Non-Subscriber Extract
Transformation on a budget: Netherlands country briefing
By Hans de Vreij
29 January 2008
Taking stock of the Netherlands armed forces in 2008, two issues take centre stage: the transformation process and the Dutch military deployment in Afghanistan.
In February 2006 the Dutch parliament agreed with a December 2005 government decision to offer a sizeable contribution to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
The move marked the beginning of what would become the largest and most dangerous operation for the armed forces of the Netherlands outside Europe in decades and is set to last until August 2010.
The Dutch constitution does not give parliament a final say in foreign deployments of the armed forces, yet a tradition has emerged for the government of the day to present its decision to parliament for approval. This holds true in particular when such missions are potentially dangerous and governments seek the maximum amount of political - and public - support possible.
A key feature of Dutch politics is that governments are generally coalition governments. In the case of the ISAF mission, this meant that the decision to go was taken by a coalition of Christian-Democrats, Liberals and Social Liberals, while the decision to stay until 2010, on the other hand, was taken by a coalition government of Christian-Democrats, Labour and the Christian Union.
The complexities of consensus-driven, multi-faceted democracy explains to some extent the continuing political and public debate about the Dutch ISAF contribution, which received added momentum in January 2008 when two Dutch troops were killed in a friendly fire incident.
While the stabilisation and reconstruction (S&R) mission is certainly not new, the experience of Dutch activities in the Afghan province of Uruzgan shows that for many politicians, and certainly for the population at large, S&R activities are novel and to a certain extent poorly understood.
For example, a discussion on whether the Dutch are on a 'fighting' (as opposed to a 'reconstruction') mission was continuing as JDW went to press. This is almost two years after the first Dutch soldiers entered Uruzgan province and despite efforts by NATO and the Dutch government to explain what ISAF really stands for. To date, some 7,000 Dutch soldiers of all branches of the armed forces have been active in Uruzgan province and other locations in Afghanistan.
The deployment itself was an unprecedented undertaking. Some 2,000 seaborne containers, many of them with ballistic protection, were shipped from the Netherlands to Pakistan and then transported by road to Afghanistan.
The army quickly discovered it lacked certain key hardware in its inventory. Faced with an omnipresent threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the Dutch army first had to rent South-African RG-31 Nyala mine-protected 4 x 4 tactical vehicles and then proceeded to buy Australian Bushmaster wheeled armoured vehicles.
Image: Lessons from Afghanistan led the Netherlands to adapt a fast-track procurement procedure to rapidly acquire equipment, such as the Bushmaster armoured patrol vehicle (Netherlands MoD)