NATO’s Afghan partners: between ally and adversary (2003–2014)

This article discusses NATO’s relationship with the Afghan authorities and security forces. Although NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan has been widely debated, few have thoroughly analyzed the partnership between NATO and Afghanistan. That is where this article seeks to add value. Applying a discourse analysis to key NATO texts and speeches in the period 2001-2014, it shows the tensions involved in cooperating with an ‘alien’ partner on the basis of a common threat perception. It finds that in the period 2003-2009, NATO represented its own and its Afghan partners’ values and objectives as ‘shared’, while at the same time policing the values of these partners. These representations are understood as a tool aimed to transform the Afghan partners into moving towards the liberal standards of the alliance. From 2009, a significant shift in this policy can be noted, as NATO’s responsibility for ‘assisting’ Afghanistan is outsourced back to the Afghans themselves. The Afghan partners’ refusal to take on board NATO’s values as well as resistance through insider attacks are seen as the main reason for this shift. Finally, it suggests that analyzing the tensions between discursive constructions of ‘enemy’ and ‘partner’ showed in this article is worth applying in other cases, such as in current making of alliances in fighting the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq