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09 January 2011 By Rick Rozoff In an article entitled "How Afghanistan Became a
War for NATO," American journalist Gareth Porter
argued that, contrary to the official position that an
estimated 52,000 non-American troops from the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and assorted partnership
programs are in Afghanistan to in any manner protect
their respective homelands, "NATO's role in
Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about
Afghanistan," citing an unnamed U.S. military officer. In relation to turning the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) and the overwhelming majority
of foreign troops in the nation (currently 120,000 of
152,000) over to NATO command, the same official was
quoted as stating, "You have to understand that the
NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon –
both in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on
the Joint Staff." Porter reminded readers that while serving as
NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 2003-2006
Marine General James Jones (until recently the Obama
administration's National Security Advisor) "sold
(Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld on turning
Afghanistan over to NATO," according to the
above-mentioned source. In testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2007, Karl
Eikenberry – at the time commanding general of the
Pentagon's Combined Forces Command Afghanistan,
shortly afterward deputy commander of NATO's 28-nation
Military Committee and currently American ambassador
to Afghanistan – argued that "the policy of turning
Afghanistan over to NATO was really about the future
of NATO rather than about Afghanistan…one that could
‘make' the alliance. The long view of the Afghanistan
campaign is that it is a means to continue the
transformation of the alliance." [1] Rather than "reinventing" NATO to make it
"relevant" and to gratuitously preserve a Cold War
relic, although doing only that allows the U.S. to
retain air and naval bases and nuclear weapons on the
European continent as well as extending its global
missile shield and cyber warfare command there,
transforming NATO means in the first place expanding
it into a global military force, one able to wage wars
like that in Afghanistan and others modeled after it. It is worth noting that while making his case for
NATO control of all Western military operations in
Afghanistan in February of 2007, then-Lieutenant
General Eikenberry was in command of 12,000 U.S.
troops in the Afghan war theater. Less than four years
later there are 100,000 American service members
there. The Porter article also asserts that the George W.
Bush administration promoted a NATO role in
Afghanistan in part to free up American forces for the
invasion and occupation of Iraq which began in March
of 2003. However, as noted above, there were only 12,000
U.S. troops and a far smaller amount of non-U.S. NATO
forces in Afghanistan four years after the launching
of Operation Iraqi Freedom; a negligible number in
relation to the 140,000 American troops in Iraq in
early 2007. In fact both Iraq and Afghanistan – previously the
Balkans and since Africa – have been used by
Washington to integrate the armed forces of scores of
nations around the world into a global expeditionary
military formation complementing the NATO Response
Force. Between 2003 and 2006 there were troop contingents
from over forty nations in the Multi-National Force –
Iraq, including ones from 21 of 28 current NATO member
states and from the military bloc's Partnership for
Peace integration program. The Polish-led
Multinational Division Central-South was supported by
NATO since its creation in December of 2003. Of today's 28 NATO states, only seven – France,
Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Greece and
Turkey – did not deploy troops to Iraq, although all
28 are now supporting the NATO Training Mission-Iraq
and Turkey permitted the stationing of three Dutch
Patriot missile batteries on its soil shortly before
the invasion of Iraq after all NATO members but France
– at the time still outside Alliance military
structures – approved the deployments under NATO's
Article 4 provisions. Starting in earnest in 2006 troops from NATO member
and partner states were withdrawn from Iraq and
redeployed to Afghanistan. The following 33 nations supplied the U.S. with
troops for the wars and occupations in Iraq and
Afghanistan: Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia,
Britain, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy,
Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia,
New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia,
South Korea, Spain, Tonga and Ukraine. Most of the above nations also provided troops for
the NATO missions in Bosnia starting in 1995, Kosovo
in 1999 and Macedonia in 2001, the last beginning only
months before the invasion of Afghanistan. Late last
month the NATO senior military representative to
Macedonia handed control over a military camp to
Macedonian Defense Minister Zoran Konjanovski, who
stated on the occasion that "the act symbolized
Macedonia's maturity and readiness, as well as the
country's principled partnership with NATO, which has
been proven in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq." [2] NATO
intervened in Macedonia in 2001 as an alleged mediator
between the government and armed insurgents operating
out of NATO-occupied Kosovo, members of the so-called
Albanian National Army, to enforce a power sharing
arrangement between the country's legitimate, elected
authorities and a force of armed invaders spawned by
the Kosovo Liberation Army. Pentagon and NATO military bases and other
facilities succeed wars as night does day: Camp Eagle
in Bosnia, the 1,000-acre Camp Bondsteel and its
companion site Camp Monteith in Kosovo, Camp Able
Sentry in Macedonia and, most recently, dozens more in
Afghanistan and Iraq as well as several neighboring
nations. NATO's Allied Joint Force Command Naples, activated
in 2004, oversees Kosovo Force (KFOR), the NATO
Training Mission-Iraq [3], NATO Headquarters in
Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia, and a Military Liaison
Office in Serbia. The seven NATO members that didn't dispatch troops
to Iraq have sent them to Afghanistan, with Canada,
France and Germany among the top six troop
contributors, and several NATO partnership affiliates
that didn't provide troops for Multi-National
Force–Iraq have joined them: Partnership for Peace
members Austria, Finland, Ireland, Montenegro (which
became independent in 2006), Sweden and Switzerland;
Mediterranean Dialogue members Jordan and Egypt;
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners Bahrain and
the United Arab Emirates. Finland, which had not been engaged in combat
operations since World War Two, and Sweden, which had
not been at war in two hundred years, are in charge of
four northern Afghan provinces under NATO command.
Sweden has approximately 500 troops and Finland almost
200 in Afghanistan. Both countries have lost troops in
the fighting there. Australia, a NATO Contact Countries along with
Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, has 1,550 troops
in theater (including elite special forces), the
largest contribution of any non-NATO nation. At least
21 Australian soldiers have been killed in NATO's
Afghan war and 162 wounded, 62 last year. The expansion of the Afghan war in the last days of
the Bush and throughout the Obama administration, and
its extension into neighboring Pakistan (with a
population of over 170 million and nuclear weapons),
has led to the highest-ever deaths among U.S., NATO
and other ISAF contributing nations' soldiers. This week Agence France-Presse reported that, based
on official figures and other sources, over 10,000
people were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, among them
711 foreign soldiers, 810 Afghan government troops and
thousands of Afghan civilians and insurgents. The U.S. Navy announced on the first day of this
year that the 1,000th sortie for the war in
Afghanistan had been launched from the nuclear-powered
supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea on
December 28. "Lincoln pulled in to the United Arab Emirates Dec.
23-27 with a total of 999 sorties flown supporting OEF
[Operation Enduring Freedom] and 76 sorties in support
of Operation New Dawn (OND) during the ship's
2010-2011 deployment to the Middle East. The first
launch after returning to sea marked the carrier's
millennial OEF mission, amassing a total of more than
5,884 hours flown for OEF in just under four months."
[4] USA Today disclosed on January 2 that the U.S. Air
Force doubled the number of joint terminal attack
controllers (JTACs) responsible for calling in air
strikes – aerial bombings, missile attacks and
strafing runs – from 53 in 2009 to 134 last year. In
October of 2010 they coordinated over 1,000 missions
"in which warplanes dropped bombs or fired missiles or
guns, the most ever, topping the previous peak of 984
in June 2008." [5] Last autumn the U.S. led a joint terminal attack
controller exercise, Sabre Strike 11, at the Adazi
Training Aria in Latvia with military personnel and
warplanes from the host nation, Estonia, Lithuania and
Poland. "The purpose of this exercise was to continue
mutual support for the fight in Afghanistan and
demonstrate previous successful NATO coordination in
Operation Iraqi Freedom." The U.S. Air Force's 100th Air Refueling Wing
"provided fuel to…Polish F-16s, which allowed the
fighters to conduct bomb and strafing runs as
coordinated by the NATO JTAC trainees and instructors.
This marked the first time that live munitions were
dropped in Latvia since their separation from Russia
in 1992." [6] The American armed forces publication Stars and
Stripes wrote last October that "Faced with a critical
shortage of joint terminal attack controllers, the Air
Force has ramped up efforts to train more from allied
nations, many of whom could deploy to Afghanistan to
call in NATO airstrikes." [7] At the time a five-week initial qualification class
for JTACs conducted in Germany graduated troops from
Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, Poland,
Romania and Slovenia. According to the same source, the now retired U.S.
Air Forces in Europe commander, General Roger Brady,
instructed the school to double the amount of annual
graduates from 72 to 144, and in 2009 General David
Petraeus, now in charge of all U.S. and NATO forces in
Afghanistan, "highlighted in a memo to the Army and
Air Force chiefs of staff the need for more JTACs,
according to military officials." In August and September of 2010 the U.S. and NATO
held Exercise Ramstein Rover 2010 in the state of
Wisconsin, "the first international exercise training
NATO Forward Air Controllers (FACs) in the US" and "an
advanced training opportunity to exercise Close Air
Support (CAS), FAC and Joint Terminal Attack
Controller (JTAC) capabilities." In addition to the
U.S., participating NATO nations were Belgium,
Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany,
Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia.
The exercise "prepare[d] NATO FACs/JTACs for their
deployment to NATO's ISAF mission in Afghanistan." [8] South of the Wisconsin border, last November the
Illinois National Guard, which has been deploying to
Poland since 2003 "for one-year tours in support of
the Global War on Terror," trained Polish troops for
NATO's war in Afghanistan. A Polish officer present
for the event was quoted as affirming: "We train
together because we fight together. If we train
together we fight and work better in Afghanistan. It
is good idea to train together before we deploy. We
are good soldiers and our brigade was deployed in Iraq
two times and in Afghanistan so we work at a high
level. We are ready." [9] In August U.S., Belgian, Danish, Dutch, German and
Portuguese air force and army personnel participated
in the Allied Strike 10 exercise in Germany, "in a
realistic combat training environment," that a Danish
army forward air control instructor described as "the
best training that is offered for JTACs (Joint
Terminal Attack Controllers) in Europe." [10 The preceding autumn a squadron of U.S. F-15E
Strike Eagles participated in a training exercise in
the Baltic Sea state of Estonia "to train Estonian
forward air controllers in calling in close air
support. "The event, titled Baltic Region Training Event IV
Alpha, gave F-15E aircrews and the Estonian FACs the
opportunity to work together in a training
environment, to better prepare them for real-world
missions." U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) characterized the
maneuvers as follows: "While this was a NATO training
event, it supports USAFE's goal of building
partnership capacity throughout the region. "The program [Baltic Region Training Events]
assists Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and neighbouring
NATO countries also in their efforts towards
interoperability and integration of air assets in line
with existing NATO standards." An Estonian military officer said of the exercise:
"This was our first time training with F-15s. We were
able to exercise coordination between us, the aircraft
and the ground forces. We are constantly learning, and
this training helps prepare us for our deployment to
Afghanistan next year." [11] The war in Afghanistan has also been used for
U.S.-led multinational NATO special forces and other
military training in Eastern and Central Europe and
the acquisition and expansion of bases in Bulgaria,
Romania and Hungary. Last September the Pentagon led
the Jackal Stone 10 multinational military exercise in
Poland and Lithuania with 1,300 special forces from
the U.S., Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Romania
and Ukraine. Building on previous NATO status of forces
agreements, in 2005 and 2006 the Pentagon acquired
eight new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania,
including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer air bases in
the first country and the Mikhail Kogalniceanu
Airfield in the second. The U.S. Joint Task Force-East operates out of the
Mihail Kogalniceanu Airfield and the Babadag Training
Area in Romania and the Novo Selo Training Area in
Bulgaria, and Stryker brigades exercise in both
countries for the war in Afghanistan. Last October the
U.S. dispatched F-15C jet fighters to Romania's Campia
Turzii Air Base for Operation Golden Lance,
large-scale air exercise involving 100 U.S. airmen and
10 fighter aircraft, and in the same month the U.S.
86th Airlift Wing and 435th Air Ground Operations Wing
led two weeks of maneuvers to train 1,000 Bulgarian
paratroopers in the Thracian Fall 2010 exercise. NATO has upgraded air bases in Eastern Europe,
including the Amari Air Base in Estonia, the Siauliai
Air Base in Lithuania and the Lielvarde Air Base in
Latvia, to accommodate U.S. and NATO jet fighters and
strategic transport aircraft. Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania have been recruited into the U.S. and NATO
Northern Distribution Network to transit military
equipment and personnel to Afghanistan. U.S. and NATO
military transit routes to the Afghan war front will
incorporate eleven of fifteen former Soviet republics,
all except for Armenia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine
for the moment. Poland's 31st Air Base in Krzesiny will soon host
U.S. F-16 Fighting Falcon multirole jet fighters and
C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft. The U.S.
moved Patriot Advanced Capability-3 anti-ballistic
missiles and over 100 troops into Morag last May and
plans to station dozens of Standard Missile-3
interceptors in Poland and Romania in the upcoming
years. In 1995 Hungary's Taszar Air Base became the first
U.S. and NATO military base on former Warsaw Pact
territory, used for interventions in Bosnia and
Kosovo. For several years the Pentagon has employed the
Papa Air Base in Hungary, recently upgraded by NATO,
for its C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft,
making it one of the few crucial strategic air
transport centers outside of the U.S. In 2007 the base
was selected to host three NATO C-17 transport planes
for the Heavy Airlift Wing which was activated on July
27, 2009, the first multinational strategic airlift
operation. U.S. personnel and that of several NATO allies are
deployed to the air base. In December of 2009 the multinational Heavy Airlift
Wing (HAW) performed its first official flight, an
airlift mission into Iraq which "facilitated the
deployment for members of the NATO Training
Mission-Iraq." The mission also "enabled the redeployment of 30
International Security Assistance Force members and 25
tons of equipment from Afghanistan. Combining missions
and increasing airlift efficiencies is a central wing
goal." In the words of a U.S. military official at the
time, "The HAW is starting to make a real difference
in moving missions to Iraq and Afghanistan." [12] Though two months before, the HAW flew a C-17
Globemaster III into the Afghan capital of Kabul "with
military representatives from all 28 NATO member
states as well as those from the 14 non-NATO nations
who also contribute forces to ISAF." [13] Last April it was announced that the U.S.-NATO
Heavy Airlift Wing at Papa had "recently moved 2.1
million pounds of equipment essential to surge
operations supporting the International Security
Assistance Force in Afghanistan. "The international wing has been part of the
operation to move more than 6 million pounds of basic
expeditionary airfield resources, or BEAR materiel, to
build six forward operating bases supporting 3,500
people…." [14] In June 100 paratroopers from the American,
British, German, Norwegian and Belgian air forces,
armies and marines participated in "airborne jump
operations to build partnerships and capabilities
needed to meet future challenges" in Germany,
parachuting from a C-17 from the HAW and C-130J
Hercules from the 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein
Air Base. Though it wasn't "the first time NATO
countries have participated in jump week, it was the
first time the recently stood up HAW participated."
[15] Last month the scope of the operation became
evident when a a C-17 left the Papa Air Base for a
three-day, 7,000-mile mission "covering the countries
of Hungary, Poland, Afghanistan and Lithuania as they
move[d] more than 75,000 tons of cargo" [16] to the
Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. On January 4 the U.S. Defense Department's news
service announced that the C-17 Globemaster III had
celebrated its two millionth flight hour. "As a testament to the C-17 mission tempo, the
aircraft passed its two millionth flight hour just
four years after passing its first million-hour mark,
and the first million hours took 16 years to reach. "Although Air Mobility Command officials estimate
the international C-17 fleet passed the milestone on
Dec. 14, the achievement was commemorated on a Dec. 10
airdrop mission out of Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan."
The latter was identified by the source as the busiest
military airport in the world, one which accommodates
"approximately 100 missions, 1,500 passengers and 800
short tons of cargo daily." [17] Last April the White House secured an agreement
with the government of Kazakhstan to permit U.S.
troops to fly over the North Pole and across the
Central Asian nation bordering China and Russia to
Afghanistan. On January 3 USS Bainbridge, an Arleigh Burke class
guided missile destroyer, left Naval Station Norfolk
in Virginia to deploy with Standing NATO Maritime
Group 2: "The ship and its crew will conduct joint
operations with various countries of NATO and also
conduct maritime interdiction operations near the
coast of Somalia." [18] That is, it will operate in
the Gulf of Aden and the broader Arabian Sea where the
U.S. and NATO have created a war zone that stretches
from the Horn of Africa to the Indian subcontinent. The Afghan war has indeed contributed in
transforming NATO from a military bloc that had waged
bombing campaigns in the Balkans to an international,
integrated, expeditionary force the Pentagon and White
House are employing to conduct military operations not
short of war for a number of key geopolitical
purposes. 1) Gareth Porter, How Afghanistan Became a War
for NATO http://www.ipsnews.net/ news.asp?idnews=54020 2) Macedonian International News Agency,
December 28, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/../
iraq-nato-assists-in-building-
new-middle-east-proxy-army 4) USS Abraham Lincoln Launches 1,000th Sortie
In Support of OEF |
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