All Aboard In Afghanistan:

‘America’s allies did not have to be hectored into committing national assets and their soldiers’ lives to this American-led battle. The Pentagon would have preferred to fight alone, with a little help from Britain. But for their own reasons, other European allies have chased after military roles in the Afghan campaign.

While the State Department emphasizes how much the United States needs coalition partners — and ladles out economic aid and political bribes to support this view — the Pentagon has been showing how much coalition partners need the United States in developing effective countermeasures to global terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction…

In contrast to Kosovo, where 19 NATO nations coordinated air targeting and argued inconclusively over the use of ground troops, European participation in this war is on a bilateral basis and undertaken under clear U.S. command authority. This is no accident.

The Europeans have clambered aboard because they (correctly) sense that the long campaign begun in Afghanistan represents a watershed in alliance management as well as world politics.’ Washington Post