I've been paying close attention to the uneasy back and forth between NATO member states and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lately. Gates, facing reports of looming state failure in Afghanistan, Gates, who is a much less high-strung SecDef than his predecessor Don Rumsfeld, has pointed to the openly-waffling members of the NATO alliance and said, "Where you at?"

The problem is, Gates is paying for the mistakes of the past, both by Rumsfeld and by the Bush White House writ large since routing the Taliban in Afghanistan years ago.

Roger Cohen, writing today in the New York Times (and probably the International Herald Tribune, too) doesn't see it this way, for some reason. To me, his blindspot seems willful.

Cohen runs through the current situation facing Afghanistan, building to the payoff. He frames Afghanistan as "Europe's Iraq" but unconsciously amends that later, calling the war in Afghanistan as "the better war." And Cohen glides right by the impact of that possibly improving situation on the one in Afghanistan with a single sentence. Talking about Gates, Cohen writes, "He's had the honesty to say Iraq dampened European zeal to fight in Afghanistan."

Then be takes a lightning volley of cheap-ish shots:

I see Europeans yawning. Can Waziristan really be a threat to the West? O.K., the frontier regions are where Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders are said to be hiding, but they're isolated. As for the Madrid and London bombings, bad stuff happens. Always did, always will.

Such insouciance is an alliance failure. NATO has failed to prove its relevance to a post-modern European generation. NATO needs re-branding. It needs to be more hip in getting across where a precious peace came from.

It was this bit of branding talk that draw me in, and I wish now my eye had kept moving. Cohen anecdotally concludes that a lack European enthusiasm for the NATO mission is somehow traceable to their short memory and a shocking disregard for the impact of the London and Madrid bombings. The European governments are understandably unenthusiastic about cleaning up the mess left behind when the US took its eye off Afghanistan to invade Iraq -- over objections from many in the world community, including NATO members. The government in Afghanistan is the one we brokered, with our hand-picked president.

Now, the reformed Taliban, the bumper poppy crop, and the instability next door in Pakistan -- another successful product of US foreign policy -- are combining for a dangerous 2008 in the region. The fact is, a lot of work remains in Afghanistan, and the multinational NATO-flagged forces, poppy eradication teams, the Afghan army and local police forces must find a way to work together to save the country from sliding into failure. But as low-key as he is, Robert Gates isn't going to transform NATO countries with a legitimate beef about the state of play in the Middle East into happy campers by poor-mouthing them. His supporters like Roger Cohen will come up gooseggs too if they think the secret to more war-fighting zeal in Afghanistan is a re-branding of NATO as the key to peace. Instead, some humility about how we got here and what we've handed them would go a long way.
Image used courtesy of Flickr User lafrancevi.