Flit

Who are the undercontributors in Afghanistan?

A brief chart, possibly of some utility to someone:

Currently, non-US NATO countries have 24,010 troops in Afghanistan, out of a total NATO-wide standing army (excluding the US) of 2.75 million, or 0.87% of the total (in other words, one out of every 115 NATO regular force troops, navies and air forces included, is in Afghanistan right now). National contributions vary, with Canada the highest at 4.01% of its standing armed forces committed, over four times the NATO average, and many countries significantly lower than that.

It's all well and good to say that some countries aren't contributing, and counting the three countries pushing to join NATO right now (Macedonia, Albania and Croatia), there are 27 troop-contributing nations to draw from other than the U.S. But the simple fact is many of those countries have armies of such a small size that pushing their contribution up to the NATO average wouldn't change very much.

So the best measure of free-riderism, as it pertains to the NATO commitment to Afghanistan, would be the difference in actual troop numbers between how many soldiers they have in Afghanistan now, and how many they would have if they were only sending the NATO average. Crunching those numbers gives you something like this chart. Countries with plus-signs, like Canada, would have to bring their contribution DOWN by that amount to be in line with the NATO average; countries with minus-signs would have to bring their contributions UP.

Now there's all kinds of reasons for this (Iraqi commitments, Lebanon UNIFIL commitments, etc.) but the simple fact is there's only about four NATO countries that are in a military position today to "step up the plate" if Canada or the Netherlands leaves Afghanistan in the next couple of years with 1,000 or more replacement soldiers of their own, while still staying close to or under the NATO average contribution level: France, Spain, Greece and Turkey. The other big countries (Germany and Italy) actually have troop levels above the mean, and the rest have armies that are simply too small to make a major difference. The relative absence of Turkish troops, not only in terms of numbers but as representatives of the Muslim world, is particularly unfortunate.

This is separate from the separate issues of national caveats preventing effective combat action, or some countries operating in safer operational areas than the Canadians and Dutch, which have also led to some inter-NATO bickering. For this reason, one can see that the Globe and Mail headline today is somewhat misleading; Canada's foreign minister notably isn't "twisting arms" visiting the countries he's visiting, all of which are, like Canada, already over-contributors. He may be shoring up support, or strategizing with his counterparts on how to turn the undercontributors around, but he can't reasonably expect greater troop commitments from the allied nations that are on his trip list this time.