Winston Churchill once said democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Much the same can be said about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which celebrated its 60th birthday on Saturday. NATO is the worst multilateral peace and security organization except for all the others that have been tried, such as the United Nations.
Ask any Canadian Forces officer with experience in UN missions and they'll give you an itemized list of the failings of that organization. The UN's inability to effectively deal with a crumbling Somalia in the early 1990s, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and a complex insurgency in Congo over the past decade all demonstrate the limitations of UN "peacekeeping" missions.
The smaller, and regionally specific, African Union has been no more impressive. The AU's signature mission in Darfur failed to stop the genocidal killing there. Although it is still relatively early days, the larger joint AU-UN mission in Darfur appears to be doing little better.
But at least the UN and AU have actually deployed forces. The European Union couldn't even manage that basic act when the Balkans descended into a vicious ethnic conflict 15 years ago. NATO had to save the EU's bacon as Bosnia and Kosovo burned on its doorstep in the 1990s.
None of these organizations - the UN, the AU or the EU - could come close to organizing and executing a mission on the scale and complexity of the NATO International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. And yet, ISAF has served to expose the dysfunction at the core of NATO itself.
When Rick Hillier departed Kabul in 2004 after a nine-month stint as ISAF commander, he left with a dismal opinion of NATO's effectiveness. The problems with ISAF are well worn at this point but bear repeating - not enough troops, too few countries willing to make meaningful troop commitments (especially in the most conflict-ridden parts of the country), restrictive "national caveats" limiting what troops can do on the ground and thereby compromising the mission's effectiveness, short-term troop commitments to a long-term problem, and, most important, philosophical differences among NATO members over the nature of the challenge in Afghanistan and the appropriate strategic and tactical response to it.
Yet, notwithstanding these profound debilitations, NATO is providing some significant measure of security, reconstruction and governance throughout a desperately poor, backward and ethnically diverse population, in a geographically large country that has almost nothing in common with any NATO member state. No other organization in the world could come close to doing that.
Perhaps the biggest criticism that could be levelled against NATO on its birthday is that it chose to take on the ISAF mission in the first place. In 2003, it assumed control of ISAF with equal parts haste and naiveté regarding both the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the complicated politics of managing the mission within the alliance itself.
Then NATO secretary-general George Robertson enthusiastically embraced the idea - advanced by Canada, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands - for the alliance to assume responsibility of ISAF. The mission would give NATO a post-Cold War and post-Balkans lease on life. How difficult could it be for the greatest military alliance in the history of the world to run a stabilization mission in Afghanistan after the Americans had already "defeated" the Taliban, as conventional wisdom had it at that time?
Lord Robertson was so keen on a new role for NATO that he simultaneously embraced the idea of involvement in the Iraq war. Fortunately, Canada and other countries tempered his enthusiasm. Imagine how ISAF would be today if NATO was also embroiled in Iraq.
This recent history brings us to an important question: Why didn't Defence Minister Peter MacKay get NATO's top job, especially given Washington's support for his candidacy?
To be sure, Canada has a legitimate claim to this position given its efforts and sacrifice over the past six years in Afghanistan. But it was never in the cards for Mr. MacKay, notwithstanding media speculation to the contrary.
This is due to another of NATO's shortcomings. The organization has two senior posts: Secretary-General and Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The former has always been a European, the latter always an American. This is an unwritten transatlantic rule. Two North Americans running NATO - an organization headquartered in Europe and established 60 years ago for the defence of that continent - is inconceivable. That doesn't make the unwritten rule correct; it just makes it a fact.
So happy 60th, NATO. You are far from perfect. But you are the best we have.
Eugene Lang is co-author of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar and former chief of staff to two ministers of national defence.