Nato leaders gathered in Chicago this week to discuss the alliance’s mission in Afghanistan and announced summer 2013 as the handover date to Afghan troops. But the alliance also met to discuss its own future amid savage defence cuts among almost all of its members. So is the Afghan war the last major Nato deployment we will see for a generation?

The handover date from Nato troops to Afghan security forces (the police and the Afghan national army) was announced in Chicago this week. There is now a 13-month countdown until the alliance will cease major combat operations in Afghanistan, and for many of Nato’s members that isn’t a moment too soon.

There has been an unpleasant sense of inevitability about the mission since it became clear that President Obama’s post-election troop surge was not going to be sustained. The additional troops who were deployed under that surge have now been withdrawn, and the slow drip-drip of the final Nato exit makes it even harder for the alliance and for the Afghan government to express confidence about the country’s future.

But while we hear Nato leaders talking about ‘withdrawal’ dates, the alliance did in fact agree this week that Afghanistan will need £2.6bn a year after 2014 to maintain a permanent 230,000-strong security force, with Britain contributing $110m a year and the Americans close to $2.3bn. So Afghanistan will remain a key foreign policy and security interest for the alliance and its members, even if the visible troop deployments will cease.

Some predictions from me about the 13-month countdown to security handover. First, the Taliban will begin to focus its attacks on Afghan state forces. Taliban leaders know that they risk losing support among some of their base once the visible Nato presence has left Afghanistan. To avoid that they will increasingly express their mission as a fight against President Karzai’s corrupt and ineffective government. This could also hasten the collapse of Afghan security forces themselves, as parts of the police and ANA have been riddled with corruption, lack of experience, and poor leadership. A full force switch by the Taliban away from Nato and towards Afghan forces would prove to Afghan citizens that Karzai’s government is not up to the job, and will also humiliate Nato claims that the country is able to manage its own security affairs.

Second, Nato will argue in response to this change in Taliban tactics that the injection of such serious  sums of financial support agreed at this week’s summit proves to the Taliban that the alliance is not abandoning Afghanistan. Nato leaders will also argue that to reach an end to conflict the Taliban must begin peace negotiations with the Afghan government, although it’s unlikely this will happen while Karzai is president.

Third, the Taliban will start to dramatically attack the narco-corruption and drug economy in Afghanistan. We have already seen evidence that they are arbitrarily destroying poppy fields in areas of the country that they control.

They have form at this, and before the 2001 US-led invasion the Taliban had succeeded in clamping down on a large swath of the country’s poppy production. During the 13 month countdown to Nato handover, the international community will find itself having to congratulate the Taliban on something that during 13 years of occupation Nato has singularly failed to do itself.

In the past I’ve argued that Nato has proven itself to be the only functioning vehicle for delivering humanitarian intervention. But it’s now possible that the Afghan mission might be the last major Nato intervention for a generation.

Funding cuts to defence budgets across all members of the alliance are having an impact. The European members historically provided close to 40 per cent of the Nato budget, but this year that percentage has fallen to just 20 per cent. With the US plugging the gap for now.

Against this backdrop of a weakening Nato military capacity, a report from the Atlantic Council this month warned that in the UK, the coalition government was pursuing a dangerous drift in its approach to strategic defence issues and it urged Britain to live up to its part in the ‘special relationship’. The report was co-written by panel of experts including David Miliband, and it reached the conclusion that the operational nature of the special relationship is ‘at risk’ from the vast UK defence cuts. More pointedly, it panned the coalition’s plan to mothball one of the new QE class aircraft carriers, and made the sensible suggestion of operating it jointly with the US as a Nato carrier.

In fact, the declining level of UK contributions to Nato missions following new defence cuts was seen only last year in the Libyan mission. The coalition’s decision to decommission the Ark Royal aircraft carrier in 2010 as part of its cuts to MoD budgets was heavily criticised by the defence select committee recently for severely restricting the scope of British contributions to the Nato-led mission.

The uncertainty about the future capabilities of the alliance has plagued Nato during this week’s Chicago conference, and this is exacerbated by Nato’s failure to talk concretely about its role and purpose once the Afghan mission comes to an end. Equally, the UK government has proven that it doesn’t want to have a debate about foreign and security policy, certainly not any time soon.

This all provides a wide open space for a progressive debate here at home about the future of our involvement in international humanitarian and security missions. If Labour is serious about winning in 2015, then the party will have to shake off its fear of discussing these issues; and this week’s Nato summit gives Ed Miliband a great opportunity to kickstart that debate.

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David Chaplin writes the Progressive Internationalism column for Progress

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Photo: NATO