THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
With files from The Canadian Press

BRUSSELS, Belgium – Some of America’s closest NATO allies reacted with surprise and disbelief today to reported comments from U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggesting that their troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan are not up to the job.

The Dutch Defence Ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation of a Los Angeles Times article that said Gates complained about soldiers from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands not knowing how to fight a guerrilla insurgency.

In Ottawa, the Liberal opposition demanded the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper call in the U.S. ambassador to Canada — or seek direct clarification from Gates himself.

At the very least, the comments smack of insensitivity in light of the death of a Canadian soldier north of Kandahar yesterday, said defence critic Denis Coderre.

“We are paying the price in lives,” he said. “Our men and women know how to fight. We need to know who he was talking about; which countries.”

In Washington, Gates’ spokesman Geoff Morrell said the secretary had “read the article and is disturbed by what he read.”

Morrell did not challenge the accuracy of the quotes in the story, but said he thought it left the wrong impression — that Gates had singled out a particular country.

“For the record he did not — to the L.A. Times or at any time otherwise — publicly ever criticize any single country for their performance in or commitment to the mission in Afghanistan,” Morrell told Pentagon reporters in Washington.

Instead, Morrell said Gates had pointed out that “NATO as an alliance, does not train for counterinsurgency. The alliance has never had to do it before.”

In Britain, Conservative legislator Patrick Mercer said Gates’ reported comments were “bloody outrageous.”

“I would beg the Americans to understand that we are their closest allies, and our men are bleeding and dying in large numbers,” Mercer, a former British infantry officer said.

“These sorts of things are just not helpful among allied nations.”

The United States has regularly criticized Germany, France, Italy and other allies that refuse to allow their troops in Afghanistan to join U.S. forces on the front line against the Taliban in the insurgents’ southern strongholds.

According to the Times, Gates raised doubts about countries that have sent significant numbers of combat troops to fight in the south, often in the face of widespread opposition at home.

“I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations,” the paper quoted him as saying in an interview.

“Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency.”

NATO’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer moved quickly to defend the allied troops.

“All the countries that are in the south do an excellent job. Full stop,” he told reporters at NATO headquarters.

Privately, several NATO officials were aghast at Gates’ reported comments, fearing they would add to tension within the alliance where Britain, Canada and the Netherlands have generally stood by Washington in urging more reluctant allies to do more in the fight against the Taliban.

A senior military officer from one country heavily engaged in the southern fighting said Canadians and Europeans had scored major successes against the Taliban.

“They have been dealt a severe blow by the very people (Gates) appears to talking about,” said the officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Canada has about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in the southern province of Kandahar. Seventy-eight Canadians have died in Afghanistan since 2002 — the most recent one yesterday, when a light armoured vehicle hit a roadside bomb in the Arghandab district, and exploded, killing a 26-year-old soldier.

The senior military officer acknowledged that some of NATO’s smaller and newer members lacked counterinsurgency experience, but said that did not apply to the British and Canadians.

The Dutch also defended their record combining counterinsurgency with reconstruction in the volatile southern province of Uruzgan.

“Our troops, men and women, are well-prepared for the mission,” said Col. Nico Geerts, the Dutch commander in Uruzgan. “Everyone in the south, the British, the Canadians, the Romanians and our other allies, are working hard here. ... I wouldn’t know what the secretary of defence of America is basing this on.”

Gates’ reported comments were published the day after U.S. President George W. Bush authorized the deployment of 3,200 U.S. marines to Afghanistan in April.

Most will be deployed in the south to strengthen NATO troops there ahead of an expected increase of Taliban activity with the spring snow thaw. U.S. officials expressed frustration that they were forced to send troops — already stretched in Iraq — because allies failed to offer reinforcements.

The new deployment will bring the total number of U.S. forces there to around 30,000, the highest level since the 2001 invasion. The U.S. has 14,000 troops with the 42,000-strong NATO-led force, the rest are training Afghan forces and hunting al-Qaida terrorists.

In Washington, Congressman Duncan Hunter, ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, warned that Congress could restrict access to defence contracts for allies who did not pull their weight.

However, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands have a bigger proportion of their armed forces serving with the NATO force in Afghanistan than the United States. Britain with 7,753 troops, has four per cent of its military, compared with 1.1 per cent of U.S. armed forces serving with the NATO force.

British and Dutch officials refused to believe Gates’ comment were aimed at them.

“Our people down there are pretty well trained in counterinsurgency,” said retired Col. Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan in 2003.

“They have been carrying out some pretty intensive offensive operations against the Taliban, and they have been winning over the community. Counterinsurgency is a combination of those two things.”

“We assume this was a misunderstanding,” Dutch Defence Minister Eimert van Middelkoop told the Dutch broadcaster NOS.

“This is not the Robert Gates we have come to know. It’s also not the manner in which you treat each other when you have to co-operate with each other in the south of Afghanistan.”

“We assume this was a misunderstanding,” Dutch Defence Minister Eimert van Middelkoop told the Dutch broadcaster NOS.

Some of America’s closest NATO allies reacted with surprise and disbelief today to reported comments from U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggesting that their troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan are not up to the job.

Gates faults NATO force in southern Afghanistan
The U.S. Defense secretary says he thinks alliance troops do not know how to fight a guerrilla insurgency.
By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 16, 2008

WASHINGTON — In an unusual public criticism, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban.

"I'm worried we're deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations," Gates said in an interview.

Gates' criticism comes as the Bush administration has decided to send 3,200 U.S. Marines to southern Afghanistan on a temporary mission to help quell the rising number of attacks. It also comes amid growing friction among allied commanders over the Afghan security situation.

But coming from an administration castigated for its conduct of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such U.S. criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is controversial. Many NATO officials blame inadequate U.S. troop numbers earlier in the war in part for a Taliban resurgence.

"It's been very, very difficult to apply the classic counterinsurgency doctrine because you've had to stabilize the situation sufficiently to start even applying it," said one European NATO official, who discussed the issue on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the alliance. "Even in the classic counterinsurgency doctrine, you've still got to get the fighting down to a level where you can apply the rest of the doctrine."

Gates' views, however, reflect those expressed recently by senior U.S. military officials with responsibility for Afghanistan. Some have said that an overreliance on heavy weaponry, including airstrikes, by NATO forces in the south may unwittingly be contributing to rising violence there.

"Execution of tasks, in my view, has not been appropriate," said one top U.S. officer directly involved in the Afghan campaign who discussed internal assessments on condition of anonymity. "It's not the way to do business, in my opinion. We've got to wean them of this. If they won't change then we're going to have another solution."

Gates has publicly criticized European allies in the past for failing to send adequate numbers of troops and helicopters to the Afghan mission. But concerns about strategy and tactics are usually contained within military and diplomatic channels.

In the interview, Gates compared the troubled experience of the NATO forces in the south -- primarily troops from the closest U.S. allies, Britain and Canada, as well as the Netherlands -- with progress made by American troops in the eastern part of Afghanistan. He traced the failing in part to a Cold War orientation.

"Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap," Gates said, referring to the German region where a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was deemed most likely.

Gates said he raised his concerns last month in Scotland at a meeting of NATO countries with troops in southern Afghanistan and suggested additional training.

But he added that his concerns did not appear to be shared by the NATO allies. "No one at the table stood up and said: 'I agree with that.' "

The NATO forces are led by a U.S. commander, Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who has called for greater contributions by NATO countries. Some member nations are reluctant to deepen their involvement.

NATO officials bristled at suggestions that non-U.S. forces have been ineffective in implementing a counterinsurgency campaign. They argued that the south, home to Afghanistan's Pashtun tribal heartland that produced the Taliban movement, has long been the most militarily contested region of the country.

The European NATO official, who is directly involved in Afghan planning, angrily denounced the American claims, saying much of the violence is a result of the small number of U.S. troops who had patrolled the region before NATO's takeover in mid-2006, a strategy that allowed the Taliban to reconstitute in the region.

"The reason there is more fighting now is because we've uncovered a very big rock and lots of things are scurrying out," the NATO official said.

Pentagon concerns have risen as violence in the south has steadily increased, even as other parts of Afghanistan have begun to stabilize.

Last year was the deadliest for both U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, according to the website icasualties.org.

But both U.S. and NATO officials have expressed optimism that eastern Afghanistan, which is under the control of U.S. forces led by Army Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, has substantially improved in recent months.

Rodriguez implemented a campaign that incorporated many of the same tactics being used in Iraq by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Baghdad who co-wrote the military's new counterinsurgency field manual.

"If you believe all the things you hear about Afghanistan, this ought to be real hot," Navy Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and Central Asia, said of eastern Afghanistan. "More than half the border is Pakistan, it's a rough area, historically it's been a hotbed of insurgent activity. It's remarkable in its improvement."

At the same time, violence has continued to rise in the south, which is controlled by a 11,700-soldier NATO force largely made up of the British, Canadian and Dutch forces. Britain saw 42 soldiers killed last year, almost all in southern Afghanistan, its highest annual fatality count of the war; Canada lost 31, close to the 36 from that country killed in 2006. American forces lost 117 troops in 2007, up from 98 in 2006, but U.S. forces are spread more widely across Afghanistan.

"Our guys in the east, under Gen. Rodriguez, are doing a terrific job. They've got the [counterinsurgency] thing down pat," Gates said. "But I think our allies over there, this is not something they have any experience with."

Some U.S. counterinsurgency experts have argued that the backsliding is not the fault of NATO forces alone.

Some have argued that an effective counterinsurgency campaign implemented by Army Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and Zalmay Khalilzad, who were the U.S. commander in and ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, was largely abandoned by officials who came later.

Barno retired from the military and heads the Near East South Asia Center at the National Defense University. In an article in the influential Army journal Military Review last fall, he blamed both NATO and U.S. commanders for moving away from the counterinsurgency plan since 2006.

Barno accused NATO and U.S. forces of ignoring the cornerstone of a counterinsurgency campaign -- protecting the local population -- and said they instead focused on killing enemy forces.

"We had a fundamentally well-structured, integrated U.S. Embassy and U.S. military unified counterinsurgency campaign plan which we put in place in late '03 that took us all the way through about the middle of 2005," Barno said in an interview. "And then it was really, in many ways, changed very dramatically."

Currently serving American officers, however, have singled out non-U.S. NATO forces for the bulk of their criticism. Among the concerns is that NATO forces do not actively include Afghan troops in military operations.

As a result, local forces in the south are now less capable than those in the east, which operate very closely with their American counterparts.

"Every time you see our guys in the field, you don't have to look very far and you'll see them," said the senior U.S. officer involved in the Afghan campaign. "Getting the Brits to do this and the others is a little more of a problem."

In addition, U.S. military officials said NATO forces in the south are too quick to rely on high-caliber firepower, such as airstrikes, a practice which alienates the local population.

"The wide view there, which I hear from Americans, is that the NATO military forces are taking on a Soviet mentality," said one senior U.S. military veteran of Afghanistan. "They're staying in their bases in the south, they're doing very little patrolling, they're trying to avoid casualties, and they're using air power as a substitute for ground infantry operations, because they have so little ground infantry."

The European NATO official said, however, that alliance data show that all countries, including the U.S., use air power in similar amounts when their troops come in contact with enemy forces.

"Everyone is grateful for the Americans . . . but this kind of constant denigration of what other people are doing isn't helpful," the official said. "It also makes the situation look worse than it is."

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"The wide view there, which I hear from Americans, is that the NATO military forces are taking on a Soviet mentality," said one senior U.S. military veteran of Afghanistan. "They're staying in their bases in the south, they're doing very little patrolling, they're trying to avoid casualties, and they're using air power as a substitute for ground infantry operations, because they have so little ground infantry."