Whither NATO?

NATO, which is made up of European nations and the US, can't seem to find the troops to field in Afghanistan. It's a problem that has been a long time in the making since the Europeans simply haven't been funding their respective armed forces in a way that enables them to handle peacekeeping duties, let alone national defense. They've skated for far too long on the hope that the US would shoulder the burden.

Once again, the US will shoulder the burden - and is sending another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan to deal with the ongoing problems with the Taliban, who continue to use the border region with Pakistan as a safe haven from which to launch destabilizing operations. NATO allies bristle over their mission, complaining that they're seeing more combat operations than US troops in Afghanistan and that the US forces are in a safer part of the country.

After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity.

While Washington has long called for allies to send more forces, NATO countries involved in some of the fiercest fighting have complained that they are suffering the heaviest losses. The United States supplies about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, they say, but the British, Canadians and Dutch are engaged in regular combat in the volatile south.

"We have one-tenth of the troops and we do more fighting than you do," a Canadian official said of his country's 2,500 troops in Kandahar province. "So do the Dutch." The Canadian death rate, proportional to the overall size of its force, is higher than that of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, a Canadian government analysis concluded last year.

British officials note that the eastern region, where most U.S. forces are based, is far quieter than the Taliban-saturated center of British operations in Helmand, the country's top opium-producing province. The American rejoinder, spoken only in private with references to British operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that superior U.S. skills have made it so.

There is another difference between regions in which the US operates and those of its NATO allies - the US engages in offensive operations against the Taliban - taking the fight to the enemy, while the NATO allies are largely engaged in defensive operations, which enables the Taliban to slowly wear down the coalition forces.

British forces are stretched thinner worldwide than US forces (the entire British Army is smaller than the US Marine Corps), with a larger percentage of troops engaged in operations overseas. That also means that they're lacking the force to hold territory, and when combined with a lack of reconstruction and development assistance that was supposed to consolidate military gains, means that the situation will remain troubled.

It also means that the British commanders are looking at all kinds of strategies, including dividing and conquering the Taliban - working with some Taliban thugs to fight off others. It's a strategy that both the British and Afghan officials are pushing, despite reservations from American officials.