Afghan exit leaves Nato with identity crisis

Nato put on a brave face at its Chicago summit but the reality is that the alliance has been weakened by the euro zone crisis and faces an identity crisis about what its role will be once it ends its intervention in Afghanistan in 2014.
Nato leaders sealed a landmark agreement to hand control of Afghanistan over to its own security forces by the middle of next year, putting the Western alliance on an "irreversible" path out of the unpopular, decade-long war.
The big question mark hanging over the summit was how will Nato, a 28-nation grouping originally designed for the Cold War, adapt to the world beyond 2014?
In an era where governments are slashing defense spending to cut budget deficits, the United States is increasingly tilting towards defense challenges in Asia while many of Nato's other members, preoccupied by economic problems, have little appetite for foreign adventures.
That raises the question of whether the United States, which accounts for three-quarters of Nato defense spending, will remain committed to the 63-year-old organization despite its frustrations at European allies' reluctance to contribute more towards their own defense.
While the Pentagon is also being forced to cut defense spending - by $487 billion over the next decade - the gap between the United States and its European allies is only likely to widen as many governments see defense as a "soft target" for budget cuts they are being forced into by the debt crisis.
Big European nations such as Germany and Britain are sharply cutting defense and only five allies meet Nato's benchmark of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.
Nato's answer to the money shortage is "smart defense," saving money by sharing equipment and facilities between allies and having countries specialize in different areas of defense.
"I think this summit sent a very clear message," Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Reuters in an interview.
"We won't get more money for defense in the very near future - let's face it ... That makes it necessary to do business in a new way and I think multinational cooperation is the way forward," he said.
Nato has reinvented itself several times before. Originally a mutual defense pact that bound North America and Western Europe together during the Cold War, the alliance survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and intervened in wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.
Afghanistan was Nato's first mission outside its traditional area of operations and its most ambitious. Nato forms the core of the 50-nation International Security Assistance Force that is battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Jamie Shea, Nato's deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges, wrote recently that Nato could soon be an alliance without a major operation under way.
"They are likely to be more spaced out and more focused on air and naval operations than on land deployments," Shea wrote. "The objectives are more likely to be limited and short-term, involving more intelligence-gathering and special forces, to say nothing of the increased use of robotics and drones in place of soldiers.
Despite the doubts, few see the United States walking away from Nato or the alliance breaking up because Washington knows it can generally count on its European allies in time of crisis and derives valuable political support from them in pursuit of its interests.
"Afghanistan will end, some day, it's not going to be tomorrow, but there's going to be something else - I can't predict where, when - and the West is going to need a tool to act and until we find a better one, I'd like to keep the alliance around for a while," Leo Michel of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the US National Defense University said in London recently.