Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan assessment calls for a classic counterinsurgency campaign. As I wrote earlier this month, immersing our own military forces with Afghan forces is a critical step in building trust between the civilian population and the government. As that trust emerges, so will the detailed real-time intelligence needed to kill and capture Islamist terrorists and prevent them from using Afghanistan as a sanctuary.

President Obama will likely send General McChrystal most of what he needs in terms of additional brigades and combat advisers. After all, the president hand-picked this general and has declared Afghanistan a war of necessity.

The more complex question facing Obama is whether he will fix the broken command relationships that abound in Afghanistan, a serious condition described by General McChrystal in an annex to his report. Strange as it may sound, some of our closest allies, including the Germans (alongside whom I served in the Konduz Valley in 2008), do not see themselves as being at war in Afghanistan.

The modern German worldview is grounded in pacifism. In 2006 a senior German officer boasted to me and some fellow American officers that the term “war” was not part of the Bundeswehr’s mission statement. Instead, he explained, German forces are prepared to execute “crisis management,” but only as part of “international coalitions.” Accordingly, that pesky NATO treaty obligation to respond to “an attack on one as an attack on all” is fulfilled by sending a contingent to northern Afghanistan to engage in “peacekeeping.” German troops are told that their actions on patrol will be solely for self-defense (and thus not for defending the Afghans).

The Germans’ overly restrictive rules of engagement and their defensive, self-preserving mindset have created a climate of fear and confusion among German troops on the ground, at times leading to civilian deaths. German commanders, hobbled by so-called “caveats,” cannot take the risks necessary to embed their troops with Afghan forces, hunt the enemy, and defend the population — which is a shame, since the German paratroopers with whom we occasionally patrolled were magnificently trained and highly motivated.

A peacekeeping mentality not only is inappropriate to a counterinsurgency mission but actually undermines its success. Dumping a force of peacekeepers into a place where there is no peace looks and feels like an occupation to the locals. In 2008 in Konduz, we watched as German armored vehicles crisscrossed the countryside, stopping only to set up checkpoints that felt like harassment to the average Afghan and presented juicy targets for Islamist suicide bombers. Predictably, reconstruction suffered due to degraded security.

Unity of command is an enduring principle of military doctrine. It insists that the vision and authority for every kind of military operation be vested in a single commander. Ironically, the term was coined by a German, the famed military theorist Baron von Clausewitz, in a timeless 19th century treatise entitled On War.

In the spirit of Clausewitz, President Obama must tell the Europeans to get with the program and follow General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy and directives to the letter. If our European partners cannot do this, we must tell them to cede their hapless control over security operations and assume support roles in the Afghan “crisis,” either by running hospitals, logistics operations, and airfields (which they do very well) or by leaving altogether.

The worry is that our president — who has made apologies, pandering and multilateralism the bedrock of his foreign policy — may not have the diplomatic grit necessary to poke our European friends in the chest and give them their marching orders.

– Vincent G. Heintz is a reservist and a member of Vets for Freedom. He served in 2001 at Ground Zero, in 2004 in Iraq, and in 2008 in Afghanistan. In civilian life he is a lawyer in New York.