Washington Post blogger William M. Arkin says that the "non-lethal European approach" in Afghanistan is right, while the US approach is wrong: "The notion that we can just ship the Iraq surge strategy to the country and win is thoughtless. " He blames Defense Secretary Gates for creating the public image that "if there were more shooters from Europe, somehow the war would be going better."

Arkin, who also served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst in West Berlin from 1974 - 1978, opines:

Complaining about the Europeans is old sport for the Cold Warrior. From decades-old bitching about "burden sharing" to 1990's frustrations with NATO's fighting spirit in the former Yugoslavia, to the era of freedom fries after 9/11, conventional wisdom is that rules of engagement and strategies authored in Paris and Berlin are to blame for American loss. Afghanistan is just the latest refrain, and the normally judicious Gates has taken on an almost Rumsfeldian tone in calling the Europeans weak. Jump on the bandwagon if you like. I'm sure all three presidential candidates could happily articulate some version of Gates' lament on Afghanistan as diversion therapy. But the truth is that hesitant Europeans are right. More firepower isn't going to "win" the war in Afghanistan.

Chancellor Merkel attacked suggestions that Germany had taken the easy option in Afghanistan: "We're not just digging wells and building houses; we also have a military mission."  Hugh Williamson reports in the Financial Times:

In her most outspoken comments on Afghanistan since Germany came under pressure this month to send more troops, the German chancellor said she had "absolutely no time" for proposals to redeploy Nato troops within Afghanistan.

Hans-Ulrich Klose, vice-chair of the Bundestag's foreign affairs committee, supposedly told the Canwest News Service that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper should put more pressure on countries like Germany and France to station troops in the more dangerous southern parts of Afghanistan. Klose is a member of the Social Democratic Party, which is part of Chancellor Merkel's coalition government. And he wants the Canadians to pressure his own government... So crazy, it could be true. Well, to his credit, Klose has also been outspoken in the German press calling for German troop deployments to the South.

The NATO mission in Afghanistan has been a big topic this week. While the German media was full of concern about providing 250 Bundeswehr soldiers for a Quick Reaction Force (No, I did not forget another zero.), US and Canadian politicians and think tanks sounded alarm over developments in Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has urged his German counterpart in a one-and-a-half-page-long letter to "send an additional 3,200 troops to Afghanistan," reports the Associated Press. The German press does not mention this number, which would be a doubling of the current German contingent. The media focuses on Gates' request for Germany to send combat troops to Southern Afghanistan. The answer from all German parties in the Bundestag is basically: "Njet. Forget it." The Bundestag's has only authorized the government to send up to 3,500 troops to Afghanistan. And that's the end of the story in most media outlets.

Asked by the BBC (video) where he sees the biggest threat coming from, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff answers that the US is increasingly concerned that "Europe will become a platform for terrorists." Chertoff said he had seen "home-grown terrorism begin to rise in Europe".

The Homeland Security officials have been increasingly concerned for a long time now. In July 2005, Atlantic Review quoted a Brookings Fellow writing in Foreign Affairs: "The growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies."

Apparently the nightmares have not been all that bad in the last two and a half years. Business is considered more important. That's why the US is not canceling the the visa-waver program for Europeans. The Bush administration is not as tough in the war on terrorism as they present themselves.

Related posts: "Terrorists on Honeymoon" in Lower Saxony and WSJ: Russia and Jihadists Target America's "Giant Aircraft Carrier with Sausages" and NYT's Correspondent Mark Landler's Shrill Coverage of Germany

Meanwhile, Germany is preparing to send 250 combat troops to northern Afghanistan as part of NATO's quick reaction force to join in the search for and fight against terrorists. This marks a departure from the Bundeswehr's current mission. To date only stabilization forces have been deployed to the main German base at Masar-i-Sharif, reports DW World.

Another example for increasing tension within NATO: Karen DeYoung describes in the Washington Post how unnamed European and North American officials praise their troops' contributions and highlight their sacrifices in Afghanistan, while criticizing their NATO allies:

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. (...)

U.S. and British forces have long derided each other's counterinsurgency tactics. (...) Britain, with a higher percentage of its forces deployed worldwide than the United States, is stretched thin in Afghanistan. Not only did the British have insufficient force strength to hold conquered territory, but the reconstruction and development assistance that was supposed to consolidate military gains did not arrive. "It's worth reminding the Americans that the entire British army is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps," said one sympathetic former U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

J. Carter Wood recommended this interesting article (Thank you!) and points out in his blog Obscene Desserts that "someone at the Washington Post seems to think the German capital is still on the Rhine:"

Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have toned down their public pressure on allies. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Bush at his Texas ranch in November, U.S. and German officials said, she told him that while Bonn would step up its contribution in quiet northern Afghanistan, any change in Germany's noncombat role would spell political disaster for her conservative government.

Closer cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a key factor in enhancing stability in Afghanistan. Therefore the G8 are launching "a coordinated package of measures ranging from assistance for refugees and returnees to strengthening parliamentary contacts. Since a particular focus of the package is support for local security services and border protection, much of the funding is to be spent in the Afghan-Pakistan border area." The press release from Germany's Federal Foreign Office does not have much more information unfortunately.

The G8 plan is called "ambitious," but I wonder how serious the plan is since the press release states that Germany will only make 9 million euro available for 2008. Or perhaps it's more important how the money is spent rather than how much is spent; see Kyle's post about criticism from Congress regarding aid to Pakistan or the essay from spring 2007 "When $10 Billion Is Not Enough: Rethinking U.S. Strategy toward Pakistan" by Craig Cohen and Derek Chollet in The Washington Quarterly (pdf). Still, I believe 9 million euro does not go very far, even if the other G8 countries pitch in as well.

And with this, Germany's G8 Presidency ends. Japan will take over in 2008. Germany was not very successful, I believe. See the following Atlantic Review post: Who's Right on the G8-Summit: Bloggers or Academics and Politicians? 

Related post on Afghanistan: Fixing the Afghanistan mission: The U.S. wants to try, but what about Europe?

Last week Kyle wrote in War for Dummies: Step 1, Fighting Is Necessary about Secretary Gates' frustration with some European allies, who are not committing combat troops to southern Afghanistan.

I understand and respect the criticism, but fighting is really just step 1 in Afghanistan. Some US commanders in Afghanistan have moved on to step 2 in the handbook, which says that fighting is a distraction.

Economist describes how the "mistakes of the past six years of fighting in Afghanistan" have changed the "mindset of American military commanders:"

They now regard kinetic actions (ie, fighting) as a distraction, a preliminary shaping operation at best. The decisive operation is non-kinetic, says Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of Task Force Fury, responsible for six south-eastern provinces. His focus is training Afghan forces, building roads, schools and clinics and, above all, getting the government to start addressing the needs of the people.

He has schooled himself in the ways of Pushtunwali, the Pushtun tribal code of honour, and has its main tenets on his wall. Next door to his office, a group of anthropologists and sociologists known as the human-terrain team provides him with valuable intelligence, not on the enemy but on the society in which they mingle. Colonel Schweitzer says what he needs is not more troops but more non-uniformed instruments of power: diplomatic, information and economic, especially agronomists and water engineers.

The Economist article is pretty good and notes US successes in Afghanistan, incl. reconstruction and reconciliation. The Atlantic Review already wrote about Colonel Schweitzer's collaboration with anthropologists in The Pentagon's Embedded Scholars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Related posts: Germans to the Front! and A Shared Mission in Afghanistan?