up the recently proclaimed new world order. And he wanted to restore the strategic authority of the United States.

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By Francois Clemenceau

At last there is a book- authoritative but not yet translated into English- that answers the tormenting question of why the two most wanted mass murderers of the Yugoslav civil wars have never been brought to justice a decade after international warrants were issued for them. Despite repeated reports of their imminent arrests, the pair – Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who headed the Bosnian Serbs’ army – have managed to elude capture and extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

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Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert E. Hunter examines the current state of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. He focuses on the challenges presented by so-called “caveats”– limitations that individual nations place on their NATO forces– and the difficulties that they are causing for NATO commanders on the ground. Hunter’s article deals not only with the alliance’s immediate prospects in Afghanistan, but also with the long-term repercussions that could result from NATO’s first major military defeat.
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