Is NATO well-suited to wage war in Afghanistan?

It's time to reconsider the value and role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The leaders of the Cold War alliance, which did so much to keep the peace in Europe for the latter half of the 20^th century, are trying to stretch its scope and mission to the fighting fields of Afghanistan in a bid to keep it relevant—but they may be crossing a bridge too far.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took a whack at the allies on Tuesday at a NATO Strategic Concept Seminar in Washington, D.C., berating all but a handful of them for spending too little on defense and paying too little attention to the gravest threats of the post-Cold War era.

He complained that just five of the alliance's 28 nations have met the common pledge to devote at least 2 percent of their gross domestic products to their military establishments—a shortfall that Gates decried as "NATO's budgetary crisis."

And while he lauded those nations that have agreed to send more troops to Afghanistan in the last few months, he noted that too few of them are providing the equipment—cargo planes, refueling tankers, helicopters, and reconnaissance drones—that's vital to the fight.

These failings, he concluded, raise doubts about whether NATO is capable of making the "transition" from "a static, defensive force," formed to deter and beat back a Soviet invasion of Europe, to "an expeditionary force" capable of staving off insurgents and terrorists in faraway lands.

The real question, though, is whether NATO is, or ever was, a suitable vehicle for this new, offensive mission. The evidence to date suggests it isn't.

Almost exactly two years ago, when he was still George W. Bush's defense secretary, Gates expressed similar worries that NATO might be "evolving into a two-tiered alliance, in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect people's security and others who are not."

He was referring to NATO's war in Afghanistan, and while President Barack Obama has since stepped up the United States' investment in that war—sending many more troops and approving a strategy at once more aggressive and more refined—the alliance is still split into two tiers.

Back in February 2008, just a handful of allies—Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, and (outside NATO) Australia—let their troops be deployed, in any substantial number, in Afghanistan's southern or eastern regions, where most of the fighting took place. (The Czech Republic and Romania also allowed a small number of their troops to go there.)

Today, the reality is no different, except that two of those countries—Canada and the Netherlands—have announced that they'll soon bring their troops home.

None of this should ever have been surprising.

In the spring of 2006, when NATO took over command in Afghanistan, the assumption was that this would be a "peacekeeping" operation, not a war.

But as those peacekeepers moved south, the Taliban—which had never really left—came out to fight. It turned out to be a war after all. At that point, almost all of NATO's national governments set conditions on their troops' involvement—dozens of restrictions, officially called "caveats," in all. One nation's troops could be stationed in the north and west but not the south or east; another's could fight from the air but not on the ground; another's could defend against insurgents' assaults but not pursue the attackers. The list went on.

The whole business was absurd; there was no way to fight coalition warfare without a unified, or at least a coordinated, command.