Bigger role for NATO in Afghanistan?

Many Dutch parliamentarians are having second thoughts after watching Afghanistan experience a sharp rise in insurgent violence, that has claimed 1,600 lives - making last year the deadliest since the Taliban's ouster in 2001. Earlier this month during the US ambassador to Afghanistan's visit to Uruzgan's capital, Tirinkot, a suicide bomber killed 10 people.

"Last year was the most violent year so far, and that gave pause, especially given the fact that a lot of the European countries think that the United States is trying to dump the Afghanistan counter-terrorism mission on them," says Mike Williams with the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies in London.

Dutch parliamentarian Lousewies van der Laan is the deputy leader of the Democratic 66, a junior party in the ruling coalition and a group leading efforts to stop a Dutch deployment to Afghanistan's south. She says her party objects to the deployment because the mission assigned to her country doesn't comport with facts on the ground. Ms. van der Laan says the Dutch were told they were going to Tirinkot on a reconstruction mission, to form a Provincial Reconstruction Team, which she said would be impossible to implement when the area is in turmoil.

"I'm very willing to ask soldiers to risk their lives on foreign soil for a sensible mission. But I'm not going to ask them to do that if it's not clear that they could ever achieve the objectives that were put to them," van der Laan says. "At the same time I don't want to raise the expectations of the Afghan people saying, 'We're going to bring stability to Uruzgan,' when we're going to be holed up in our compound for two years. What are we going to achieve with that?"

The Dutch have been burned by ill-defined missions in the past. In 1995 Serbian troops surrounded the UN-designated safe-haven of Srebrenica in Bosnia and threatened to kill the lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers stationed there. When the Dutch were allowed to leave, Serbian forces massacred 8,000 Muslim men. The debacle brought down the Dutch government. The Dutch parliament plans to vote on the Uruzgan proposal Thursday.

"The lesson is: Know what you are going to be doing. Don't raise hopes and expectations when you can't live up to them. Make sure that you can also get yourself out of a situation and that you do not have to rely on allies that may not actually show up," van der Laan says. "Now when we actually apply this historical lesson and when we are asking these questions ... people are saying, 'You Dutch are shirking your responsibility. And you're afraid to go to a dangerous area.' "

Earlier this month NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the Netherlands' indecision was damaging NATO's solidarity. And Paul Bremer III, who is a former American ambassador to the Netherlands, warned that unless the Netherlands agreed to go to Uruzgan, Dutch interests could suffer in the US.

"It is good that these debates are under way, but signs of hesitation will not help anybody," said Afghan foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah Monday.

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