“If I must make war, I prefer it to be against a coalition.”
–Napoleon[1]

Two months after the collapse of Kabul, NATO published a fact sheet on lessons learned from its experiences in Afghanistan that proclaimed, “NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan demonstrates the immense strength of Allies working in pursuit of a common goal.”[2] This statement seems to imply that NATO somehow succeeded in Afghanistan by holding itself together politically. This statement is indicative not just of how coalitions of states conduct war, but more importantly by how multinational organizations do so.

Much of the coalition warfare seen in the past thirty years has not been conducted by coalitions per se, but rather by organizations such as NATO, the UN, and the European and African Unions. While much has been written on this type of warfare from a state-centric, international perspective, little has actually been written from an organizational, multinational perspective. This is especially the case of NATO, which is almost universally dominated by descriptions of U.S.-European bilateral relationships. These organizations, however, have their own internal dynamics that have significant impact on the outcomes of operations. Whether NATO in Afghanistan or the UN in Rwanda, these dynamics center primarily on the relationships between civilian and military authorities.

How can civil-military relations be used as a lens for us to understand the outcomes of wars in which multinational organizations are involved? This piece uses civil-military relations as a guide (rather than a strict framework) and the specific case of NATO to show the benefit of applying this approach. It shows, using the example of NATO in Afghanistan, how civil-military dynamics within the organization itself structured the campaign and impacted the alliance’s strategy and operations.

Reading Multinational Civil-Military Relations

There is a gap in scholarship on the relationships between the civilian and military authorities within multinational organizations. Few studies on civil-military relations theory consider NATO, and few studies of NATO explicitly explore its civil-military dynamics. This lacuna has created an ahistorical impression that such relationships either do not really exist, or that they are far less consequential than the bilateral relationships that exist within organizations.

Civil-military theorists since the middle of the twentieth-century have largely ignored NATO. Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz make a few references in their foundational studies, while more recent studies by Peter Feaver or Risa Brooks make no substantive reference at all.[3] Indeed, the most recent Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations contains no substantive treatment of NATO, the UN, or any other organization. This despite their near constant presence in every conflict since the end of the Cold War. An excellent, though dated, exception to this is Canadian author Douglas Bland’s theoretical work and historical study of  the NATO Military Committee.[4]

Conversely, much of the literature on NATO is heavily focused on state-centric sources that essentially reduce the history of the alliance to a presidential history of the United States. Some of this can be ascribed to the largely unquestioned presumption that what happens in Washington is what happens in NATO. Both in practice and in the literature this is untrue. Additionally, there is a dearth of sources on NATO’s internal dynamics. The NATO Archives are far behind most national archives in terms of disclosures. The historical office of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) has not made any documents available past 1958. From personal research experience, however, this is only an excuse, as numerous national declassified and released sources provide detailed and lengthy considerations on NATO’s internal work, though that is itself often only until the mid-1990s. Again, exceptions to this include Ryan Hendrickson’s 2006 book on the role of the NATO Secretary General, which explicitly includes civil-military relations in its analytical frame.[5] The work, however, is outdated and some cases are now contradicted by more recently available archival sources.

In both the theoretical and empirical literature, there is also a significant U.S.-centrism. Hew Strachan lamented this in his own considerations on civil-military relations, noting how the near-ubiquitous Huntingtonian constitutional framework of civil-military relations is predicated on the unique situation of the United States in the early- to mid-1950s. Timothy Andrews Sayle’s 2019 book on NATO, while comprehensive in its coverage of the Cold War, is almost exclusively focused on Anglo- and Franco-American relations (with some added German focus as well).[6] While certainly consequential, this largely misses the role of the integrated, multinational staffs that work(ed) on a permanent basis both in Europe and North America. Focusing on the disputes between Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon Baines Johnson or Tony Blair and George W. Bush hardly scratches the surface of NATO.

Fully comprehending the civil-military relations of multilateral organizations requires accessing and understanding a broader array of primary sources. Importantly, this involves comparative and cross-archival research between national and international sources. For example, one internal NATO study on organization received only short mention in U.S. and NATO documents, but has a fully detailed folio available within the UK National Archives at Kew. Such is also seemingly the case for the UN and other organizations. This also puts a particular premium on conducting new interviews with officials from these organizations, an urgent effort by scholars of NATO and other organizations as archival sources will begin to wear thin in the coming decades. Indeed, there is a risk of a digital dark age in studying these organizations as the avalanche of digital evidence is either automatically destroyed or held behind classification barriers in perpetuity.[7]

Applying the New Prism: The Case of NATO in Afghanistan

A particularly apt case for the application of the civil-military lens is the NATO missions in Afghanistan. Why did NATO fail in Afghanistan? Most look to failings in Washington or London, or maybe to the failures of interagency processes inside the country itself. Few have looked to NATO itself, the organization that did in practice command a significant portion of the Afghan efforts, particularly training. An excellent example of some coverage on this front has been the Danish scholar Sten Rynning’s work on NATO’s organizational learning during and after the war.[8] There is room for more.

Applying the lens of NATO’s civil-military relations lends a new angle on understanding the alliance’s failure to defeat the Taliban. Both the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” release, newly conducted interviews by this author, and underutilized secondary literature paint a picture of an alliance that overly deferred to the optimistic (and sometimes untruthful) military authorities in Kabul and elsewhere, both on strategy development and in operational-level information related to Afghan troop readiness.

In the development of NATO strategy, the civil-military divide is especially clear. NATO largely deferred to Washington in the strategic direction of the Afghan campaigns, though on at least one notable occasion there was an attempt by NATO civilian staff in Brussels to assert some control over the alliance mission. The development of the Comprehensive, Strategic Political-Military Plan (CSPMP), led by the NATO International Staff between 2007 and 2008, aimed to provide a comprehensive set of multinational objectives around which the NATO staff in Kabul could cohere their efforts. As it was ultimately a product agreed upon by all of the NATO countries, it was bureaucratically quite the achievement in Brussels.[9]

There was one small issue. When the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander at the time, General Stanley McChrystal, received the CPMSP, he and his staff considered it useless and did not take it into account when setting strategy for the ISAF mission. Theo Farrell’s work on the war states frankly: “McChrystal’s team found the NATO strategic plan to be pretty useless as a source of guidance for their redrafting of the ISAF campaign plan.”[10] The seeming casualness with which a military commander in the field dismissed the political strategy agreed by his civilian superiors would, in most national contexts, likely lead to accusations of insubordination or an inappropriate flexing of military power. This was not the case in NATO.

Would McChrystal or his followers embracing the CSPMP made any significant difference in the outcome in Afghanistan? It is unlikely. The CSPMP is only one indicative episode in which the relationship between Kabul and Brussels was deeply and structurally flawed and lacked effective civilian oversight. It also highlights a reluctance for field commanders to engage with senior civilians who are not in theater on matters of strategy. There is little evidence, however, that the military commands in Kabul would have found a capable partner in Brussels. As the next example shows in clear form, the military effort vastly outweighed the civilian in terms of staff sizes and authorities.

On Afghan readiness reporting, the situation was little better than in the formulation of strategy. Primary source evidence shows a clear and lengthy pattern of overly-optimistic and occasionally outright false reporting to Brussels from the military missions in Kabul. For a number of reasons, be it careerism or simply naivete, the ISAF and Resolute Support Mission (RSM) commands passed flawed or false information up the chain of command from Kabul to Joint Force Command-Brunssum, to SHAPE, which would then be agreed by the Military Committee, which would only then be presented to the civilian authorities in the North Atlantic Council and the supporting International Staff. By this stage, the reporting had been massaged and pushed into an acceptable form by the military authorities of NATO, while it was received by a NATO Operations Division staff of often fewer than five staffers. In Kabul itself the NATO Special Civilian Representative for Afghanistan (SCR), notionally the civilian counterpart to the ISAF commander, played no role in overseeing the content of the periodic reports sent to Brussels. There was, in effect, no civilian control of the NATO ISAF and RSM missions.

This dynamic has since been confirmed by NATO’s former Assistant Secretary General for Operations John Manza, writing that “reports from the field were often overly optimistic and watered down as they climbed the chain of command.”[11] Official reports from the UK, the Netherlands, and from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction all confirm the same trend.[12] Past field research at ISAF headquarters also suggests the same.[13] What becomes abundantly clear from this evidence, and considered within a civil-military perspective, is that NATO officials were hugely deferential to military officers and did not adequately oversee the Afghan missions. This failure by NATO’s political leadership, both in Kabul and in Brussels, to adequately hold military reporting to account and oversee the development of the Afghan forces directly contributed to the collapse of Afghan forces in 2021.

A Call for More

This piece is only a small corner of the author’s ongoing research in applying a civil-military lens to NATO’s history. It is as readily applicable to strategy development in the early Cold War as it is to studying operational control during the 2011 Libya intervention. Beyond NATO, such an approach would be useful in exploring the strategies and operations of the UN, EU, AU, or any other structured multinational organization with both civilian and military components. Each of these organizations sits on a trove of underutilized primary sources, sources that are vital to understanding their internal dynamics and how they shaped the course and outcome of any number of conflicts.

Beyond the wider application of the analytical frame, there remains the urgency in collecting as much data as possible on these organizations as time goes on. As already noted, a digital dark age is coming, if it is not already here, that will stymy research into multinational organizations for years. Oral history projects with adequate attention (and funding) will be vital to circumvent the byzantine and outdated declassification standards of these large organizations. Without such structured collection, there will not be enough evidence to apply a civil-military lens to in the first place.

Davis Ellison is a PhD Candidate in the King’s College London Department of War Studies and a Strategic Analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. His research is on civil-military relations within and between NATO’s institutions.

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Header Image: NATO Flags at North KIA, Kabul Afghanistan, 2017 (Tyrell Mayfield).

Notes:

[1] Ole R. Holsti, P. Terrence Hopmann, John D. Sullivan, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances (New York, NY: Wiley, 1973), 22.

[2] “Foreign Ministers address lessons learned from NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan”, NATO, December 1 2021, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_189512.htm?selectedLocale=en.

[3] Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957), 357; Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 314–17; Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Risa Brooks, Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War, ed. Risa Brooks and and Daniel Maurer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[4] Douglas L. Bland, The Military Committee of the North Atlantic Alliance: A Study of Structure and Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1990).

[5] Ryan C. Hendrickson, Diplomacy and War at NATO: The Secretary General and Military Action After the Cold War (St. Louis, MO: University of Missouri, 2006).

[6] Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

[7] Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets (New York: Pantheon Books, 2023), 347–75.

[8] Sten Rynning and Paal Sigurd Hilde, “Operationally Agile but Strategically Lacking: NATO’s Bruising Years in Afghanistan,” LSE Public Policy Review, May 2, 2022, 1–11; Sten Rynning, “Still Learning? NATO’s Afghan Lessons beyond the Ukraine Crisis,” in NATO’s Return to Europe: Engaging Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond, Edited by Rebecca R. Moore and Damon Coletta (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2017).

[9] Diego Ruiz Palmer, “NATO Review - NATO’s Engagement in Afghanistan, 2003-2021: A Planner’s Perspective,” NATO Review, June 20, 2023, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2023/06/20/nato-s-engagement-in-afghanistan-2003-2021-a-planners-perspective/index.html.

[10] Theo Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001-2014 (London: Vintage, 2017), 284–85.

[11] John Manza, “I Wrote NATO’s Lessons from Afghanistan. Now I Wonder: What Have We Learned?,” Atlantic Council (blog), August 11, 2022, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/i-wrote-natos-lessons-from-afghanistan-now-i-wonder-what-have-we-learned/.

[12] “Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan, First Report of Session 2022–23” (London: UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, May 17, 2022), https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/22344/documents/165210/default/; “Between Wish and Reality: Evaluation of the Dutch Contribution to Resolute Support” (The Hague, Netherlands: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Policy and Operations Evaluation Department, March 2023), https://english.iob-evaluatie.nl/publications/reports/2023/05/19/dutch-contribution-resolute-support; Krisanne Campos, “Lessons Learned Record of Interview - Unnamed NATO Official” (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, February 23, 2015), background_ll_01_xx_brussels_02232015, The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/.

[13] Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001-2014, 374.