12:00, 15 December 2009
By Luis Simón
In a recent interview with the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, former American ambassador to NATO, Robert E. Hunter, argues that Europe’s support for the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan is part of some quid pro quo arrangement whose flip side is America’s commitment to upholding the existing balance of power in Europe (read acting as an insurer against a growingly assertive Russia). In a similar vein, Richard Gowan has argued in Pragati that Europeans worry about what Afghanistan might bring to the Atlantic Alliance, not about what the transatlantic relationship might bring to Afghanistan or ‘the wider strategic regional context’.
We often hear that the challenges posed by Afghanistan are of a transnational nature (i.e. international terrorism, drug trafficking, human rights, etc.) and must be dealt with by the international community. However, we realise today, Af-Pak (Afghanistan and Pakistan) is shaping up as one of the first real twenty-first-century geopolitical arm wrestles; an eloquent illustration of the fact that all things transnational bear a national dimension too; from climate change, through terrorism, piracy or regional stability, all the way down to drug trafficking. To be sure, as the highly destructive power of modern weaponry rises the costs of war, national squabbles will more and more come wrapped in transnational packages.
Af-Pak is very much about the direction of Pakistan; India’s perennial challenge, America’s impossible ally, China’s promised land. During the Cold War, America saw its partnership with Pakistan as a means to hinder a potential Indo-Soviet expansion into the Indian Ocean that would have challenged its hegemony over the seas. Today, Washington’s commitment to a stable Pakistan is not only a means to counter the spread of radical Islam across the greater Middle East; it is also serious test of the strength of the US-India relationship and of Washington’s bid to manage the rise of China. For Russia, Af-Pak evokes some fundamental contradictions: between its will to contain the spread of radical Islam in Central Asia and its reluctance to accept that the price of that containment is the expansion of American influence in the region; between its will to preserve its partnership with India while upholding an improved relationship with China. For China, Pakistan offers not just a trampoline into the Arabian Sea and the vast energy reserves of the Middle East: it is a golden card in a rapidly heating proxy contest between Delhi and Beijing that comprises Nepal, Butan, Tibet, Myanmar or Sri Lanka.
Af-Pak is about influence in Central Asia, a region that, connecting Russia, China, India and the Middle East to each other, constitutes Eurasia’s geopolitical hub; an area that will test America’s will to remain a Eurasian power in the twenty-first century. The contradictions that confront it make a neat caricature of the explosive ambiguities that surround the web of relationships among the various Eurasian great powers.
But where does an ageing, retirement-minded Europe fit into all this? Europeans’ reluctance to embrace the very notion of Af-Pak does tell us a great deal about the old continent’s half-heartedness towards power politics, which for many, is considered as a thing of the past. Af-Pak does not seem to have a place in post-modern, post–Westphalian, European mindsets. For most Europeans, Afghanistan remains a transnational challenge and, as such, its stabilisation is associated with multilateral, comprehensive, solutions.
I have argued elsewhere that Europe’s bid to market itself as the bastion of international legitimacy is not necessarily strategically naïve. For Europeans, to avoid taking sides in the Eastern half of Eurasia (the region stretching from Central Asia to East Asia on land, from the Eastern Arabian Sea, through Malacca, onto the North Western Pacific at sea) might just be sound strategy. As the management of the balance of power in the Eastern half of Eurasia will require more and more resources from the United States, China, India and Russia, Europeans will be able to concentrate their efforts closer to home and use their offshore position to increase their leverage over the other Eurasian powers in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Northern Africa or the Suez to Hormuz maritime routes.
If the European offshore power strategy is to work effectively, though, Europeans must ensure they possess an appropriate offshore balance capability. Such capability can only be reached if two (interlinked) pre-conditions are met: Europeans’ acknowledgement of the importance of a strong, diverse and flexible military instrument in a growingly volatile international environment, and their determination to speak with one voice in foreign and security affairs. As long as America remains committed to the current balance of power in Europe, Europeans will tend to think they’ll be able to get away with their aversion to military force and their resistance to unite. But at a time when America’s commitment to Europeans will be severely tested by the challenges it faces elsewhere, Europe’s softness and disunity might soon turn against it. Only a more military aware and more politically cohesive European Union offers Europeans the possibility to be a constructive force in the international system, and to uphold their social-liberal values at that. For in the rough environment of international politics, one either shapes or is shaped.
