Identity crisis splits Nato

By CATHERINE FIELD

Nato leaders meet next week for a summit where flowery rhetoric is unlikely to dispel the sense of crisis surrounding President George W. Bush's efforts to coax the Western Alliance into Iraq and push it deeper into Afghanistan.

The meeting in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday takes place on the geographical faultline between Europe and the Middle East and Asia - an appropriate reminder of Nato's traditional boundaries in Europe and its reluctance to step into the Islamic hotspots beyond.

It will be the first summit since Nato expanded to 26 members in April with the arrival of seven East European countries - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Several more are knocking at the door, a sign of Nato's reputation as the military alliance that defeated the Warsaw Pact. The reality, though, is that the United States and continental Europe remain literally an ocean apart. Nato is still deeply split by the Iraq War, when the US-led invasion plunged it into its worst crisis in its 55-year history.

That discontent continues to bubble as the clock ticks away to the US presidential election campaign in November and pressure mounts on Bush to show voters that Iraq is being stabilised and US forces can exit gracefully.

Bush has been hoping that the change of sovereignty in Iraq on Wednesday - just two days after the start of the summit - and a UN resolution authorising a multinational force in Iraq will be the carrots to tempt Nato into that country.

That position has been quietly supported by the alliance's new secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who in Istanbul will take part in his first top-level meeting.

"It makes sense for Nato to discuss whether the allies could play a further role," de Hoop Scheffer ventured cautiously. "It is clear to me that the entire international community has a profound interest in ensuring that the new Iraq finds its feet. The price of failure is simply too high."

Desperate to maintain its force of 138,000 men and women in Iraq, the US has been extending their deployment there and is eyeing troops that it believes could be safely transferred there from other overseas garrisons, such as South Korea. It hopes the allies could play a direct or supporting role.

But the loss of support for Bush, which in many cases was never big, has been palpable in many Nato countries. Opposition to the war has swollen in the past three months, driven by the worsening insurgency in Iraq and the scandal of prisoner abuse by US guards at Abu Ghraib jail.

Spain, a supporter of the Iraqi war, became an opponent overnight when its pro-US premier, Jose Maria Aznar, was defeated by the Socialists in general elections. Poland, which commands a multinational division in Iraq, has warned it will cut its 2400-member force early next year.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair supports the war strongly, and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi does so verbally. But both are defying public opinion.

France and Germany have been against the war from the start, and their position has strengthened as American difficulties have worsened. President Jacques Chirac of France had no qualms at the G8 summit in Savannah, Georgia, this month in quashing American hopes of a Nato role in Iraq.

"I don't expect more troops from Nato to be offered up. That's an unrealistic expectation," Bush admitted then.

Where he may succeed in Istanbul, though, is in encouraging individual Nato countries to stump up help for training, equipping and advising Iraqi security forces. These programmes could take place either in Iraq or outside it, thus skirting fears that a country could be dragged into a quagmire.

Bush "hasn't given up on getting them to do training. And the French in the past have said they might consider something like that. He may continue to try, although I think he will back off on the troop issues," said Stephen Larrabee, an expert on Nato at the US think tank the Rand Corporation.

The other prong of Bush's Istanbul strategy may be to lobby for a greater Nato effort in Afghanistan. If the allies shoulder more of the burden there, the US could scale down its deployment of 20,000 US troops, transferring at least some of them to Iraq.

Nato took command of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in August last year, the first time it had taken over a mission outside Europe. Its Afghan strategy is based on so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, small groups of foreign troops and civilian experts who are supposed to expand the authority of the central government in Kabul and win hearts and minds.

There are 15 of these PRTs, but only one is run by Nato, in the northeastern city of Kunduz. Individual members of the US-led coalition run the others.

The aim is for Nato to take over as many as five PRTs in the run-up to democratic elections that are scheduled to take place in September, but to do this, the alliance will have to greatly beef up the 6400-person Isaf force, in personnel and equipment.

De Hoop Scheffer, a former Dutch foreign minister who took over the top Nato job at the start of the year from Britain's Lord Robinson, says it is vital for the alliance to meet its commitment.

Just to get Isaf going required the "begging bowl", he said in a tough speech in London this month. "As a standard operating procedure, this is simply intolerable."

Such comments go to the heart of the identity crisis that has beset Nato since the end of the Cold War: What is it? And what should it do? The end of the Cold War plunged Nato into a tactical fog. "During the Cold War, total defence was aimed mainly at defending a country against armed aggression rather than protecting the population," notes Lisbet Zilmer-Johns of the Danish Institute for International Studies.

"Today, the threat is directed against society itself and its infrastructure. Protecting the population is the central requirement."

After September 11, the flood of heartfelt support for America drove European countries to contemplate a revamp of Nato's role, transforming into the peacekeeping arm of the liberal democracies to help to calm the turbulence in the Muslim countries on Europe's rim.

But the notion of standing shoulder to shoulder with the US Administration has shrivelled like a deflating balloon over the past 18 months. Many Nato countries have shied away from the goal and tactics spelled out by Bush, who talks of an ill-defined "war on terror" and of a crusade to democratise the Middle East. They are reluctant to commit troops and treasure to this vision. So what remains is rhetorical: the Istanbul summit will trumpet a new strategy of stronger "co-operation" with Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East through joint military exercises and exchanges of military personnel.

Another complication for Nato has been the European Union. For several years, the EU has been talking itself up as a potential defence alliance or as the European military arm of Nato, and not just an economic bloc.

This has been a greatly divisive issue for Nato. Critics of such talk, especially in Britain, warn that if the EU role becomes too big and the United States feels it is being sidelined in Nato, that will trigger a US military pullout from Europe, which no one wants.

"Nato and the EU should not compete with each other. In the years to come they will sink or swim together," says Daniel Keohane of the London-based Centre for European Reform.

"If the Europeans were to succeed in boosting their military capabilities, American respect for Nato would grow, and the EU would benefit. If they fail both Nato and the EU will suffer."

In Istanbul, the summit will endorse the formal end of the Nato-led SFOR peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which will be handed over to the EU at the end of the year.

Beyond that, though, EU ambitions are likely to be limited for several years to come. For one thing, it will be busy taking care of the problems that resulted from its enlargement, from a 15-nation to a 25-nation club, on May 1.

Many of those newcomers, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, are staunch supporters of the United States and Nato.

The security challenges facing Nato countries could hardly be more evident than in Istanbul. Turkey is preparing to cast a ring of steel around the summit. No city offers a bigger potential target than Istanbul, and at a more acutely sensitive time.

In November last year, Islamist militants launched a wave of suicide bombings there, targeting synagogues, the British consul, the HSBC bank and a Masonic lodge, in which 63 people were killed and hundreds injured.

But al Qaeda is only one threat. Other potential dangers for the summit include a far-left group, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) and Kongra-gel, the successor to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), fighting for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey.