NATO

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Addington for securing this debate and for introducing it in such a thoughtful way. NATO has always been of interest to your Lordships’ House, not least since three Secretaries-General of NATO have been Members of this House—most recently the noble Lord, Lord Robertson.

We have heard two distinguished maiden speeches, from the noble Lord, Lord Flight, and from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, both of whom talked about important areas outside NATO’s territory; however, it seems to me that the challenges for NATO are fundamentally, not just a little, different from the purposes for which it was founded. First, at that time, it was clear who the enemy was. I remember, when the IRA had a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, one of the Northern Ireland politicians famously said that it was the most destabilising thing that had happened in his lifetime. In a sense, he was right, because when you know who the enemy is and where to point the guns, that is simple and straightforward. NATO’s purpose was, as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, said, very clear: to keep our American colleagues with us in protecting us from the Soviet Union.

The situation is by no means so clear now, as has been said by other noble Lords. As the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, has just said, it was clear then what an attack was and that it would be a relatively conventional attack; even a non-conventional attack was seen in terms of weapons of mass effect. However, what now constitutes an attack is far less clear. He mentioned one cyberattack—I declare an interest as president of ARTIS Europe, a research and risk analysis company that looks at some of these matters—but, of course, not only has a small country in the alliance, Estonia, had a denial-of-service attack, there are attacks every day on the United States Department of Defense, not to mention our own defence establishments. It is not as though there is a day on which an attack starts; they go on constantly and it is by no means easy to be clear about precisely where some of the attacks come from. It appears that the attack on Estonia came at some point from Russian territory but, because many of these areas are remote, one does not know exactly what that means.

The difficulty, too, has come from the very success of NATO. As NATO has become more successful, so its extent has grown. As a strong supporter of the European Union, I remember becoming increasingly concerned about whether it was possible to widen and deepen the European Union at the same time and at some speed. I expressed substantial doubt to my colleagues about whether that was possible, and I maintain that view. I think that the faster one extends, the more difficult it is to deepen, and so with NATO. It seems to me that the more we have extended, the less clear NATO’s purpose has become. Where a defined territorial integrity might be under attack, it is clear what the purpose and role of NATO will be. Its very name— the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—identifies its geographical extent. However, once one starts to look at substantially different territories, one encounters problems in two ways.

The first of those problems is in being clear about where an attack response is justified. Here, we come to the question of Afghanistan and, in a sense, to the link between the two maiden speeches—one referring to Afghanistan and the other to India. If we find ourselves responding to an attack on our own geographical territory, we know what to do—we discuss it among ourselves, as we are all to some extent under attack. However, responding to an attack in Afghanistan is a different matter. When discussing Afghanistan a year or so ago with Indian military commanders, I was shocked and dismayed to learn that, despite their being an ally and having a million men under arms, and despite their historic relationship with Afghanistan, there had been little or no consultation with India in advance of any response in Afghanistan. Subsequently, when India offered assistance, there was remarkably little acceptance of that assistance. If we have to move outside the territorial integrity of our own area, we have to find a different way of operating with those whom we can regard as allies; otherwise, we will fall over ourselves, not knowing what we are dealing with and not having to hand all the allies who would be prepared to help us.

However, it then becomes difficult to hold the alliance together. Let us take as an example Turkey, which has been such a stout and important member of NATO. The situation in Turkey has changed because, as NATO has advanced and developed and other countries have wanted to be part of it, so Turkey has begun to change. When Turkey was a secular country with a very strong military command that had control of everything, it was easy to see how it might relate to us within NATO. However, things have changed. Turkey is now a more democratic country, but the democratic forces and the military establishment do not necessarily see things in quite the same way. The democratic establishment now wants to look to a more significant Turkish regional role, with different kinds of relationships within its own region and territory and different political attitudes compared to many of the leading countries and partners in NATO. It is not at all clear, particularly since the European Union has been unwise enough not to embrace Turkey more energetically, how that important component of the alliance will develop over the next number of years. That will have implications in the wider Middle East.

Like other noble Lords—it was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton I have seen senior officials in NATO developing strategy. At Lisbon, my very good friend the former Liberal Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, produced the new strategic document, Active Engagement, Modern Defence. From reading through that document, it seems to me that although useful thinking is taking place and the new threats and problems externally are being identified, such as the cyber threat, there is very little in the document about the stresses and strains within NATO itself and about its whole purpose.

In particular, a fundamental problem for a military alliance in dealing with the developing threats is this: a military operation, certainly an official one, is hierarchical in its structure and bureaucratic in its control relationship with politics and politicians and Governments, whereas many of the threats that we experience, whether they are terrorist threats or cyber threats from terrorists, hackers or even from other countries, operate in a network fashion and not in a hierarchical fashion. If we do not look to the very structures of the way our military and military alliances function, we will find that they are always trying to address what has happened in the recent past rather than what is happening and what we are facing currently. That is a very real dilemma for us.

It seems to me that NATO and its whole way of working must address these threats as they are, and that may require changes of structure and function. If NATO becomes a network, rather than a structured, hierarchical military alliance, that will have all sorts of implications for matters like the consensus of decision-making when it comes to action and whether that results in more operations by those who feel themselves most at threat. The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, asked the question: when the new countries came in, did that really mean that all of us were prepared to go to war on any kind of attack? Whatever was said to those countries, I simply do not believe that that is actually the case. If we are not to be disingenuous, and then find ourselves in a huge dilemma when the matter arises, we must look at how we actually structure and function as an alliance.