NATO’S ROLE IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

In the years after the Cold War NATO “operates in an environment of continuing change "and has undergone a deep-rooted transformation concerning its strategy, membership and operations. Initially NATO was conceived as an alliance with the aim of protecting its members’ territory from a large-scale aggression emanating from an “enemy” (after 1955 the Warsaw Pact became such an enemy). Its planning was based on the classical concept of war, i.e. confrontation of big military units on a broad theater. Use of nuclear weapons was included in its options, even only as a measure of last resort. NATO’s post-Cold War strategic agenda—German unification, the integration of Central and Eastern Europe, partnership with Russia and the Ukraine, and stabilization of the Balkans—is essentially complete or on the track of being completed. It cannot serve as the Alliance’s strategic purpose.

In the words of Henry Kissinger “today’s world is in a state of revolutionary disarray.” NATO must keep pace with developments in the international stage and cope with new risks, dangers and threats which are smaller in scale but make Western societies more vulnerable.

NATO’s transformation began in the early 1990s and is still progressing. The Summits in Washington (1999), Prague (2002) and Istanbul (2004) have given NATO its new face. The Alliance is gradually becoming a political rather than military and a collective security instead of a collective defense organization.3 It has adopted an “Open-Door Policy,” with a result that any state willing and able to incorporate its values, strategies and tactics has an option to join it; NATO has recently accepted ten Central and Eastern European states as its members, thus contributing to a Europe whole, free and at peace.

NATO does not consider itself to be any country’s adversary; there is not a single state which could be viewed as “the” enemy. Similarly, the enlarged Alliance does not threaten any country; on the contrary, it seeks a synergy of efforts by all states, including Russia, in order to success-fully address the new challenges.

While collective defense and Art 5 operations remain its core purpose, NATO must also take account of the global context; its operations cannot be territorially limited. The traditional idea that war occurs solely between mutually exclusive spatial entities, either states or blocs, no longer holds. Permeable boundaries and shifting alliances mark the struggles of local militias and the local political economies of warfare in specific places. Enemies no longer so obviously control territories; violence is often constrained to particular places but its connections spill over the territorial boundaries of conventional geopolitical categories.4 The greatest likelihood for people in America and Europe being killed does not emanate from a major military invasion, but from a threat posed by terrorists or failed states in the periphery armed with weapons of mass destruction attacking our citizens, our countries or our vital interests.