U.S. wants more help from allies? Not really.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

Obama administration officials, including the president himself, have called for U.S. allies to take on more prominent roles in planning operations in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has reached out to European governments for more help in nation-building and police training.

The hope is that President Obama's extraordinary popularity in Europe will translate into "enhanced contributions to the efforts in Afghanistan," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

But goodwill alone may not suffice.

What often goes unmentioned is that allies are being asked to participate in coalitions that exist only on paper. In the real world of military operations--where the United States is the dominant force, with far more troops and hardware than all other nations combined--allies play on the sidelines, if at all.

Foreign members of a U.S.-led coalition are not treated as true "members of the team," says John E Sattler, a retired Marine three-star general who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and served as former director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Almost by default, planning documents and e-mails written by U.S. officials are flagged "secret/no foreign," Sattler tells a Washington, D.C., conference. So when coalition members gather to discuss an upcoming operation, U.S. officials give them praise, thank them for their contributions, and then ask them to leave the room so the Americans can go over operational plans that foreign officers have not been "cleared" to see. Sattler, who commanded coalitions in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, says the inability to share information is self-defeating.

"We over-classify," he says, and as a result, "We shoot ourselves in the foot." Once it becomes clear to allies that they are not part of the inner circle, no amount of glad handing or socializing after-hours can make up for that, says Sattler.

"It's the number-one thing that our allies hate," he says. Sometimes they are handed paper documents with large sections cut out. While some data must be kept secret, much of the current classification is unnecessary, says Sattler.

An internal Defense Department report that recently was leaked to the Wikileaks website disclosed that Dutch F-16 pilots in Afghanistan were under U.S. orders to bomb certain targets but later were denied access to the "battle damage assessments" of what they had hit because the Dutch did not have the required security clearance. The document also revealed that...