A deal that can revive the OSCE

The foreign ministers of 56 participating states in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, are gathering Tuesday and Wednesday in Athens to review the security developments in a region spanning from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

The OSCE is the biggest security organization in the world, established on the backbone of Soviet and Western détente in the 1970s, and today continues to provide valuable assistance in helping member states manage and increase security.

Election processes still matter, and the free will of citizens remains a fundamental human right and a building block of the OSCE community that should not to be overlooked. However, the security environment has changed drastically since the organization was established, and the OSCE will have to be more than a human rights platform in order to play a relevant role going forward.

The dispute between countries pushing for the OSCE to be a soft security organization and those who want a more robust platform has been going on for over a decade. The organization’s two biggest members provide a good example: Russia is fed up with OSCE election monitoring missions while the U.S. would prefer to use the OSCE for what it cannot do through NATO or alone.

More than ten years have passed since the OSCE held a security review summit – the 1999 Istanbul OSCE Summit was the last – but the security context that defined Istanbul was shattered only two years later on Sept. 11, 2001. NATO has undergone two strategic concept reviews since then, and the EU, Russia and the U.S. have all adjusted their national security doctrines. It is not surprising then that the OSCE Istanbul agenda is archaic.

Next year Kazakhstan takes over the chairmanship of the OSCE from Greece, which in itself is an important point in the history of the organization. For the first time, a country that once belonged to the former Soviet Union will lead the OSCE. It also says a lot about the importance of stability in Central Asia for Europe and Euro-Atlantic security. The central question on the table now is whether the OSCE should go to Afghanistan, something the U.S. strongly supports.

Before we send the OSCE into Afghanistan, however, there is a need for a comprehensive debate about how the OSCE should be reformed in order to meet the security challenges of tomorrow. Embarking on an Afghan mission under the present understanding of the common tasks and responsibilities, we can be sure the mission will fail, which for an organization already lacking in credibility will have catastrophic consequences.

If the OSCE is to open a mission in Afghanistan, we need to know whether this means the OSCE will from henceforth do out-of-area operations. If yes, what will be the criteria for choosing them, who will choose them, and how will the OSCE finance and staff them?

The Kazakhs have rightly understood that we need answers to these fundamentals before adding Afghanistan to the list of OSCE responsibilities. This is why Astana’s offer to host a summit in 2010 at the level of heads of state is the right idea. The OSCE foreign ministers would be wise to back this proposal next week in Athens.

Washington has been skeptical of a summit, which is shortsighted as the United States stands to benefit the most from it. Ultimately, the OSCE going into Afghanistan means better burden sharing over the long run, including Russia and Central Asian countries assuming direct responsibility for the future of Afghanistan.

This could help U.S. President Barack Obama in scaling down America’s exposure in Afghanistan. The OSCE could do a great deal of work on border, police and administrative training. The organization’s track record from the Balkans is impeccable in these areas.

However, a green light for an OSCE mission in Afghanistan has its price. The United States will have to reach an agreement with Moscow on how to rebalance the three baskets underpinning the OSCE – human rights, the economy and hard security.

Kazakhstan’s good relations with both Moscow and Washington give Astana an opportunity to facilitate this deal, which would open the doors for the OSCE to enter Afghanistan.

* Borut Grgic is the chairman and founder of the Institute for Security Studies Brussels. He served as a senior political adviser to the chairman-in-office of the OSCE in 2005.