United States and NATO forces bolted out of Afghanistan three years ago, leaving behind a grim scene. Just over half the population needs humanitarian support. The UN Special Rapporteur has called the Taliban's rule an “institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls.”
At its height, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and partner countries numbered more than 130,000 troops in the country. Nearly 3,500 of them were killed. That pales in comparison to the approximately 70,000 Afghan security forces and 46,000 civilians who died during two decades of Western intervention. Successes made in that time, such as driving the Taliban from power and protecting women and girls, were largely wiped out in a matter of weeks in 2021, as a US decision to end its presence in Afghanistan all but forced NATO allies to follow suit.
The hasty and dangerous withdrawal, which abandoned some 78,000 Afghans who helped western forces, left a stain on NATO’s reputation and damaged Western credibility. It sparked a period of soul searching and a stated desire to learn from the experience.
The easy answer was, from a mere counter-terrorism perspective, mission accomplished. Al Qaeda ceased to pose a major threat to the US or its interests, and Afghanistan was no longer a base for terrorist groups.
“But it was not just about that. It was about nation-building,” Jamie Shea, a retired NATO official and security studies professor at the University of Exeter, told The Parliament. “It was about bringing democracy to Afghanistan, empowering women and allowing children to go to school, developing the country economically. That objective was not made.”
A return to 'collective defence'
Both NATO and some member states underwent a postmortem process.
A German parliamentary inquiry saw strategic failure in the mission and a mismatch in priorities among those involved in Afghanistan, “particularly regarding the US, NATO and the United Nations that, made effective coordination difficult,” its report said.
NATO’s own analysis concluded that future missions should pay more attention to local political and cultural norms and the “ability of that society to absorb capacity building and training.”
Moreover, throughout 20 years, the alliance’s goals kept changing and expanding, the report noted.
“The ambition became much too grand in Afghanistan. There was not enough modesty in the mission. It should have been much more limited,” Shea said. The bar for NATO success is not bringing peace to Afghanistan, he argued, but "can it defend its own members?”
It took just six months for this question to take on real relevance. When Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, some observers pointed to the Afghan calamity as factoring into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculation to invade. He saw the West as weak and divided.
Suddenly, Afghanistan felt like a distant memory, which has given NATO something of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Whatever damage the Taliban’s reconquering of Afghanistan did to NATO's reputation, Putin’s aggression in Ukraine seems to have restored it. Sweden and Finland, which had long been officially neutral countries, saw it as reason to join, bolstering the alliance.
NATO allies could “forget about [Afghanistan] because now we're back to what we know best: collective defense on our territory versus Russia,” Shea said.
A lopsided alliance
Nonetheless, one challenging internal dynamic getting a critical look of late is ongoing US domination of the alliance. The decision to end the mission in Afghanistan was a US one, underscoring its "failure of alliance management,” Sten Rynning, the director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark, told The Parliament.
“Many European allies felt ill-informed and there was a lack of consultation and coordination," he added. Indeed, the experience was widely perceived as a major wake-up call for NATO’s European members, reigniting calls by some for an EU army.
With a budget of nearly $1 trillion, the US represents about two-thirds of NATO countries' annual defence spending. Even with many members increasing their military budgets as a result of Russian aggression and a decade-old alliance agreement to hit 2% of GDP, it will be a difficult balance to adjust.
As a joke in transatlantic circles goes, NATO stands for “need Americans to operate,” Andrew Radin, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a security think tank, told The Parliament.
Afghanistan was hardly the only operation to highlight this. NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Serbia and intervention in Libya in 2011 both relied heavily on American firepower, logistics and intelligence.
“Having an independent ability to do things without the United States gives Europe the credibility to have a much different discussion about collective activities,” Radin said. “Ultimately, decision-making and influence on shaping operations comes from having the forces available.”
With most EU countries also part of NATO, the ability for the EU to operate militarily outside of NATO is limited. NATO is designed to conduct major combat operations, whereas most EU operations are more civilian and police driven.
“The question of collective defense is very clear. The security of European countries is based on NATO,” Maxime Lefebvre, a professor of international relations at ESCP Business School in Paris, told The Parliament.
NATO's European contingent can take some limited credit, he said, such as ramping up its defence industry. Still, progress is “slow and limited.”
Rethinking defence at the EU level
One aspect is the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), which foresees €1.5 billion in EU funds for weapons. If some EU officials, such as Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, get their way, that fund has to get a lot bigger. Breton has proposed €100 billion.
“To be credible, Europeans must spend more on defense and develop military capacities,” Lefebvre said.
Last October, the EU held its first ever military exercise in southern Spain, bringing together forces from 19 EU members. The EU’s Strategic Compass, published in March 2022, envisages a Rapid Deployment Capacity of 5,000 troops to be ready in 2025. An EU defence commissioner is reportedly in the works.
Whether under the NATO or EU flag, Rynning, the Danish war studies professor, said the United States' European allies are far from being able to defend themselves on their own.
“They will have to invest in the means of shared leadership in order to gain” those capabilities, he said. “This will be a big issue for NATO in the coming years.”