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264 nato after sixty years 264 Conclusion What Does NATO’s New Strategic Concept Say about the Future of the Alliance? Jamie Shea Every organization or business knows that it has to operate at two levels simultaneously . Daily operations have to be managed as best as possible or the organization will be seen as irrelevant. But the organization also has to predict its future roles in the light of a rapidly changing world and make decisions today to adjust its structures and functions to be ready to face that future when it arrives—which is nearly always sooner than most policy makers calculate. To do the one but not the other—to put the present ahead of the future or vice versa—is a sure recipe to make an institution less important to the wider world, and less attractive to its own members. The present is about how what we are doing can be done better. The future is more about what we ought to be doing. So it is with NATO. The long-standing Western Alliance faces the choice between present and future in a particularly acute fashion. For the past fifteen years NATO has staked its relevance essentially on operations in failed or failing states. It has become an increasingly expeditionary organization with a mission to stabilize and reconstruct collapsing societies far beyond its borders, beginning with the Balkans in the 1990s and more recently in Afghanistan. Yet as these military interventions have become more and more NATO’s core business and principal raison d’être and NATO has acquired more experience of conducting them, paradoxically the missions have become harder, more costly, and more potentially divisive. Whereas NATO lost no soldiers to hostile fire during its fifteen-year presence in the Balkans (SFOR in Bosnia and KFOR in Kosovo), notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of NATO soldiers who were rotated in and out of the Balkans during this time frame, Afghanistan shows a rising trend of battlefield casualties. By July 2010, International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) deaths in Afghanistan surpassed one hundred in a single month. Several allies are now putting the emphasis on withdrawing their forces and setting a concrete exit date, albeit different from one ally to the next. Whereas the calculated, limited use of force in the Balkans appeared to change the political equation on the ground decisively, it has not enjoyed similar success in Afghanistan. Nor have the civilian conclusion 265 institutions, such as the EU or the UN, been as present in Afghanistan, with the major commitments of resources and personnel, as they were in the Balkans and as part of a truly comprehensive approach to stabilization and nation building. As a result some NATO observers conclude that NATO needs to learn the lessons from Afghanistan, in terms of having expeditionary capabilities and better interaction with the EU and the UN, in order to do the “next Afghanistan” better. In short, they see the future essentially as a continuation of the past with the alliance largely focusing on military interventions out of area. But other observers believe that Afghanistan has been a mission too far demonstrating the impossibility of using military power to heal the deep ethnic and social rifts in profoundly fractured societies. The farther the West operates from its immediate neighborhood, the less influential, attractive, and thus powerful it is; the more it has to seek a compromise between its concept of democracy and governance and what the local community with its own history and traditions is willing to accept. In view of this second group of observers, Afghanistan marks the high-water mark of NATO’s embrace of interventionism , after which the alliance should reduce its ambitions and limit itself to smaller and easier operations, with a clear time limit and exit strategy. To evoke this debate is not to imply that the Afghanistan conflict is an unwinnable one for NATO and its partners. The four conditions of success are clear and they are still achievable. NATO, with the reinforcement of substantial additional U.S. troops, has to put the Taliban on the defensive so that the movement begins to fragment and lose its foot soldiers. The Afghan government has to commit itself more visibly and effectively to the fight and take ownership of both military campaigns and civilian reconstruction. The international community has to work better together and put aside outdated assumptions regarding the separation of military and civilian efforts. And both Afghanistan and Pakistan have to...

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