A return to Europe

The pullout of NATO-led ISAF troops from Afghanistan is running like clockwork. Tens of thousands of soldiers have already returned home. By the end of the year, all combat troops will have left the country along the Hindu Kush mountain range.

But what happens next?

NATO doesn't want to abandon the Afghan security forces it has trained, so the military alliance has pledged to leave behind a training and advisory mission comprised of 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers. Afghan politicians have been so involved in domestic political infighting that they haven't yet managed to sign an accord on the status of the NATO troops. But without an agreement, there will be no new mission and Afghanistan would be left to its own devices.

That is neither in NATO's interest nor in the interest of the Afghan people. It would result in a drifting into chaos, similar to the situation in Iraq.

After 13 years of US and international commitment in Afghanistan that cost many lives and billions of dollars and euros, NATO should take stock, candidly and honestly.

But there has been little sign of this at the summit in Wales, where positive spin has prevailed. It is not true that the security situation is improving, as NATO has insisted for years. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Taliban are gaining strength and expanding their rule, bit by bit.

The international force has managed to put an end to the acute threat of terrorism from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, but the radical Islamic Taliban has not been eliminated in Afghanistan, and a viable democratic state on the Western model has not been created. Yet this was the ISAF's goal at the beginning of the mission. Measured against this, it has failed.

The war-weary West wants to get out of Afghanistan. It's now only a matter of somehow preventing the ultimate failure that a return of Taliban rule would signal.

In Afghanistan, both the Soviet Union and the coalition of the willing had an extremely tough time. It may not be possible to pacify the country from the outside, perhaps it can only be contained. NATO admitted as much in internal analyses several years ago, but never made this public.

If the follow-up mission in 2015 breaks down because of domestic political quarrels in Afghanistan, it would mean the final collapse of the NATO strategy.

Iraq provides a cautionary example, a NATO training and advisory mission there was forced to leave by the Iraqi government in 2011. Three years later, we see that the central government in Baghdad is not up to the task of providing security and has almost been overrun by an Islamist terror group.

It is possible that NATO will now have to return to Iraq to fight the "Islamic State" militia on a vast scale, at least from the air. Not to help Iraq so much as to prevent the acute threat of genocide and to combat the growing threat of terrorism in the NATO countries.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a turning point for the North Atlantic alliance. It means the end of foreign missions and a return to collective security. The military presence in the eastern NATO countries is to be increased in response to the Russian threat in the Ukraine crisis.

National defense is suddenly back in fashion. It's like a time warp back 25 years, when in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact military strength is what counted in Europe.

At the moment, Russia has the conventional strength advantage. NATO has to catch up and must rearm. The continuous trimming of armies, including Germany's Bundeswehr, was not a good idea. Defense budgets will have to increase. NATO forces are no longer deployed as a massive deterrence in Europe. They will, again, have to be restructured.

NATO sees itself surrounded by crisis areas, from Kabul to Kirkuk and Cairo to Kyiv - but the crisis in Europe is the most serious. NATO does not yet have a strategy on how to deal with the new situation. The discussion has only now started in Newport.