Dutch troops' departure from Afghanistan leaves uncertainty behind
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Dutch politics
The Dutch departure from Afghanistan does not come as a result of the end of the Afghan war, which has entered its ninth year, but of a domestic political uproar.
NATO's request for an extension of Dutch military presence in Afghanistan sparked a political rift within the governing coalition -- the Labor Party and the Christian Democrats -- that led to the Dutch government's collapse in February and the announced drawdown.
Dutch local elections in March showed that the government's fall made some voters lose trust in the two coalition parties.
Though the Afghanistan mission was not a key issue in the general election held in June, the central-right liberal VVD party won the poll for the first time since it was founded in 1948, leading to a major change in Dutch politics.
Dutch media said it is still possible for the Netherlands to help train Afghan army and police forces though political parties are still stuck in forming a coalition cabinet.
While the rift among main Dutch political parties focuses on domestic issues, such as economy and immigration, the Afghanistan drawdown and similar diplomatic issues could be a sore point in Dutch future politics, local analysts said.
Chain reaction?
As some Dutch media saw it, the Netherlands took lead in troop pullout, which somehow broke the unity among NATO members. However, as NATO is a military coalition of sovereignty states, it's up to its members to decide whether to join the group's military actions.
Analysts said the Dutch withdrawal is very likely to cast shadows on NATO's similar military actions in the future.
NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz played down the significance of the Dutch move, saying it did not signal a weakening of coalition resolve.
"The overall force posture of (NATO) and of the Afghan security forces is increasing," Blotz told reporters, citing the surge of mostly U.S. forces that have recently taken control of key areas in Helmand and Kandahar provinces from British and Canadian forces.
Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen affirmed that the NATO-led troops will not leave Afghanistan prematurely as it has a long-term commitment to establishing peace and stability in the war-torn country.
"We don't want to leave Afghanistan in a condition that help Taliban to retake the power to make the country a den of international terrorists," he said.
Despite NATO's assurances of continued support for Afghanistan, the pullout is seen as the start of a drawdown by foreign forces from the country amid increasing Taliban-led violence.
A withdrawal timetable involving several countries has added much to the worry.
Canada plans to pull out its 2,700 soldiers in Afghanistan by the end of 2011; Britain has said it would begin withdrawing from 2011; Poland's new President Bronislaw Komorowski also said his country would follow the suit by the end of 2012.
U.S. President Barack Obama has said his country will begin phased withdrawal from Afghanistan from July 2011.
Though U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that it would only involve "a small patch of troops," once Washington begins withdrawal, the effect on its allies is not hard to imagine, analysts said.
With NATO allies distancing themselves from the notion of an open-ended stay in Afghanistan, the American aspect of the war comes increasingly to the fore.
For American troops, which account for about two-thirds of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, July was the deadliest month of the nearly nine-year-old war in Afghanistan. At least 66 U.S. servicemen were killed, surpassing what had been a record 60 American fatalities in the previous month.
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