Do You Suppose There's A Connection?

A rather illogical editorial in yesterday's Minneapolis Star Tribune (regular readers of the paper will not be stunned since logic is not a hallmark of the editorial board) on the future of NATO. The editorial begins by scolding the United States for acting without NATO in Afghanistan:

For Washington, that means taking NATO seriously and working with it -- rather than saddling Silver, assembling a posse of "the willing" and riding off like the Lone Ranger in search of the bad guys. After Sept. 11, the NATO ministers invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty -- which meant they considered the attack on the United States an attack on them. They were signaling very seriously their willingness to fight alongside the United States in the war against terrorism.

The United States effectively said, "We'll call if we need you." It wanted a free hand to prosecute the war as it saw fit, without needing to consult and perhaps compromise with its NATO allies. Various members of NATO have been involved in Afghanistan, but the war has never been an officially NATO action. The Europeans were quite put off at the rebuff, and they grumble a lot at what they see as an American-imposed division of labor: The United States fights, and the Europeans do the "social work" necessary to clean up after the dust settles.

But in the next breadth it goes on to say that the European members of NATO have not spent enough money on defense spending in recent years and so, with the exception of the British and to some extent the French, are not able to provide any meaningful military contribution:

The Europeans have some thinking to do also, beginning with overcoming their aversion to updating and properly funding their military. It's fine that Europeans have a stronger aversion to war than Americans do; they've lived through a great deal more of it. But to be taken seriously at NATO, they need to demonstrate substantial military muscle. Right now, only Britain really can do that. France is beginning to invest more, but Germany's economy is so sick -- and its government so averse to the reforms that would help it improve -- that prospects are poor for a more robust German military any time soon.

I don't think it's beyond the bonds of imagination to make a simple connection here which the paper fails to do. The reason that the U.S. did not involve NATO directly in Afghanistan is that no NATO nation other than Britain has the ability to project force beyond the European theater. NATO's invocation of Article 5 after September 11th was a nice gesture but that's all it really was; a gesture. The last time that the U.S. military acted under the umbrella of NATO was in the former Yugoslavia in 1999 and it wasn't pretty. Bureaucratic haggling over target selection, leaks within the bloated NATO command, and indecisiveness among top NATO commanders caused the bombing campaign against Serbia to be dragged out much longer than necessary.

Why would the U.S. want to saddle itself with burdens like these while gaining no tangible military benefits for operations in Afghanistan? The U.S. did work with the few NATO countries who could help in Afghanistan but since the U.S. was doing most of the heavy lifting it wanted to call the shots and rightfully so. The paper may not like the "we blow stuff up, you clean things up" relationship that exists between the U.S. and most of the NATO countries today but given the realities of the large disparities in military power that exists it is the only one that actually works.