In scale and format, the European Union’s missions to Chad and Afghanistan could hardly have been more different. The Chad mission, from March 2008 to March 2009, was the EU’s biggest military operation outside of Europe, deploying 3,700 soldiers to Central Africa to provide security for refugees from the Darfur conflict in neighbouring Sudan. EUPOL in Afghanistan is a civilian mission, requiring just 400 experts to provide training for local police and judicial officials. However, in their different ways, the two operations illustrate the difficulties - logistical and political - that the EU faces when dispatching security forces to remote and far-flung trouble spots.

CHAD

Before the start of the Chad mission, no less than five force generation conferences were needed to muster the necessary troops and equipment, leading to months of delay for an operation judged urgent to protect the around 400,000 refugees.

Helicopters in particular were a major headache. European armed forces have over 1,000 helicopters matching the types needed, but few were adapted to operate in the harsh conditions of Eastern Chad, EU officials explained at the time. Nations that do have them are reluctant to carry the high maintenance and fuel costs involved with such a deployment. In the end, France provided half the troops and most of the tactical air support. Six French helicopters were used along with three from Poland and four from Russia, which agreed to support the EU mission.

EUFOR Chad-CAR turned out to be the EU’s most logistically challenging mission to date. Troops and equipment had to be flown in to the remote regions along the border region between Chad, Sudan and the North-Eastern Central African Republic, or shipped via ports in Cameroon then hauled over land, a process that could take up to 45 days.

Despite those challenges and the delays caused by force generation, the Chad operation is generally considered a success, earning praise from the humanitarian community for providing a sense of security in the region and clearing the way for a smooth transition to the current UN operation.

AFGHANISTAN

It remains to be seen whether EUPOL Afghanistan will be able to claim similar success. EU officials acknowledge it was rushed in without sufficient planning or resourcing, with an unclear mandate and difficulties building bridges with either the Afghan authorities or other international actors like NATO, the United States and the United Nations. The mission’s launch, in mid-2007, was, EU officials acknowledge, “a disaster”.

Since then, things have improved, the mission has focused on the niche role of ‘training the trainers’ to ensure a trickle-down effect of expertise passed on to Afghan law enforcement officers, as well as specialist sectors, such as intelligence-led policing, criminal investigations, anti-corruption and city policing.

With 270 EU experts on the ground, the mission remains well short of the 400 target, as member states struggle to find adequate personnel willing to volunteer for the difficult and dangerous work.

Officials serving in Afghanistan complain that colleagues get similar pay working on the relatively easier Kosovo police training mission, a situation that is changing, according to officials at headquarters in Brussels. They are confident that the manning level can be up to 300 by early next year. Cooperation with the Afghan Interior Ministry and NATO has also improved.

However, problems remain due to the political limitations on NATO-ESDP collaboration rooted in the Turkish-Cyprus problem. As well as working with US-led police training, which is focused on grass-roots schooling of district level police units, EUPOL will also have to find ways of liaising with the new NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan to which several EU nations are expected to contribute experts from their gendarme forces.

LONG-DISTANCE THEATRES

On a wider level, the two missions illustrate many of the problems facing EU efforts to deploy to long-distance theatres – strategic lift, tactical mobility, cooperation with NATO and other actors, strategic communications, civil-military coherence and most basically ensuring the EU has the necessary forces available.

When ESDP was envisaged ten years ago in the wake of Europe’s failings in the Balkans, the plan was to have a rapid reaction force of 60,000 European troops ready to snuff out incipient crises. Over the years, those ambitious have become more modest.

Following the successful quick deployment of around 1,800 troops to Eastern Congo in 2003 for Operation Artemis, the EU has developed the ‘battle group concept’, which involves member states maintaining a six-month rotation of mobile units around 1,500-strong ready to leave at short notice for long-distance EU operations.

The problem is that capitals have been unable to agree on what constitutes an emergency that would warrant deployment of an EU battle group, a situation that has kept them confined to barracks since the concept was declared to have reached full operational capacity in 2007.

European nations have taken a series of steps in recent years to fill shortfalls in strategic airlift to ensure that they can get troops, equipment and emergency aid to were they are needed anywhere around the world. Sixteen EU and NATO nations have signed up to the 2006 SALIS agreement, under which they have access to six giant Antonov An-124-100 transport planes belonging to a Ukrainian company. In addition, 11 European nations and the United States have pooled resources to operate three C-17 Globemaster airlifters from a base in Hungary. The first strategic flight delivering material to Swedish troops serving with NATO left for Northern Afghanistan in late September, but the planes can also be used on EU missions.

Meanwhile, Germany, France, Britain, Turkey, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg have ordered 180 of the much-delayed Airbus A400M transport planes and are hopeful deliveries could begin in 2012, three years beyond schedule.

To solve gaps in tactical airlift, which hobbled the start of the Chad operation, initiatives are underway though the EU and NATO to help Eastern European members upgrade their fleets of Soviet-era helicopters for use on long-distance missions.