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?

While Germany is still pretty busy with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Roger Cohen misses the Wehrmacht.

The NYT columnist, who was Berlin bureau chief from 1998 to 2001 and is currently in Afghanistan, thinks it is "Time for the Bundesmacht" (HT: David and Don):

Remember the Wehrmacht? It was a formidable fighting force. The modern German army, the Bundeswehr, is also very effective. Thing is, it is reluctant to fight or even place itself in danger.

NATO is at war here. That, however, is a fact Europeans are reluctant to accept, just as the link between slaughter in Madrid, London or Amsterdam and the Afghan-Pakistani terror nexus seems unconvincing to many Europeans floating on an Iraq-comforted wave of moral smugness.

Three points on the above quote:
(1) What terrorist attack took place in Amstersdam?
(2) Yes, I am skeptical about a link between Afghanistan and terrorism in Europe. A NATO success in Afghanistan will not reduce the terrorist threat in Europe significantly. Europeans worry about home-grown terrorism and about Pakistan, where Al Qaeda leaders have found a safe haven, which IMHO calls into question the Afghanistan mission. Sure, Cohen mentions Pakistan as well in the above quote, but he is calling for German troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, not Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Now, that would be something! He could join Barack Obama in getting serious on Pakistan...
(3) "Iraq-comforted wave of moral smugness" is a cool phrase, but I think many Americans tend to exaggerate the spread of this sentiment, while I might underestimate the smugness of my fellow citizens. Everybody is biased...

Cohen's op-ed has another cool phrase, which is from Julian Lindley-French, a military expert at the Netherlands Defense Academy:

A lot of the German troops are little more than heavily armed traffic cops.

So the Bundeswehr is not as effective as Cohen claimed in the beginning of his op-ed? Hm...  Cohen received 114 comments and counting on his blog regarding this op-ed. Wow.

The Moderate Voice (TMV) is among the most popular political blogs in the United States. It is certainly the premier voice for centrist positions in the blogosphere. Joe Gandelman, the Editor-In-Chief, has invited me to join TMV as a co-blogger. 

Here's a quote from TMV's mission statement:

A prime guiding principle was that differing ideas don't give people brain cancer, so from the start TMV linked to Democratic, Republican, liberal, conservative and centrist blogs. It also put a special emphasis on linking to blogs written by "independent thinkers" of any (or no) party who sought to discuss issues and promote dialogue rather than hype specific candidates or repeat talk show (of the left and right) talking points.
Since then, TMV has grown into one of the Internet's fastest growing and respected group moderate/centrist sites. And it hopes to grow more in coming years.

I very much like these principles and goals. In fact, the Atlantic Review has also been linking to both sides of the aisle (and not just to both sides of the Atlantic. Some readers don't like it, but I will continue to link to both Davids Medienkritik and Dialog International, for instance. And I try to see both sides of an argument. Okay, enough navel-gazing and bragging. Of course, Atlantic Review continues as usual. I will cross-post a lot. Sometimes I will write a pointer on TMV and link to Atlantic Review or vice versa.

My first post at The Moderate Voice is online: Secretary Gates Is Not "Satisfied" with NATO. It's about Afghanistan, obviously. More specifically: About the NY Sun's wrong point on European policy, about Canada's frustration with the lack of European solidarity, about the "threat" (?) to move US troops from Kosovo to Afghanistan and about US Defense Secretary Gates' politeness. You are invited to translate his diplo speech into plain English. There are quite a few interesting comments from TMV readers. Some of my responses might sound familiar. ;-)

The first link in my TMV post goes to a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty interview with Secretary Gates, which was conducted by Ulrich Speck. I am sure many Atlantic Review readers used read Ulrich's Kosmoblog and might be interested in what he is doing now.

The US, Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands provide most of the troops to fend off the insurgency in Afghanistan. Germany's engagement is quite limited and yet public support has fallen to new lows.

[Merkel] has not given a single speech devoted to Afghanistan to the Bundestag, or Parliament. She missed an ideal chance last Friday during a parliamentary debate over renewing the mandates for the German troops based there. But she left the explanation to her not terribly persuasive defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung. And since taking office nearly two years ago, Merkel has traveled neither to Kabul nor to the comparatively peaceful north where most of the German troops are based. Now, under pressure from the opposition, she has finally announced travel plans. But so far, no date has been set. What is baffling is that her attitude is out of line with the rest of her foreign policy agenda.

Dempsey describes Afghanistan as Merkel's "big blind spot," because she has shown more leadership on other issues like Russia and China.

Ulf Gartzke, a visiting scholar at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, argues in a similar direction in "German Lessons: The Afghan Conundrum" in The Globe and Mail.

Carl Robichaud asks a rhetorical question in Afghanistan Watch: "Last week Germany voted by a 2 to 1 margin to sustain the deployment of its 3,000 strong forces in Afghanistan--for now. But how sustainable is this mission when the public at large opposes the deployment by the same margin?"

Spiegel International has interviewed former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer about "opposition against the Iraq war that threatened to put Berlin in the same camp as Syria, the threat of a Tehran-led arms race in one of the world's most unstable regions and the mixed legacy of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder."

I believe that the current German government missed an opportunity a year ago when the Canadians and other allies were under great pressure in the south and asked us for help. Despite the many risks, Germany should have stepped up to the plate. One day we'll be the ones asking for help, and no one will help us.