Excerpts
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): A three-month-long military effort in Libya is highlighting tensions in the NATO alliance.
NATO continued its bombing campaign in Libya today, with the U.S. in a support role, after initially taking out Libyan air defenses. But in Brussels today, the soon-to-retire U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a blunt rebuke to many of America's European allies.
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT GATES: While every alliance member voted for the Libya mission, less than half have participated at all, and fewer than a third have been willing to participate in the strike mission.
MARGARET WARNER: The strike force is led by Britain and France, with Norway, Denmark Belgium, and Canada joining in. But other major NATO members, like Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Turkey and Spain, are not flying air strikes.
ROBERT GATES: Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they cannot. The military capabilities simply aren't there.
The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S. once more to make up the difference.
MARGARET WARNER: Gates also pointed to Afghanistan.
ROBERT GATES: Despite more than two million troops in uniform, not counting the U.S. military, NATO has struggled, at times desperately, to sustain a deployment of 25,000 to 40,000 troops.
MARGARET WARNER: This uneven division of labor can't be sustained, he warned, with the U.S. facing its own economic strains and defense budget cuts.
ROBERT GATES: If you told the American taxpayers, as I just did, that they are bearing 75 percent of the financial burden of the alliance, this is going to raise eyebrows.
Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War wasn't the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost. What I have sketched out is the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal, future for the transatlantic alliance.
MARGARET WARNER: The Europeans must spend more, and spend it more strategically, Gates said, or risk sliding into collective military irrelevance.
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MARGARET WARNER: Let me just ask you, as Ambassador Burt said, this isn't a new complaint on the part of the U.S. But has the Libya mission, because, for the -- for once, the U.S. has said it wouldn't take the lead, has it exposed this gap more dramatically?
LT. GEN. DAVID BARNO (RET.), U.S. Army: Well, I think it has. And Libya is not 3,000 miles away from Europe. It's part of Europe's backyard. And the refugees from Libya could well wash ashore in Spain and Italy and France...
MARGARET WARNER: They are.
LT. GEN. DAVID BARNO: ... NATO members, exactly.
And so these are vital interests, I would suggest, to the Europeans. And if NATO can't operate effectively and muster the resources to be able to do a very small military operation right next door in Libya, we have to question what their ultimate value is.
MARGARET WARNER: And in Libya, Ambassador Burt, in fact, it was the U.K. and France that most wanted to do this, and pretty much persuaded the Obama administration. Yet, you think it's -- is it all right that the Europeans clearly couldn't do it by themselves?
RICHARD BURT, Former U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs: Well, I mean, first of all, I think Bob Gates today conspicuously left out France and Britain in his critique of spending.
MARGARET WARNER: Of course, yes.
RICHARD BURT: But, more importantly, this -- this -- this became a NATO mission after the fact. You're absolutely right. Britain and France grabbed, put the bit in their teeth. They grabbed hold of this mission. They got the United States to back it.
And it only later, in a kind of very clumsy way, became a NATO mission. This was never a NATO mission at the outset. And I think many members of NATO believe that -- that, as did Bob Gates, apparently, if you read the reporting, that military force wasn't necessary in this contingency.
And on the question of immigration, you get a good argument on both sides of the Atlantic. If we are successful in getting rid of Gadhafi and his regime, is that going to make immigration better or worse? I mean is using military power going to be a solution to the issues we face, not only in Libya, but in the greater Middle East?
We're not talking about using military power in Syria. We're not talking about using it in Yemen. So, I think we have to think a little more broadly here about what our strategic interests are and what NATO can and can't do.
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MARGARET WARNER: So, you were ambassador to Germany. I mean, in Germany, they're doing actually well economically. You go back to the beginning of this decade, I think they were doing well.
Is it essentially that it just has a more pacifist impulse than, say, here in the U.S.? In other words, it's a question of political will, what political leaders want to spend their money on?
RICHARD BURT: Well, Margaret, you have got to begin by recognizing that NATO was created and sustained in a very different strategic era.
There were over 500,000 Soviet forces deployed in Eastern Europe arrayed against NATO. And NATO's forces were designed to deter and defend against an attack in Europe. Now, when the Cold War came to an end, for many Europeans, that existential threat came to an end.
And when we think about Afghanistan, we Americans think about Afghanistan as the place where we were attacked by al-Qaida. And so it had very special relevance in terms of their -- of American thinking about its security.
That's not the case in Europe. And in the special case of Germany, the Germans don't believe, given their special history, that military force is necessarily a solution to every problem. And I'm amazed, just to tell you the truth, that there are 45,000 European troops fighting in Afghanistan, and some of those are Germans.
The idea of German forces being deployed outside of Europe, 20 years ago, would have been politically unthinkable.
That little history lesson from Brunt is very pertinent. Since the end of the Cold War NATO is an organization looking for a mission. It is not configured for today's arena, and has not yet adapted. It HAS deteriorated.
But, without NATO, that leaves the U.S. the ONLY power to deal with military issues in the European hemisphere. That would NOT be good, and we cannot afford to ignore Europe.
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