Europe to Obama: Don't Count On Us for Many More Troops

BERLIN (Dec. 2) - In his speech Tuesday night announcing 30,000 more U.S. troops for Afghanistan, President Barack Obama said he was "confident" that allies would join in the escalation for an obvious reason: "what's at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world."

He is likely to be sorely disappointed with the response, since Europe seems neither militarily equipped nor politically disposed to significantly up its stake in what is still widely seen here as an American war.
Of the roughly 110,000 foreign troops now in Afghanistan, 68,000 are American. The United Kingdom provides the second-largest contingent, with 9,000 troops, and has pledged another 500 in the coming months. Germany has the third-largest force, with 4,365 troops, followed by France's 3,095 soldiers. Canada, Italy and the Netherlands have between 2,000 and 3,000 troops in country as well. It will take very talented diplomatic arm-twisting to bring about sizable increases in those numbers.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Brussels on Wednesday that the allies would send "5,000 soldiers and possibly a few thousand more on top," but he doesn't yet have the pledges to back that up. Aside from Britain's modest addition, Italy said it would add a still unquantified number of troops, and Poland promised 600 more troops to supplement the 1,900 it already deploys in Afghanistan.

That leaves a major gap still to fill. Indeed, when Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister who took the NATO post in August, spoke in the grand ball room of Berlin's historic Hotel Adlon last week on the German leg of a circuit to drum up European support for the war, he painted a bleak picture of the transatlantic alliance's ability to respond to contemporary conflicts.

"We still have 10,000 battlefield tanks in Europe to defend against what?" he asked the gathering of Berlin's foreign policy and security community. "More than half our troops are not deployable, and only a fraction of our helicopters can be used in Afghanistan because they have the wrong engines."

In short, Rasmussen said, NATO's European component is trying to fight today's security threats with doctrine and technology left over from the Cold War. So it should come as no surprise that Europe's response to Obama's plea for more troops has been respectfully warm but entirely non-committal.

European leaders face armies that are stretched to the limit and publics that tend to dismiss the prospect of military victory in Afghanistan. Increasingly, European polls show that voters want their governments to bring the troops home rather than send more into battle.

The political challenges confronting European leaders are significant.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with a slim prospect of winning an election expected in May, doesn't have the political muscle or will to push through larger troop increases.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was re-elected in September, but Afghanistan is a political liability for her, too. Her government is mired in a political scandal over an incident in September, when the German command in Afghanistan ordered a NATO airstrike that killed more than 100 people, including dozens of civilians.

Merkel's defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, fired two top military officials last week, and his predecessor in that post, Franz Josef Jung, who had already been demoted to labor minister, resigned under pressure in the affair. Later this month a parliamentary subcommittee will look into whether Merkel and her government lied about what and when they knew about civilian casualties.

Germany's problem with combat missions runs deeper than that, though. Burdened by its Nazi past, Germany is sensitive to any allegations of military misconduct and is still apprehensive about sending troops into combat. As a result, German leaders have for years defined the Afghanistan deployment as a kind of humanitarian mission to rebuild roads and schools and train local police. But 34 German troops have died in Afghanistan, and the once-peaceful northern province where they are deployed has this year been the target of new Taliban incursions.

"It is not possible for German leaders to say we are taking part in security operations to defend Germany and NATO," said Christian Tuschhoff, political scientist at Berlin's Free University. "Germany can take part in a military operation, but the way the government describes it is different than what is actually taking place."

The Dutch parliament has demanded the withdrawal of the country's 2,160 troops by August, and the Canadians, who have suffered disproportionately high losses, have said they want out by early 2011. Those political pressures, which are echoed throughout NATO, may well doom Rasmussen's job of enlisting greater allied support for Obama's surge. His stated goal of 5,000 more troops is a major climbdown from the Pentagon's request of 10,000.

"This is not a U.S. mission alone," Rasmussen says. But many Europeans consider the Afghanistan mission to be just that, and the U.S. escalation could make it more so.

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said that Afghanistan has become Obama's war.

"With the decision for a military escalation, Obama has linked the success of his presidency to the course of events in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan," the paper said, adding that this also turns up the heat on Europe.

Both Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy put off any firm decision on new troops until after a United Nations conference for Afghanistan on Jan. 28 in London. Both countries have signaled a determination to focus any increased involvement on training police and other local security forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "France will look at its contribution to international strategy, giving priority to the training of Afghan security forces," Sarkozy said in a statement.

Europeans had hoped that President Obama's new strategy would give them more influence over how the war is being fought. But for that, they have to have more soldiers in the fight. Judging by the response of European leaders, the burden on the battlefield will continue to be borne in large part by Americans.