Who knows? Maybe Senator McCain will overcome all odds and become the next president of the United States, in which case the war in Iraq, which has become a forlorn US war as the few original allies head for the hills, may not be over. But the war in Afghanistan, supposedly a NATO war with some help from Australian special forces, is anything but over. But for most of the NATO countries, it has never started.
In a scenario that nobody could have imagined even five years ago, Canadian Minister of Defence Peter MacKay knocked on the doors of all of his colleagues at the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Lithuania this week, and asked a simple question. “Are you willing to order your soldiers to actually fight in Afghanistan, or do you plan to keep them in safe havens under orders to not engage in combat while Canadian, British, and US troops do all the dangerous work, with some limited help from the Netherlands and Denmark?” For the Canadian government has announced that it has had enough of this charade of a NATO army and will pull its 3000 troops out of dangerous Kandahar, where 78 Canadian soldiers have been killed, if other NATO countries don’t contribute at least 1000 actual fighting soldiers by next year. The US Secretary of Defence inadvertently added his salt to this wound by stating that while US soldiers knew how to fight Taliban forces, other NATO soldiers didn’t. Later he admitted he hadn’t meant to include Canada, the UK and the Netherlands in this condemnation, but by then it was too late.
MacKay met with lots of encouragement but little success, though the US promised marines on a temporary basis, and France seemed to vaguely suggest it might send 700 fighters. The real disgrace is that supposed leading powers in NATO like Germany, Italy and Spain have ordered their armies to not engage in combat, while their Canadian, US and British colleagues, all supposedly part of the same army, are suffering heavy casualties. Can such a supposed political union really survive such a breech of loyalty?