Nato shows signs of battle fatigue in confrontation with ruthless Putin

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/nato-russia-vladimir-putin-confrontation-ukraine

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Democracy is messy. And, when it comes to multinational clubs and coalitions like Nato or the EU, it is also very bureaucratic. Committees and task forces, summits and consensuses, conflicts and compromises, armies of sherpas climbing political mountains to try to agree what to do. International democracy does not make for quick, robust, or effective action.

It’s different for dictators or authoritarian regimes. Flick a switch, pull a lever, and things happen, often instantly. Which is one reason why the Putin-versus-Europe contest in Ukraine is so one-sided; why one side acts and the other struggles to react; why one side is consistently ahead of the curve, the other behind it – in the short-term, at least.

Related: Putin must be stopped. And sometimes only guns can stop guns | Timothy Garton Ash

Six months after the Kremlin stunned Europe with its land grab in Ukraine, a Nato summit in Wales unveiled its ideas for shoring up security in eastern Europe. For more than two decades, the alliance had been beset by self-doubt. Having won the cold war, what was the point any more?

Putin gave the military planners at Mons and the armies of bureaucrats in Brussels a new lease of life. Nato’s core purpose – facing down and containing Russia – was newly legitimised.

The summit decided to put a spearhead force at brigade strength, more than 5,000 men, into Poland and the Baltics at short notice: small units of special forces within hours, bigger reinforcements within days, at the first hint of trouble.

That was six months ago. But since the September summit, the plan has atrophied, bogged down in endless circular discussions of who does what, when and where. Who pays for it? Where is the kit coming from? Will the Americans step up to relieve the Europeans? Who will be in command?

Nato foreign ministers met in Brussels in December to try to put flesh on the bones of the vision. European ambassadors complained of snail’s pace progress. Last week they reported that nothing much has changed. Alliance defence ministers meeting on Thursday are supposed to fast-track the deployments, agree on the precise size and design of the force – and on who will bear the costs. “The costs will lie where they fall,” said a senior Nato official, meaning participants will pay their own way.

But already the resolve displayed in Wales is showing signs of fatigue. In a speech in Washington, Victoria Nuland, the US State Department’s top official responsible for Europe, said all of Nato’s 28 members had to be involved.

“All Nato allies must continue to contribute to the land, sea, and air reassurance mission all along Nato’s eastern front line. All must contribute to Nato’s new Spearhead Force, which will allow us to speed forces to trouble spots, and we must install command and control centres in all six frontline states as soon as possible,” she said. “All allies must contribute as much as they can. Some governments are already slinking backward.”

The defence ministers on Thursday are expected to decide on the quick establishment of small headquarters units in six countries – the three Baltic republics, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. But already the numbers have been scaled back, from initial plans for forces of 100 in each country to about 40, with the host country putting up half the contingent and the remainder multi-national.

Senior officials also say it was likely to be 2017 before the full brigade-strength is up and running. That is a long time when a small war is being waged on Nato’s eastern flank. Thirteen years ago, satisfied that the east-west confrontation was truly over, Nato stood down the complex and sophisticated gamut of planning that kept it in a state of readiness in Europe throughout the cold war. It is difficult to revive it.

Since then there has been a degradation in the logistical and technical infrastructure. For example, speedily whisking heavy armour and tanks from the middle of Europe to the Russian borders on the Baltic is problematic for the simple reason that the right gauge of railway track is no longer available in Germany.

This complacent, half-hearted, bureaucratic reaction to Kremlin ruthlessness is accompanied in the west by affectation of surprise that the Russians don’t play by the rules of the game and have hit on a formidable new modern form of “hybrid warfare” that will take some getting used to – television, rapid rebuttal, paramilitaries, special units out of uniform, funnelling of funds, arms, and equipment to local proxies, plausible deniability of involvement, the cultivation and bribery of political Trojan horses within the enemy camp in Europe.

There is nothing new about any of this, except the more modern tools being used. Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia was practising all these dark arts in the 1990s. The KGB was at it for decades. As the senior Nato official said: “The Comintern was doing all this stuff in the 1920s.”

Take the propaganda war. It is as if Putin has just conjured a slick new spin machine out of thin air. In fact, he systematically set about wiping out independent Russian television within months of becoming president in March 2000, especially following the Kursk submarine disaster in the Arctic in August of that year. The two main TV moguls, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, had to surrender their media empires and flee the country.

Putin is now spending hundreds of millions on slick Silvio Berlusconi-style television entertainment laced with ferocious anti-western and anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

The response? A lot of thinking about “strategic communications”. Nato has set up a special unit tasked with how to compete. In the EU there are Latvian plans and Estonian plans; there are letters to the European commission from the British and Danish governments. The Dutch have put up half a million euros to fund a project. NGOs are getting involved. Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy coordinator, has been ordered to get to grips with countering Russian propaganda.

“There’s continuous lying, distorting the facts. It’s disgusting. Propaganda is morally reprehensible and rarely effective,” said a Latvian official involved in the media projects. But Putin television, like Fox TV, is highly effective. The west is at a loss as to how to counter what Nuland called “a new and vile foreign-financed propaganda campaign on our airwaves and in our public spaces”.

“There’s a broad understanding that something has to be done,” said the Latvian official. “But what? This is a discussion that’s going on.”