Steve Burns: Dutch pull their finger out of the dike

On Sunday, Jan Peter Balkenende, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, announced that his governing coalition had collapsed over the issue of the Dutch military presence in Afghanistan, a move that will almost certainly result in a complete withdrawal of 2000 Dutch soldiers this year. Balkenende's government had won office on promises of a troop withdrawal, but had come under strong pressure from the U.S. to reverse its position. At first, Balkenende buckled to U.S. pressure, attempting to craft a compromise that would allow a scaled-back military presence, but after a 16-hour-long cabinet meeting, Dutch Labor Party leaders announced that they would stick to the policies they had campaigned on, and pulled out of the governing coalition, forcing a new election.

Prime Minister Balkenende said that he expected Dutch troops to leave Afghanistan as planned, saying of the Dutch mission, "If nothing else will take its place, then it ends."

Using an appropriately Dutch hydraulic analogy, Julian Lindley-French, professor of defense strategy at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda, said, “If the Dutch go, which is the implication of all this, that could open the floodgates for other Europeans to say, ‘The Dutch are going, we can go, too.' "

U.S. leaders viewed this development - an elected government deciding to honor its promises to the voters - with grave concern. In a New York Times story headlined "Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quoted as saying, “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st."

But Gates' gripes extended beyond irritation at the tendency of Dutch politicians - unlike their American counterparts - to actually follow through on their campaign promises. NATO members, Gates complained, weren't spending a large enough share of their national income on the military. The U.S. had extracted a promise from NATO members to increase their military spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product, but only 5 of the 28 NATO members had reached this target. By comparison, the United States spends more than 4 percent of its GDP - and nearly half of the Federal budget - on the military.

Gates was also likely disappointed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel's announcement that Germany would be sending only 850 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, in a decision the New York Times called "a compromise between the pleas of the United States and other allies for a larger commitment of forces and the political realities of a deeply unpopular war at home." The Times reported that American officials had asked the German government for "roughly 2,000 more troops" and "hoped for at least 1,000, given the political constraints they knew the government was under." Antiwar sentiment among the German people spiked in September after a German-ordered airstrike on two hijacked fuel tankers near Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed at least 72 civilians, and the impending decision on additional troops had sparked demonstrations involving more than a thousand people in Berlin. A poll in February showed 85 percent of those surveyed opposed to sending German troops to southern Afghanistan, where the fighting is heaviest.

And if the "European mood" is a "danger to peace", what are we to make of the Canadian mood? This week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirmed that Canada would stick to its plans to withdraw all Canadian forces from Afghanistan by 2011. "I don't think it's viable, knowing the history of Afghanistan, what we know about it, to believe that foreigners are going to be able to run Afghanistan or Afghan security on an ongoing basis," Harper said.

Of course, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Our new, charismatic President was supposed to win commitments of more troops from those recalcitrant Europeans (and Canadians). According to this theory, EuroCanadian reluctance to send more of their citizens to die in Afghanistan was not a legitimate reflection of public opinion, but rather a reflection of mere personal dislike of the arrogant George W. Bush. But charisma only gets you so far, it seems.

And Secretary Gates isn't the only one worried about this new, world-peace-threatening "mood" that seems to have infected Europe and our neighbor to the north. The supposedly liberal folks at National Public Radio also raised alarms. Although reporter David Westervelt couldn't find a single Dutch person who supported the withdrawal (a promised withdrawal, remember, that had sufficient public support to win an election for the governing coalition) he was able to find an "expert" who was appropriately concerned about this dangerous outbreak of democracy. "And now you see that one partner has always been regarded as a country able and willing to deliver is now pulling out, completely. That's really a worry to NATO. It's a worry to the United States, and of course, it's a worry to a lot of Dutch who think that our image will be negatively influenced by this," said Edwin Bakker, Senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations.

Mr. Bakker didn't offer up the names of specific Dutch citizens that he'd be willing to sacrifice in order to maintain the Netherlands' reputation as "a country able and willing to deliver."

NPR reporter Westervelt closed his report with more expressions of anxiety, this time from unnamed "analysts", saying, "analysts here worry the Dutch political system is now in turmoil with no strong leadership and now clear way out of the crisis."

Of course, most Dutch voters might conclude that a government that was willing to stand up to the most powerful nation on Earth in order to stick to a promise it had made to the voters was exercising "strong leadership." Speaking as an American, this is the sort of "strong leadership" I want to see from my own government.

Steve Burns is Program Director of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.