Minister for Development Bert Koenders in Afghanistan, 2009 (Ministerie van Defensie)

At the end of December the Ministry of Defence in The Hague declared that the Dutch mission in Afghanistan has caused 80 civilian deaths since its inception in mid-2006. Other reports – making use of UN figures from the fighting around Chora in June 2007 – place the total at 120.  When this figure is placed in the context of total civilian deaths since the beginning of Enduring Freedom – with a whole range of estimates between 10 and 18,000 – it looks pretty insignificant. Likewise, the number of Dutch military fatalities - 21 –  is low compared to, say, Canada (138), the UK (246), or even France (36) (and this includes the fact that the first five Dutch casualties were the result of accidents, not combat).  

How are these figures going to weigh up when the Dutch cabinet decides on the future of the mission? If between 80 and 120 Afghans have died due to Dutch military action, has the Dutch presence contributed to saving many more Afghans from the repression of a religious fundamentalist regime in power in Kabul? Or the unscrupulous violence of a regional warlord getting rich on the drug trade? Or – surely the main point – Dutch civilians in danger of terrorist attacks planned from Afghan territory?

Or has the Dutch presence exactly provoked the development of new threats, run by new networks coming out of other locations? Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s trip through Schiphol on the way to his failed attempt to take out a Delta / North West flight was not due to Amsterdam airport’s slack security. With the possible exception of ElAl, just about any airline (or airport) would struggle to detect this kind of threat. The symbolic significance of the US-Netherlands connection as represented by flight 253 is what is at stake here. Jasper Schuringa comes out as the hero, but what conclusions should be drawn beyond praising a quick-witted member of the public?

Compensation paid out to Afghans for loss of family members or damage to property so far totals 350,000 Euro. A death of an Afghan civilian brings $1500 to the next of kin. To prevent undermining the positive effects of the 3-D approach (development, diplomacy, and defence) in Uruzgan, the Dutch even pay out to Afghans who suffer from the military activity of other ISAF forces stationed in the province. Considering this, it is remarkable how some of their ISAF colleagues seem to have a low opinion of the Dutch approach – just listen to the Australians (even though, for instance, four of the civilian deaths noted by the Ministry came from faulty targeting by Australian forces). 

What kind of an impact is this all going to have in the coming decision-making period? On 12 January the Davids Commission will be presenting its report on Dutch involvement in the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Few surprises are expected, but the timing of the delayed report could not be more awkward, with the cabinet having stated its wish to indicate an Afghanistan strategy by the end of this month. And as of today, after another hours-long debate amongst the ministers concerned, there is no consensus to speak of at all.

Minister for Development Bert Koenders was one of the guests on Matthijs van Nieuwekerk’s Top 2000 music show after Christmas, talking up the merits of Deep Purple’s epic Child in Time for best song. Using the song to reflect on his own political development, Koenders made clear that protests against the Vietnam war in the early 1970s were fundamental. Considering the many linkages that have been made between Vietnam and Afghanistan in recent years, Koenders was in light-hearted mode and was in no way going to make difficult parallels with the present. He has after all been one of the main supporters of a long-term military/development strategy in Afghanistan, putting him out of step with large parts of his own Labour party. But maybe Koenders learnt one thing from Vietnam which is highly relevant today – if you commit to an intervention, you have to know when and how to get out. So he can continue to praise the success of the Dutch mission and the need for a future perspective while relying on his party and the rest of the opposition to focus on the failure and pull the plug.

The Netherlands – that oft-mentioned and much-loved but rarely analysed key player in international affairs – came in for quite some attention last Monday at an intriguing one-day seminar held at the Systems Planning Corporation, Washington DC, entitled ‘US-Dutch Relations: Shared history, Shared Future?’ Hosts were the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, and the CIA’s Office of European Analysis. Boring? No.

Lots of people sat around a table describing themselves as ‘political analyst’. Two presentations on history, followed by two presentations on security, one on Dutch politics, and one on identity. The history goes way back – 1609 was the first physical contact between Dutch (still vassals in the Hapsburg empire) and North America (although the joke is that the captain of that voyage of the Halve Maen was an Englishman, Henry Hudson). The settlements never developed beyond a network of trading posts, and the Brits eventually took over in 1674. But the Dutch had their revenge, printing the Declaration of Independence and funding the rebels in the 1770s. Since then traces of Dutchness have remained, and there have been recent efforts to claim ‘tolerance’ as one of the virtues the Dutch passed to the Americans. After WW II, of course, relations became more dense as the Dutch actively engaged in all manner of political, intelligence, security, economic, and cultural networks spanning the Atlantic. “We don’t have a foreign policy,” one Dutch foreign ministry official is meant to have said in 1969, “we have only NATO.”

This stuff seemed to go down well with the CIA, who dig the longue durée perspective. The questions came in: What was the Dutch reaction to 9/11? How is the issue of climate change affecting bilateral relations? But the big issue was this: Is it holding together in the 21^st century? Are there not signs that this long-running unity of US-NL interests is starting to come apart (read: Afghanistan)? The security speakers were divided on this point. One, during an otherwise excellent overview of Dutch counter-terrorism policy, emphasised that the Guantanamo situation was shared by all – Europe should take on former Gitmo internees and bear the burden. Hmmmm. Not sure about that.

The other speaker raised the intriguing point that recent energy deals with the Russians (read: Shell) seem to have had an impact on the public orientation of Dutch foreign policy. Putin expelled Shell from the big money Sakhalin-2 oil project in 2006, but then invited them back in to operate in the Yamal peninsular last June. This occurred just around the time of the opening of the Hermitage in Amsterdam (nice combination of cultural and carbon diplomacy). What is more, the Netherlands and its Gasunie will become a key distribution center for Gazprom’s NordStream gas pipeline across the Baltic. And to cap it all, the Dutch seem to have shifted away from their original position in supporting NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. This is quite a cocktail.

Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, as Atlanticist as they come, has recently been avoiding outspoken pro-NATO statements in speeches, instead talking up the role of the EU. Now, with Lisbon about a month old, this kind of makes sense. But surely we are still in an era of Euro-US partnership, not substituting one for the other? Would there be a connection between Russian oil and gas, and a shift in the public outlook of the Dutch government? With Afghanistan still to be decided? To say the least, it’s a radical claim – not least, its something that might drive your average economic determinist into fits of euphoria.

If anything, though, the Dutch are good at playing both sides. They’ve done that for years with their double-sided orientation towards European integration and Atlantic cooperation. While Verhagen and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs talk up the EU, they remain died-in-the-wool fans of NATO, something that they share with their colleagues in the Ministry of Defence. There have been chinks in this armour. State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans has been saying consistently that while the Netherlands shares many important factors with the Americans (openness, entrepreneurship, democracy, and social-religious diversity), the days of a knee-jerk support for US foreign policy are over. Interests have to be weighed, and sober conclusions drawn. Yet Verhagen’s back-pedalling on NATO pronouncements is probably more closely related to the cabinet’s clamp-down on Afghanistan-related statements before they have reached an agreement on what to do with Uruzgan. After all, the Foreign Minister’s previous excessive proclamations pretty much triggered the parliamentary motion to end all further involvement in ISAF as of end 2010. Instead, word on the street has it that a deal is probably going to be struck which involves 1) Dutch forces active in another part of Afghanistan, and/or 2) a scaled-down presence continuing in Uruzgan itself.

The big question is whether the Labour party will cause the cabinet to fall on this point, when they are riding so low in the polls. As you can imagine, the hosts were keen to test this one out on their visitors. The consensus amongst the Dutch present was that the key player in the immediate future – certainly going into the next election – would be Democrats 66 (D 66), a rather non-ideological footloose party that voters often flock to if the standard options are in complete flux. D 66 leader Alex Pechtold recently picked up the ‘political leader of the year’ award from the nation’s youth (i.e. those who don’t bother to vote), and wider polls suggest his party will do well. What this means for policy, however, is totally unclear. In 2005 D 66 tried to block the original Uruzgan mission and failed. What will they do if they have a bigger number of MPs?

The seminar ended with State and the CIA  – and the Dutch – looking well pleased with the day’s deliberations. They do many of these kinds of fact-finding sessions, the hosts said, but rarely were they as high quality or as in-depth as this one on the Netherlands. Clearly, even a one-day seminar like this can go a long way to re-affirm the ‘special relationship’.

Hilary Clinton and Maxime Verhagen at the Afghanistan Summit, the Hague, 31 March 2009

 (De Pers http://www.depers.nl/binnenland/296683/Goednieuwsshow-uit-Den-Haag.html)

Richard Holbrooke commented recently at the NATO ministerial meeting that he appreciated domestic pressures would have an impact on the Dutch government’s decision-making on Afghanistan, but that ultimately he didn’t understand Dutch politics at all. With NATO falling into line behind Obama’s commitment of 30,000 extra troops and a revived counter-insurgency strategy, the Netherlands sticks out as a prominent exception. In December 2007 the new coalition in The Hague stated that the current mission in Uruzgan would terminate in August 2010 and be fully withdrawn by the end of that year. In October 2009 the parliament voted against any new mission in Afghanistan, a vote all the more significant because it was introduced by two of the three parties in the coalition, the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) and the Christen Unie. Technically the parliamentary decision cannot define the government’s future policy direction – but it is a clear sign of deep division within the cabinet itself. The Dutch political timetable is currently totally at odds with what Washington wants. This is, to say the least, quite unusual.

How this will pan out over 2010 remains unclear. The cabinet has until the Spring to make a decision, and the key ministers – Christian Democrat Foreign Minister Frans Verhagen and Christen Unie Defence Minister Eimert van Middelkoop – are both keen to prolong the Dutch presence. But even the Christian Democrat party is now getting restive. Obama’s announcement that the escalation will be wound down by July 2011 would require a relatively minor adjustment to The Hague’s planning for the Dutch to join the NATO moral majority. But for once it looks like they are going to take a different path.

Two factors lie behind this.

Firstly there is the continuing political fall-out from the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Davids Commission is still to report on the decision-making that led to Premier Balkenende offering ‘political not military support’ for the Coalition of the Willing. Plenty of counter-factuals on Dutch military involvement have floated to the surface since, and the PvdA swallowed a bitter pill in abandoning its aim for an enquiry when it joined the Christian Democrats for the current coalition. It is unlikely that the Davids report will explode Dutch politics, but it’s a hangover from the past that still has to be worked through the system.

Secondly, there are serious electoral considerations involved. Since the early 2000s the Netherlands has seen the rise of a nationalist form of politics that has awakened a popular focus on domestic issues. Starting with Pim Fortuyn, it has since morphed via the individual movements of Rita Verdonk (Trots op Nederland / Proud of the Netherlands) and Geert Wilders (Partij voor de Vrijheid / Party for Freedom). While Verdonk’s star has waned, Wilders now holds nine seats in parliament and is running neck-and-neck in opinion polls with the Christian Democrats as the largest party in a future election, currently set for 2011. Troops out of Afghanistan and more police on Dutch streets is the Wilders message. On the Left, the Socialist party maintains a similarly nationalist platform and is competing with Wilders for the same pool of discontented voters. Meanwhile the social democratic PvdA has got squeezed in between. Insisting on a withdrawal from Uruzgan may regain some radicalism and give some pay-back to the Christian Democrats, but ultimately it will probably be a pyrrhic victory for the PvdA. The voters are clearly looking elsewhere.

The nationalist tone was illustrated by the June 2005 referendum that rejected Dutch ratification of EU Constitution. The current malaise on Afghanistan is in many ways an extension of that result, only this time not in a European direction but an Atlanticist one. NATO has long been the corner-stone of Dutch security policy, a stance only strengthened by the Dutch willingness to participate in US-led peace-making operations since Kosovo in 1999. But Dutch politics – and the popular mood – has been moving in a different direction for several years now. It looked as if the human rights / development agenda, for a long time a bonding mechanism between the Christian and Liberal Right and the Social Democratic Left, could be used to wallpaper over the cracks. Instead the nationalist turn in Dutch politics is starting to have an impact. The argument that Afghanistan represents a key episode for the future effectiveness of NATO might continue to drive the top of the Defence and Foreign Affairs ministries, but not much beyond that.

Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Ivo Daalder have all started to pressure The Hague to see reason and comply with the White House timetable, not its own. All manner of combinations and constructions will be formulated over the coming months as the policy-makers search for ways to stretch both coalition credibility and the Afghan commitment. But as one commentator in the NRC Handelsblad stated at the weekend, there is more at stake than 1700 military personnel stationed in southern Afghanistan. Dutch willingness to be at the front rank of NATO is coupled with Dutch desire to be present at the top table of global fora in general. The special invitations to Balkenende and Finance Minister Bos to attend the G20 this year were an important part of this. A no on Afghanistan will almost certainly mean no more similar invitations. How this ‘status factor’ will play out in the decision-making will make interesting watching.

Can the circle be squared? To be continued.