CIAO DATE: 01/2009
November 2008
Danish Institute for International Studies
The aims of this report are to analyse the evolution of the Alliance's Comprehensive Approach (CA) to date, to identify the principal obstacles standing in the way of further progress and to suggest how they can be overcome or circumvented. CA is based on the premise that operations aimed at creating a sustainable peace must employ the relevant civilian and military instruments in a coordinated and concerted manner in order to succeed. Ideally, the civilian and military actors involved in such operations should agree on the political end-state and engage in the joint planning, execution and evaluation of their operational activities in order to achieve it. Since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) does not have the civilian capacities that a fully-fledged CA requires, the Alliance is faced with a dual challenge as it seeks to develop its contribution to CA. It must get its own house in order by creating a common understanding of its role in CA, as well as the mindset, doctrine and procedures that will enable it to employ its own resources in accordance with CA requirements for success. In addition, it must also develop an understanding of and cooperative
relationships with the organizations and local actors it is likely to cooperate with in the field. NATO must, in short, conduct its own activities in accordance with CA requirements, and at the same time be both willing and able to plug and play with other actors who can bring to the table the capacities that are required to meet the political objectives of a given operation.
To determine how far NATO has come in meeting this challenge, the report examines (1) how far NATO has come in defining its own role and contribution to a CA involving non-NATO actors, (2) how far the Alliance has come in adopting a CA to the planning, implementation and evaluation of its own operational activities, and finally (3) how far NATO has come in establishing effective CA cooperation with the EU, the UN and the NGO community.
The report concludes that NATO has made considerable progress in all three areas and that the fear of defeat in Afghanistan will keep the process of CA implementation alive. At the same time, it also finds that the Alliance has a long way to go before it is capable of implementing CA in its own operations or has established the kind of cooperation with the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that effective CA requires. The pace of progress has been slow in the past and will remain so in the future. Within the Alliance the adoption of CA is being hampered by disagreements over NATO's role in world politics, disagreements over the extent to which NATO should use its military capabilities to fill the gap if civilian actors are incapable of carrying out their CA tasks, an instinctive military reluctance to engage in civilian gap-filling and finally disagreement over what CA means and how it should be implemented in Afghanistan.
As a result of these disagreements, the level of CA institutionalization within the Alliance remains in its infancy. At the strategic level, CA concepts, doctrine and procedures have not yet been formally adopted, and although the process of institutionalization will benefit from the CA principles found in existing Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) and Peace Support Operations (PSO) doctrines, the various CA initiatives undertaken by the Allied Command Transformation and the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) course being conducted at the NATO School, it will still take a long time. NATO has made more CA progress in Afghanistan, but the degree of institutionalization is low here as well. The International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) Headquarters has little influence over the operations conducted by the 26 PRTs, and neither the use of development advisors in the ISAF Commander's staff nor the practice of involving civilian actors in ISAF force planning has been institutionalized. Finally, the value added by NATO's Senior Civilian Representative (SCR) is unclear.
Progress has also been slow with respect to establishing effective CA cooperation with the EU, UN and NGOs since none of them have been eager to enter into closer relations with the Alliance. Official NATO-EU cooperation has been paralysed by the Turkey-Cyprus dispute and French concerns that closer NATO-EU cooperation would increase US influence over the EU and hamper efforts to build a stronger European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) capable of acting independently of the United States (US). As a consequence, cooperation only takes place at the operational level with an eye to finding pragmatic solutions to practical problems. NATO-UN cooperation has improved steadily in recent years as a result of effective cooperation on the ground in Kosovo and Afghanistan, but political unease in New York and a limited NATO willingness to provide operational support to UN-led operations mean that effective CA cooperation is unlikely in the near future. NATO-NGOs relations are limited at the strategic level and poor in Afghanistan as a result of ISAF's inability to create security and the heavy PRT involvement in humanitarian and development activities.
Since many of the obstacles that have hampered CA progress to date will remain in place in the short term, this report has sought to formulate policy recommendations that member states may be able to agree on in the short term or that they can implement immediately on a national basis without waiting for a consensus to form at the NATO level. The 24 recommendations made throughout the report are summarised in the conclusion at the end in the hope that they can contribute towards moving the process of CA implementation in NATO forward.
Resource link: NATO's Comprehensive Approach to Crisis Response Operations: A Work in Slow Progress [PDF] - 377K