Afghanistan

Abstract

This chapter traces the history of NATO and Afghanistan and pinpoints the principal strengths and weaknesses of the Alliance’s operational involvement in the country. NATO’s security assistance mission (ISAF) and the subsequent training mission Resolute Support) ultimately failed, and NATO was forced to withdraw chaotically in August 2021. The record of Alliance involvement in Afghanistan defies easy interpretation. NATO was layered into a counter-insurgency campaign partly run by a US-led coalition and partly by United Nations agencies. NATO went big in terms of operational footprint, but its hand on the political steering wheel was always light. NATO demonstrated endurance, capacity, and political legitimacy, and yet Afghanistan became the graveyard of its good intentions. Three frameworks of interpretation help make sense of all this—highlighting, respectively, strategic leadership, institutionalized ideas, and the contingency of multinational warfare. In engaging these frameworks, the chapter demonstrates how, even as we now know the beginning and the end of NATO in Afghanistan, the full meaning of the intervention is still emerging. The case thus merits further scholarly attention.