NATO No Longer Fits The Bill

We Need a More European Alliance

Theo Sommer, Alfred Clayton

• Publisher: Edition Einwurf
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9783896841445
• eBook ISBN: 9783896843784
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

NATO is not particularly good when it comes to countering new threats. The most successful alliance in military history has not as yet managed to develop a strategy designed to deal with the battle for resources, asymmetrical conflicts, cyber warfare and the security policy consequences of climate change. NATO found it difficult to come to terms with the disappearance of enemy stereotypes at the end of the east-west conflict, and the "war on terror" is proving to be tough going. Thus what NATO needs to do is to redefine its mission. Does it want to be a purely defensive alliance, or does it want to be a military reserve force at the disposal of the United Nations? Should it intervene whenever Western values are under threat? Theo Sommer, one of Germany's most renowned journalists, comes up with some thought-provoking answers. He believes that the alliance needs to be more political and more European, that the military wing should be downsized, and that NATO will gain nothing by overextending itself in an effort to become a globally active organization. However, he is of the opinion that it has a future as an alliance in which Europe and America agree to cooperate as equal partners.

IV. Out of Area, Out of Business?

Only a few years after the end of the east-west conflict the NATO partners started to reach out beyond the boundaries of the alliance in Somalia. In 1991 the country’s dictator, Siad Barre, was toppled, the same Barre who in 1977 had given the GSG-9 counter-terrorism unit permission to storm the Lufthansa jet “Landshut” after it had been hijacked by terrorists and had landed at the airport in Mogadishu. There was heavy fighting in Mogadishu between rival militias. A famine led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people , and one and a half million Somalis were made homeless. The world was shocked. The UN Security Council passed four resolutions that were all aimed at restoring peace and creating stability by means of nation-building. A number of international military missions were sent to Somalia, starting with UNITAF, UNOSOM I (Operation Restore Hope), and finally, in 1993, UNOSOM II (Operation Continue Hope). There were 22,000 soldiers from 34 countries, including thousands of Americans. And in Belet Huen, from April 1993 to March 1994, there were also 1,700 soldiers of the German Army who were supposed to provide logistical support for an Indian combat brigade (which as it happens never actually arrived.) UNOSOM’s mission was to impose a ceasefire, and thus to create a safe environment for humanitarian assistance. Later – and this was one of the first examples of mission creep – it was extended to include the restoration of peace, stability, law and order, and the encouragement of the political process in the country.

Of course, Operation Continue Hope came to a disastrous end. On 3 October 1993 18 American soldiers died in a 12-hour gunfight (“Black Hawk Down”), and 78 were wounded. Several dead Americans were dragged half-naked through the streets of Mogadishu. The terrible TV images shocked viewers around the world. Exactly half a year later the Americans withdrew ignominiously. The others followed. UNOSOM II was terminated in March 1995.

In the seventeen years which have elapsed since then Somalia has been a hotbed of unrest. A functioning central government never materialized. And the country has disintegrated into three sections. The breakaway Republic of Somaliland and autonomous Puntland in the north are relatively peaceful, whereas 6,000 Shabab rebels control the south and the centre. The fighting between rival clans and tribes is never-ending. Outbreaks of famine are a regular occurrence. Neither the Somali army nor the African Union AMISOM troops from Burundi and Uganda, nor the Kenyan military, which crossed the border in October 2011, nor the Ethiopian army seem to be able to pacify the country. Somalia has become the classic example of a failed state. The interventions of the early 1990s were just as unsuccessful as the seven international peace conferences that have already taken place. Furthermore, in the recent past piracy has emerged as an additional threat to maritime trading nations. Along the Somali coastline the inhabitants have increasingly turned to robbery on the high seas in order to make a living. In 2011 they attacked 237 ships, and seized 28 of them. The estimated damages incurred in this year alone amounted to between US$6.6 and US$6.9 billion.

There is a lesson to be learnt from Somalia, and this is that it is pointless to intervene militarily in countries in which tribal customs and self-seeking clans are traditionally more powerful than any sentiments occasioned by the state as a whole. In countries of this sort nation-building of a Western kind is simply love’s labour lost.

To a certain extent the diagnosis that it was “love’s labour lost” also holds true of the first Gulf War in 1991. In the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait this war – Operation Desert Storm – acquired legitimacy under international law since it was based on a UN-mandate. More than 100,000 sorties were flown, and they demoralized Iraq. A coalition force from 34 countries was led by the US, and had almost a million men, of whom 73 percent were Americans. It liberated Kuwait within four days, and in the following five weeks destroyed the military might of the Iraqi dictator. However, for the time being Saddam Hussein was allowed to remain in power because President Bush (senior) was unwilling to shoulder the difficulties that would have materialized if he had seized Baghdad. A CIA attempt to incite an uprising against Saddam Hussein was a failure. Thereupon the US upgraded the Emirate of Kuwait to the status of a “major non-NATO ally” and set up a military base in which 15,000 US soldiers are now stationed “to keep Iran in check and keep America prepared for any other threats in the area,” as General James Mattis of the US Central Command has put it. Despite a number of promising moves in this direction, the desert sheikhdom has not become a democracy. In the neighbouring Kingdom of Bahrain, where the American 5th Fleet has set up its headquarters in Manama, the Arab Spring was crushed in 2011 with the help of Saudi tanks. The West restricted itself to muted expressions of indignation.

The first Gulf War was a classic war of necessity that was fought for the principles of international law, to re-establish the status quo ante and to liberate Kuwait. It received overwhelming international support and had the blessing of a UN mandate. The campaign was a brilliant military performance. Its political goals were restricted. Saddam Hussein was defeated, but not swept from power. The war did not mark the start of regional democratization. But that is not what it set out to do.

In 1991, just after the coalition forces – especially the 540,000 American, 43,000 British and 18,000 French troops – had pulled out of the Persian Gulf, things began to spiral out of control on the Balkans. In the last decade of the 20th century NATO used military force on two occasions in this area in order to terminate the violent ethnic nationalism unleashed by the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In 1994–95 the issue was Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in 1999 it was Kosovo. In both cases military intervention by the alliance created peace, but hitherto this has not led to the envisaged political results. Stability has not materialized, nor has transparent and effective governance. However, the Europeans, who have assumed responsibility for the Balkans, have only one choice, and that is the stay there and to dig in.

Bombs Fall on Belgrade

NATO’s first Balkans war came about as a result of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, or, to put it more precisely, it was the reaction of the West to the savage wars of dissolution into which, a decade after the death of Tito, President Slobodan Milosevic plunged the southern Slav state as a result of his lurid ideas of the supremacy of Greater Serbia. Germany was reunited, the Iron Curtain had disappeared, the Warsaw Pact had burst asunder, and the Soviet Union was breaking apart. In Yugoslavia the collapse of communism in 1990–91 also went hand in hand with the disintegration of national structures. The attempt to transform the federation into a confederation was a failure, and a “velvet divorce” of the kind that had taken place in Czechoslovakia was rejected by the dictator in Belgrade. In fact, in Kosovo, the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of which he had abrogated in 1989, he intensified the oppression of the Albanian Kosovars, who made up 90 percent of the population.

The Croats and the Slovenes in particular were afraid that they would be subjected to similar attacks by the Serbs, and on 25 June 1991 they declared the independence of their republics. Two days later the Serb-Yugoslav army struck at Slovenia. However, the Slovenes fought back and secured a ceasefire brokered by the EU. Instead of showing some restraint, Milosevic now extended the war to Croatia. His army occupied a third of its national territory and expelled the Croatian inhabitants. The small town of Vukovar was besieged for three months, subjected to an endless artillery barrage, and in so many words starved into submission. 2,000 of the 10,000 inhabitants lost their lives. In October the Serbs even shelled Dubrovnik, the “Pearl of the Adriatic” and a designated world heritage site.

After this Milosevic set his sights on Bosnia-Herzegovina. His army occupied the northern and eastern parts of its territory (70 percent of the whole republic) and embarked on a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing. Innumerable Croat and Muslim Bosnians were incarcerated, tortured and murdered. Rape was an everyday occurrence. For three years all the peacemaking efforts of the United Nations, the EU and the US were to no avail. For 1,000 days the Serbs besieged Sarajevo. The towns which the UN Security Council had designated safe havens – Gorazde, Bihac, Zepa, and Srebrenica – fell one after the other into the hands of the Serbs. The gruesome events in Srebrenica, where Dutch UN soldiers watched helplessly as 8,000 Muslim men were marched off and brutally murdered will remain etched in Europe’s memory as the worst act of violence since 1945.

After a great deal of toing and froing NATO decided in the summer of 1995 to respond to further attacks on the safe havens and on the besieged city of Sarajevo with air strikes. Another massacre in the Bosnian capital triggered the proposed retaliatory action. In Operation Deliberate Force Serb military targets throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina were subjected to aerial bombardment. Now Milosevic finally backed down, agreed to a ceasefire and travelled to Dayton, Ohio, where at an air force base a peace agreement was negotiated within three weeks under very great pressure from the US. It brought to an end a war in which 225,000 people lost their lives, and in the course of which 2.5 million out of a total of 4 million inhabitants were displaced, and 1.1 million were forced to flee abroad. 10,500 people died in Sarajevo alone, and 150,000 fled from the city.

NATO intervention put an end for the time being to the Yugoslav war of dissolution. Yet peace in Bosnia is not stable by any means. The situation is outwardly calm, but under the surface there is seething discontent. Bosnia continues to be a provisional affair, and on top of everything else it is a structure that simply cannot work. In the Dayton agreement it acquired constitutional mechanisms that have led to the total paralysis of its system of government. A confusing coexistence and indeed jumble of public bodies and institutions weakens the entire state. Two “entities” stand in each other’s way. They are the territorial units Republika Srpska and the Croatian-Bosnian Federation. The latter is divided into ten cantons, three of which have a Croat majority. In the course of sixteen years it has certainly been possible to introduce standardized number plates, standardized passports, and a single currency. But the country still has three presidents, a plethora of parliaments and ministers, and on top of everything else a bloated tripartite administrative system. If one entity refuses to give its assent to a certain measure or law, then nothing happens. The entities have not become territorial units. They are ethnic organizations paralizing each other. Only few refugees have returned, and the results of the ethnic cleansing have now been cemented.

War in Kosovo

A mere four years after the Dayton Agreement NATO had to wage its second war against Milosevic. This time it was about Kosovo, an issue that had been studiously avoided in Dayton.

The abrogation of the autonomy of Kosovo had merely been the beginning. “Every nation has one love that warms its heart,” Milosevic boasted in November 1988. “For Serbia it is Kosovo.” And 600 years after the defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, on St Vitus’s Day in 1989, he appealed on the site of the Battle of Kosovo in Gazimestan to Serbian national pride and issued open threats of “new battles” against the Muslims. Subsequently he worked relentlessly to restore the Serbian character of the province. His goal was to change the ethnic composition of the population, which was 90 percent Albanian and 10 percent Serb. Members of the Albanian majority were excluded from all public offices and places of work, and 115,000 lost their jobs. As if this were not enough, they were subjected to a kind of apartheid. It meant that they were forced to establish a parallel society with its own educational system, its own health care provision, and its own tax collection system. They also held elections, and in a referendum in 1991 the vast majority voted for the independence of Kosovo. At the same time they appointed a government-in-exile under the leadership of prime minister Bujar Bukoshi which to the very end resided in Bonn.

The Kosovars under the leadership of the writer Ibrahim Rugova and the LPK initially pursued a strategy of non-violence. However, since in the short term this produced no results, many people and in particular many young people began to be convinced that only violence was capable of attracting the attention of the international community. In the course of 1997 the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or, in Albanian, UCK) began to carry out guerrilla attacks. The Serbs reacted to them by displaying even greater brutality.

The diplomatic efforts to contain the conflict were a total failure, and those initiated by US negotiator Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton accords, were just as ineffectual as those of the European “contact group” in which State Secretary Wolfgang Ischinger from the German foreign ministry played an important role. A final attempt in Rambouillet in February 1999 came to nothing because Milosevic refused to agree to the presence of a NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

On 24 March NATO did what it had threatened to do and flew its first sorties against Serbian troops in Kosovo. The heads of state and government who had assembled in Washington to commemorate NATO’s 60th anniversary then decided to extend the bombing runs to Serbia proper. Up to 10 June air force units from 13 countries flew 38,400 missions including 10,484 combat missions (four out of five were flown by the US Air Force, which on 7 May also bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade). Seven bridges across the Danube were destroyed, nine major roads were rendered impassable, large parts of the telecommunications system, the media centres and factories were reduced to rubble, and on top of this 80 percent of the refinery capacity and 70 percent of the electricity generating facilities were wiped out.

NATO had erroneously assumed that Milosevic would capitulate and return to the negotiating table after a few days of bombing runs. Furthermore, the alliance had thoughtlessly overlooked the fact that the Serbs would exact terrible vengeance on the Kosovars, who were the ones it was trying to protect. Within the course of a few weeks several thousand civilians were killed by the Serbian army. More than 860,000 were driven over the border, and about 600,000 were driven out of their homes within Kosovo itself. Numerous reports of rape, torture, looting, pillaging, extortion and mass deportations caused consternation in the Western world.

Since NATO was unable to prevent this barbarous behaviour with its bombing runs, it began to think about sending in ground troops. This, the waning Russian support for Serbia, and the fear that the country’s economy would be totally destroyed finally led Milosevic to agree to accept the terms of a German initiative. It stipulated that Belgrade had to agree to withdraw its troops, the Serbian police and all paramilitary units from Kosovo, to come to terms with the presence of international troops and civil authorities in the province, and to accept the return of the refugees. In the negotiations Milosevic was at least able to ensure that the UN and not NATO would be moving into Kosovo; that Kosovo would continue to a part of Yugoslavia; and that Russian forces would take part in the Kosovo Force (KFOR). With a mandate based on UN Security Council Resolution 1244, KFOR with 35,000 men and the UN administrative authority UNMIK were sent to the ravaged province. They were supposed to restore law and order, help to facilitate the return of the refugees, protect minorities, supervise the work of reconstruction, and set up an administration which could function until the advent of a final political settlement.

To an extent all this has been achieved, but only to a certain extent. In 2008 a non-existent nation did not suddenly become a nation on account of the Kosovo declaration of independence, or because responsibility was transferred from the United Nations to the European Union. The new state is de facto divided into two sections, and the area to the north of the river Ibar where most of the inhabitants are Serbs is governed and financed by Belgrade. A compromise with Serbia is not in sight, and seems conceivable only if Belgrade were to back down in order to be able to join the EU. Twelve years after the war there are still 6,200 KFOR soldiers from 30 countries in Kosovo. 1,300 soldiers from the German Army constitute the largest contingent. Furthermore, violent clashes, civil commotion and rioting are an almost daily occurrence. And in many respects the internal development of Kosovo, which declared itself independent in 2008 and has now been recognized by 80 countries, including 22 of the 27 EU member states, leaves much to be desired. Little progress has been made with regard to reforms designed to stabilize the country. People are extremely frustrated by the whole situation, by the high unemployment rates of up to 60 percent among young people, by the increasing squalor of the villages, and by the de facto secession of the areas to the north of the Ibar (they are inhabited by Serbs and financed by Belgrade) which divides the town of Mitrovica. The gangs of Serbian and Albanian smugglers who traffick in cigarettes, drugs and women run the only flourishing kind of business. Corruption is rife. On a visit to Pristina at the end of 2011 Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to admit: “Unfortunately a region which for a long time was very placid has become a trouble spot.”

The lesson to be learnt from the wars on the Balkans is that the transition from war and despotism to peace and democracy is always a difficult undertaking. The outcome has been satisfactory neither in Bosnia-Herzegovina nor in Kosovo. And yet both interventions were necessary and justified. It is of course true that an international no objection certificate in the shape of a UN mandate did not exist in the case of the first war against Milosevic. But should the West, when what is at stake is Europe’s backyard – or front garden – on the Balkans, really become embroiled in the quarrels of the great powers and the petty wrangling of the smaller states in the Security Council? Certainly not. And despite the unsatisfactory nature of the present situation, the EU cannot pull out of Bosnia-Herzegovina, nor can it pull out of Kosovo. The two areas are much too close to the Brussels-based community. Renewed conflicts and violence on the Western Balkans would once again see hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring over our borders. There is only thing that one can do in this situation, and that is to persevere and to take decisive action in political, economic, and (if that is what the local actors want) military terms.

In these cases intervention was not actually misguided. What went wrong was the fact that the European Union’s two Balkan protectorates were permitted to become independent far too soon. It was an independence with which they were unable to cope, and with which they will find it difficult to cope for the foreseeable future without the political backing of the EU. The EU should make its influence felt in no uncertain terms instead of allowing itself to be taken for a ride by corrupt, self-seeking and obstreperous local dignitaries. What is at stake on the Balkans is more than the reputation of the EU. It is the ability of the European Union to pacify, stabilize and democratize on a permanent basis...

Table of contents

• Preface: Brief Moments of Eternity
• Preface
• I. The Beginnings
• II. Radical Change and Transformation
• III. Old Alliance Seeks New Task
• IV. Out of Area, Out of Business?
• V. New Uncertainties
• VI. Are America and Europe still Partners?
• VII. The NATO of the Future
• VIII. Old Alliance and New Federation
• About the Author
• Imprint