NATO in Afghanistan The Liberal Disconnect [Paperback]

The war in Afghanistan has run for more than a decade, and NATO has become increasingly central to it. In this book, Sten Rynning examines NATO's role in the campaign and the difficult diplomacy involved in fighting a war by alliance. He explores the history of the war and its changing momentum, and explains how NATO at first faltered but then improved its operations to become a critical enabler for the U.S. surge of 2009. However, he also uncovers a serious and enduring problem for NATO in the shape of a disconnect between high liberal hopes for the new Afghanistan and a lack of realism about the military campaign prosecuted to bring it about.He concludes that, while NATO has made it to the point in Afghanistan where the war no longer has the potential to break it, the alliance is, at the same time, losing its own struggle to define itself as a vigorous and relevant entity on the world stage. To move forward, he argues, NATO allies must recover their common purpose as a Western alliance, and he outlines options for change. NATO has got better at waging war but is no closer to securing peace in Afghanistan. Rynning shows how NATO pinned its hopes on the liberal pipe dream that the international community would pull together to rebuild the country. This book is an essential read for those concerned about the future of Afghanistan and of the Alliance. While a score of books have been written about the purpose and future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the close of the Cold War, and an equally large number of monographs examine the ongoing war in Afghanistan, political scientist Sten Rynning provides a focused, thoughtful analysis of the intersection of these two topics inNATO in Afghanistan. . . Rynning's book contributes a valuable assessment of the performance and internal dynamics of NATO as a 'benevolent alliance' subjected to the strains of responding to a protracted insurgency in one of the world's most challenging physical, ethical£J