Speaking from experience here ... some, certainly not all, NATO partners in AFG were additional security burdens with arcane stipulations and ROE (no night ops, can't go outside the wire). I certainly acknowledge that many nations sent troops for that war, but we should not forget the political context in which that happened. European opinion was decidedly
against participating. Bush and then Obama had to beg NATO members to increase their levels of support post-invasion (only the Aussies, the British, and I think Canada participated in the invasion, could be wrong), and then again during the occupation. This is part of why we ended up with the famous "caveats" that would make one ask ... why are you even here? The Europeans insisted on putting large safety constraints on their forces, and honestly I understand why. They weren't attacked, it was the Untied States' (bad) idea to pretend it was possible to build AFG into some kind of democracy, and their body politic had good reason to question their country's involvement.
>The USA couldn't have done it all by itself, just consider the range of transport vehicles
Not sure how to parse this. No one has the transport capabilities even close to ours.
Frankly, this issue has been percolating for a while now and it's better that we rip the band aid off and get it over with. We should've done this 25 years ago, but 9/11 happened and we got distracted. The AFG Campaign was extremely telling, both in terms of what a post-Soviet Union NATO could bring itself to do and the actual capabilities of the non-US partners. For what it's worth, Robert Gates (SECDEF at the time) was making some similar points back in 2011[1]:
>Today, I would like to share some parting thoughts about the state of the now 60-plus year old transatlantic security project, to include:
>Where the alliance mission stands in Afghanistan as we enter a critical transition phase; NATO’s serious capability gaps and other institutional shortcomings laid bare by the Libya operation; The military – and political – necessity of fixing these shortcomings if the transatlantic security alliance is going to be viable going forward; And more broadly, the growing difficulty for the U.S. to sustain current support for NATO if the American taxpayer continues to carry most of the burden in the Alliance.
>The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.
>Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.
Emphasis added. This was 14 years ago. Pity that it took the reality of a land war in Eastern Europe and the possibility of no American security presence for the Europeans to take this point seriously.
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/text-of-spe...