The Road to Kabul: The International Community and the Crisis in Central Asia (review)

If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations had known what they were letting themselves in for, would they willingly have committed their forces to the war in Afghanistan? That question lurks at the heart of Alessandro Minuto-Rizzo's personal memoir about the alliance's historic first engagement outside Europe, The Road to Kabul: The International Community and the Crisis in Central Asia. By 2005, he writes revealingly, "the Alliance was up to its neck in the Afghan mess and had understood only too well that it was impossible to get out of it in a hurry. It had also understood that its ingredients were worse than once thought when Brussels had taken the decision to go as far as Kabul."

By then there was no turning back. A number of books have tried to shed light on the complexities of the eight-year Afghan conflict, but mainly from a US perspective. In Minuto-Rizzo's elegant, informed, and discreet account of how the Atlantic alliance got there and its subsequent and ongoing search for a purpose, NATO is the protagonist. The Americans—the dominant presence in Afghanistan—receive only an occasional passing mention. This is understandable: Minuto-Rizzo tells the story from his vantage point as NATO's deputy secretary-general, the senior diplomat in Brussels spanning the tenure of two political secretaries-general, Lord Robertson, a British Labour peer, and Joop de Hoop Scheffer, a Dutch Christian Democrat.

It was not until three years after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States that NATO entered the Afghan fray at the head of the ad hoc International Security and Assistance Force. The Bush administration had initially opted for a unilateral approach, a decision that the author labels a mistake. It would turn out to be not the only one in the Afghan crisis.

Minuto-Rizzo writes that Washington considered it more important to act quickly, and a multilateral presence would have slowed down the decision making process—at the time its added value appeared to the Americans to be limited. "With hindsight, this was probably a serious misjudgment," he writes. Elsewhere he states, "If the Atlantic Alliance had taken part in the Afghanistan mission from the very beginning, perhaps European public opinion would have had a more direct sense of taking part in the international fight against terrorism."

But by 2003, the jolt of 9/11 had lost its emotional impact; Europeans were no longer, as Le Monde had famously put it at the time, "all New Yorkers now." Thus the alliance shuffled into the Afghan situation both late and hesitant, like someone entering a dark room and having difficulty finding the light switch. The hesitancy is reflected in the size of its initial deployment. Until July 2006, according to the author, there were never more than nineteen thousand NATO troops in Afghanistan, compared to sixty thousand in Bosnia at the height of the alliance's engagement in the 1980s.

Minuto-Rizzo suggests that without the early successes by the US military in Iraq, particularly the fall of Baghdad in the early part of April 2003, NATO might not have found the consensus to enter the Afghan conflict at all. This runs somewhat counter to the conventional wisdom that the Bush administration put Afghanistan on the back burner, diverting forces from that operation to Iraq, thereby creating a climate of neglect in which the Taliban gained precious time to regroup. Things looked different from Brussels. Minuto-Rizzo writes that the US victory over Saddam Hussein changed the minds of NATO members opposed to an intervention in Afghanistan—notably the French. "Everyone thought that it was possible that the 'Pax Americana' would prevail without question" in Afghanistan as it seemed to be doing in Iraq, he writes, and the Afghan war would consequently be short, sweet, and successful. So in April, the commitment was...