Tell a Canadian that the Netherlands was one of the countries contributing combat forces to the allied effort in Afghanistan and you are likely to be met with surprise. Tell someone in the Netherlands the same thing about Canada and you very well will get the same response. And if you are in the United States ... well, lots of Americans will find it news that anyone else except themselves and the Afghans, and maybe the British, have fought and died in significant numbers in the struggle against the Taliban.
All this mutual surprise largely comes because in recent decades neither Canada nor the Netherlands has tended to be seen, either by its own citizens or abroad as a warfighting country. Yet unlike most other members of the Western Alliance, both countries went actively to war in Afghanistan, assuming strikingly similar combat roles as the leading countries of provincial reconstruction teams of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the neighbouring southern provinces of Kandahar and Uruzgan, where the Taliban have been resurgent and the fighting persistent. One hundred fifty-four members of the Canadian military and twenty-five members of the Dutch military died there. In both countries, the government, facing parliamentary opposition and an increasingly sceptical public, was obliged to bring the combat mission to an end, replacing it with a smaller one, not combat-based. Unlike the minority Harper government, which accepted the end to the Afghanistan combat mission imposed upon it by the parliamentary majority, the Dutch centre-right coalition government led by the Christian Democrat, Jan Peter Balkenende, both fell apart and fell in parliament over continuation, and so the mission came to an end.
Canada pulled out of combat in 2011. The Dutch left Uruzgan a year earlier, ending their four-year stay there. In the wake of that Dutch head start out, the after-mission assessments have begun to appear in that country. The Dutch government, in its official evaluation issued in September 2011, concluded that: “The Netherlands succeeded during the mission in offering the population centres of Uruzgan, and thus the majority of the population, more security.” But it also gloomily noted that, “Four years was not long enough, however, to allow the local Afghanistan government itself to provide security, good government, and development. The progress achieved is not irreversible.” For its part, The Liaison Office, an Afghan non-governmental organization, saw the Dutch glass as being half-full, noting in a fairly lengthy assessment that, “As their four year engagement concludes, the Dutch military can leave confident that their mission contributed to both security and development in Uruzgan. In fact, over time Dutch efforts in the province came to be considered a model of successful civil/military intervention within the context of the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.”
The first major scholarly assessment of the Netherlands engagement has also just appeared, in the form of this book by the Dutch military historian Christ Klep, Uruzgan: Nederlandse militairen op missie, 2005-2010(“Uruzgan: The Dutch military on mission, 2005-2010”). As recounted by Klep, much of the Dutch road to Uruzgan will sound very familiar to Canadians. Dutch politicians, like their Canadian counterparts, publicly emphasized that terrorism being a direct and indirect threat to national security, the national interest would be served by a stable, largely terrorist-free Afghanistan. Yet Alliance obligations and considerations were paramount in the decision to go in. As Klep puts it, “It was actually unthinkable that the Netherlands, as a reliable NATO partner and ally of America would not play a substantial part” in ISAF.
If the major accounts of the decision taken by the Paul Martin government to commit Canada to Kandahar are to be believed, the Liberals felt that they had to take the extra step of going to war in Afghanistan to demonstrate to the Americans Canada’s dependability after the recent Canada-US imbroglios over Iraq and continental missile defence. The Dutch government had no such worries as it already was in the good graces of the Bush administration, especially having supported it politically (although not militarily) when it bumped off Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Atlanticist instinct was a strong enough motivator itself to send the Dutch into Uruzgan. The Dutch attachment to NATO mirrors Canada’s. Just as Canada often has shown the powerful desire to find in democratic Europe a counterweight of sorts to the United States that so dominates Canadian life, the Netherlands wishes to preserve the link to the Americans and so not accept an exclusively European future. For both sets of purposes the NATO structure has been seen as particularly useful.
NATO both cements Dutch ties to the US and can be used to blur those ties. The centre-right Balkenende government needed to demonstrate to the folks at home in ways that will be familiar to Canadians that it would not be getting too close to the Americans and their efforts in Afghanistan. To that end, it underlined first, that the Dutch forces would not fall under the operational command of the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) effort but rather of the multinational, i.e., NATO-led ISAF.
Klep inaccurately and unfairly calls OEF “above all else an American revenge operation,” although in fairness to him it should be added that he also describes it accurately as the “hunting down and elimination of terrorists” (192). Second, the Balkenende government emphasized that the Dutch role in Afghanistan would be a “reconstruction mission.” How could anyone be against that? To be sure, Klep firmly points out that, “The government had never denied that the chances were great that there would be combat and casualties.” Yet it still relied on the term in order to make mission “sellable” to the Dutch electorate (45).
Calling the deployment a “reconstruction effort” eventually only led to trouble at home, though. Klep quotes the commander of the Royal Dutch Armed Forces, Gen. Dick Berlijn, who told a newspaper in 2008, “I was surprised over that term, reconstruction mission. I still say that we never should have used the term” (45). It not only conjured up images of classical international peacekeeping, but it played into the conceit held by many smaller countries (Yes, here’s also looking at you again, Canadians) that their armed forces are somehow “nicer” or more “culturally sensitive” and thus more suited to helpful interventional interventions than those of other countries, usually the Americans. Over the past years, starting with their brief 2003 deployment in post-Saddam Iraq and continuing into Afghanistan the Dutch have developed their own version of this conceit regularly called, using English words, the “Dutch touch” or “Dutch approach” to international stabilization operations.
Klep does not think there is very much to the “Dutch touch.” True, the Netherlands forces “indeed sought somewhat less to engage in combat” than did the Americans, British and Canadians and there were “noticeable differences in approach” between them. Nonetheless, these differences clearly were secondary, for among the British, Canadians, Dutch and eventually even the Americans in southern Afghanistan, “None of the countries had a truly unique method. The operation plans and tactics were comparable” (152).
Those plans and tactics were based on the precepts of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare of “shape, clear, hold and build.” The problem in Afghanistan was that there were overall too few forces devoted to COIN. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans initially preserved “a light footprint” committed not to counterinsurgency but rather to, as Klep emphasizes, hunting down and killing terrorists, and tried to leave the counterinsurgency operations to allies, who provided too few forces.
The results were catastrophic in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Only after the US Army, especially under the inspired leadership of General David Petraeus, learned its lesson and embraced a true counterinsurgency strategy based on the protection of the local population, and after President Bush defied popular opinion in 2006 by providing a “surge” of US forces to execute his strategy, was the war in Iraq finally won. Petraeus was then sent to Afghanistan by recently-elected President Obama with a similar counterinsurgency mandate and a similar increase in US forces on the ground.
But by then the Dutch, like the Canadians, had had it in Afghanistan. While the Balkenende government had warned the country that there would be combat and casualties, the Dutch were still shocked by a “reconstruction mission” of such difficulty and such violence, although they stuck it out for four years and were prepared to take a higher level of casualties that many abroad would have expected of them or perhaps even that they would have expected of themselves.
The Dutch military left Afghanistan after having demonstrated that it was pretty good at counterinsurgency. The “Dutch approach” and “the Dutch touch,” to the extent that they really existed, dovetailed nicely into COIN. The “shame of Srebrenica,” whereby in 1995 the Dutch military under UN authority had stood by and allowed the mass murder of Bosnians by Serbians, was expunged. After Srebrenica, the Dutch military was overhauled, including the abolition of conscription, allowing it to become a fully professional force. Klep points out that this transformation “sped up” in Uruzgan; the Dutch military became there a “more serious” force (196).
But what will the Dutch want to do with this “more serious” force? That will be hard to say with any certainty until the next call from Washington comes to join in the next deployment under circumstances and in places now unknown. On the one hand, the Dutch Alanticist instinct is still strong, although the Dutch, like the Americans, British and Canadians are sorely disappointed with the efforts in Afghanistan of the other European allies and will need to think long and hard about entrusting any future operation to the Brussels-based alliance.
While the Dutch turned out to be tougher than thought, scepticism in the Netherlands about such interventions also remains deep, not only because of the combat and the casualties, but because the Dutch intervention was not decisive and progress in Uruzgan, to again quote the government, is “not irreversible.” Losing a war or fighting it to a stalemate is rarely popular. Perhaps much will depend how the war in Afghanistan, now almost solely in the hands of Afghans and Americans, eventually turns out.
And while the Dutch can take satisfaction from how their military performed in Uruzgan, there will be a longing to return to a “traditional” peacekeeping role. I need not name the other country where, post-Afghanistan, that longing also is strong.
Joseph T. Jockel is Professor and Chair of Canadian Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is co-editor of the International Journal. His most recent book is Canada in NORAD, 1957-2007: a History(2007), which he wrote while serving as distinguished visiting professor at the Canadian Forces College. He has an M.A. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and is working on a research project comparing the Canadian and Dutch experiences in Afghanistan.