Gates Loves Kiev in the Spring Time

Former CIA chief-turned-Texas A&M University president-turned-defense secretary Robert Gates was busy making friends and influencing people this morning, attacking NATO for not providing enough troops in Afghanistan.

This kind of ignores the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-backed force in the area. Consisting of 25 US NATO allies and 11 non-NATO states, it has increased its personnel on the ground from 32,000 in late 2006 to 35,500 in the middle of this year. The UK, which has taken flack for its decision to withdraw combat forces from Iraq, is doing so in order that it (guess what?) can boost its deployment in Afghanistan. The 2,500 Canadian troops around Kandahar have been taking particularly heavy casualties. Meanwhile, NATO has always seen a major part of its job in the Fight on Terror (they don't call it a war) as backfill: using member states to plug the gaps in NATO commitments for states with troops tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gates went on to talk up the Southeast European Defense Ministers, a body created in the aftermath of the bloody civil wars that swept through the Balkans in the 1990s. He then went on to completely miss the point about SEDM, saying it needs to get proactive to have any real role. Except that the reasons SEDM was formed in the first place, as described on the Department of Defense web site was to "promote peace and stability in the (Balkan) region, … enhance cooperation and regional security, (and) support NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) programs." So, basically, to ensure there's not another war in the Balkans, and undertake peacekeeping operations through NATO, not as an independent SEDM force.

Even more bafflingly, Gates then went on to threaten to withdraw the 1,500 US troops in the Kosovo stabilization force in 2008 if NATO didn't step up to the Afghanistan plate. Possibly he thinks that if he distracts the Balkan states in Afghanistan, they won't have time for another civil war or regional conflict.

Of course, this has posturing over how great Eastern Europe is and how essential to the War on Terror has nothing at all to do with Poland's conservative, pro-US Law & Justice party administration getting bounced out of office by the centrist, pro-European Civic Platform (part of whose agenda is that they are less willing to host the US's proposed missile defense screen, aka Son of Star Wars.)