Earlier this week, the Bush administration decided to send 3200 more Marines to join U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. This is a smart and long-overdue move—and one that could have been made easily a long time ago if so many of our troops weren’t deployed in Iraq.

But our effort in Afghanistan remains constrained by the unwillingness of our NATO allies to commit more troops and the unwillingness of many of those allies to allow their deployed troops to engage in difficult combat missions against the Taliban. Secretary of Defense Gates pointed to an additional problem this week, stating: “I’m worried we have [in Afghanistan] some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations. Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency.” This blunt criticism was out of character for Gates, who usually speaks very diplomatically—unlike his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

The comment understandably angered the Dutch government, which summoned the U.S. Ambassador in the Netherlands to explain the remarks. But Gates made a valid and important point that deserves serious consideration on both sides of the Atlantic.

Prior to 9/11 neither America nor NATO expected to be engaged in large-scale counterinsurgency warfare in the foreseeable future. But after getting bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military took a crash course on counterinsurgency fighting, culminating in the drafting of a new counterinsurgency manual and the implementation of that manual’s strategy in Iraq under General Petraeus over the past year. In Afghanistan we haven’t had enough troops to use the strategy to the same extent. And we won’t be successful in Afghanistan unless our NATO allies adopt a coherent counterinsurgency strategy and provide the troops and resources necessary to implement it. So far, they haven’t come close to doing so.

This shortcoming underscores a more general problem—while most Americans rightly view Afghanistan as a critical front in the war on terrorism, many Europeans don’t consider the Afghanistan mission to be of vital importance. It seems to me that NATO now faces a crossroads: will it be content to just muddle through in Afghanistan while keeping its principal identity as a collective defense pact, or will the alliance transform itself into a body capable of succeeding in difficult combat missions, including counterinsurgencies, far from Europe? From America’s perspective the choice is clear: we need NATO to help us fight the tough and messy wars of the 21st century.

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