We are all Europeans, Now?

NATO refuses to stand up in Afghanistan. I'm sure many European leaders are disappointed that we have won in Iraq (though I'll hedge and not make a final call until June) since a loss there would have discouraged us from fighting in Afghanistan too, and provided a convenient excuse for the Europeans to dodge duty in Afghanistan. "We are all Americans, now" will be trumped by "we are all European, now."

But we have inconveniently beaten our enemies inside Iraq. And we are turning our attention to what had been the secondary front. So of course, we'd like our allies to stand with us in the one place they've formally agreed is a place to fight.

Britain and America called for NATO to do more:

Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States have troops on the frontline of that fight, but other allies insist that reconstruction is as important as combat and refuse to redeploy.

British Defence Secretary John Hutton insisted that combat forces were most desperately needed, as only by capturing and holding ground in the hands of the insurgents could the allies ensure that rebuilding can be done.

"Combat forces, that is a most precious contribution right now to that campaign," he said. "We kid ourselves if we imagine that other contributions are as important, right now."

General Petraeus, too, asked for help.

Hutton is right that the Europeans who only want to build are kidding themselves about the paramount role of building versus security. I quoted a good book on Vietnam here on this topic:

George Jacobson, an "old hand" who altogether served eighteen years in Vietnam and was a mainstay of the pacification program in these later years, often observed that "there's no question that pacification is either 90 percent or 10 percent security, depending on which expert you talk to. But there isn't any expert that will doubt that it's the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent. You just can't conduct pacification in the face of an NVA division."

Or in the face of Taliban war bands roaming the countryside.

I'm certainly glad that the Europeans are willing to commit to building in Afghanistan. But when security needs have not been met, the building is slower and subject to dramatic reversal by an enemy not beaten which sees building as a threat to their ultimate victory.

I'm still more worried about our government slipping into the European view than I am hopeful of Europeans (Brits and Danes excepted, of course, and the Canadians too. Australia gets partial credit for their special ops but they don't send infantry battalions to do the heavy labor.) standing up to fight for security.