For months, government officials and military officers have been talking about merging the two military missions in Afghanistan. At a meeting in February in Nice, NATO defence ministers gave the general go-ahead. For two reasons, this decision will have grave consequences. First, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) have two completely different agendas. ISAF is a peacekeeping mission to ensure reconstruction and assist the government in Kabul, while OEF is fighting terrorists and the Taliban. Second, in light of the ongoing differences of opinion within NATO, the decision reached in Nice is so unspecific that its consequences will probably not be greater efficiency, but greater confusion among the military forces in Afghanistan.

For several months, the US has been pushing especially hard for the restructuring of the two missions. Because of the great problems the US faces in Iraq, Washington is particularly interested in streamlining its commitment in Afghanistan. For the US administration, the security situation in Afghanistan has improved so much that it can now imagine to reduce its troops and leave responsibility to NATO.

Of course, the US also insists that NATO can only take over both missions if it is prepared to fight terrorism in the sense of playing the part of Operation Enduring Freedom convincingly. This is where Europeans become sceptical. How closely can ISAF and OEF work together without undermining the goal of ISAF? Germany’s Defence Minister Peter Struck explained back in October 2004 that it makes a difference whether you help a government rebuild its country or whether you wage war on terrorists. He assumed back then that the two missions would "remain distinct for a long time".

That very month, Germany’s Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul even warned that ISAF and OEF should "definitely not" be merged, and she gave a convincing reason for her opinion: "We can only get the people to trust us if we make a clear distinction between reconstruction and the battle against terrorism." Some OEF commanders in effect supported the argument of Wieczorek-Zeul when they told the Washington Times that they were concerned that a merger with ISAF would make it harder to cooperate with Afghan warlords in hunting terrorists.

But the resolution of Nice is even more problematic because it mars the differences between the two missions without creating any new clarity. At a press conference just after the meeting, NATO general secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was either unable or unwilling to explain how the defence ministers imagine ISAF and OEF working together in the future. Hoop Scheffer merely stated that the goal was to benefit from synergetic effects. He was not sure how this would happen, but said it would be a topic of discussion – probably there would be two missions under "some form of unity of command". Other NATO officials told the press that they expected there to be one mission with two commanders.

Such contradictory statements are typical and indicate that the main decision-makers are not sure what the overriding concept is, how they are to define their future tasks, and how they are going to operate in Afghanistan in the future. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that France and Germany would allow themselves to be gradually drawn into the war going on in the south and east of Afghanistan as auxiliary troops under a NATO general from the USA. At the same time, it is also unlikely that the US administration will tone down its war on terror only to protect the good reputation of the peacekeeping mission. Just because they want to camouflage transatlantic differences, NATO governments are about to create military confusion in Afghanistan – and military confusion normally leads to catastrophe in war time.