In an interview, Joseph Collins, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations (the fashionable Pentagon term for peacekeeping), made a blunt appraisal: "The performance of our European brethren is pretty pathetic," he said. "Pretty pathetic." The problem, said Collins, is that "everybody wants to help, but nobody wants to put out. NATO is incredibly badly organized, the NATO nations are incredibly badly organized. The Germans complain all the time about their overstretch, and they've got less than 3 percent of their force abroad." Andrew Wilder, an American who heads the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank, said that the alliance has fallen short of its commitments. "I think many of us here have been disappointed by the response of the NATO member states in terms of contributing troops to the Afghan situation," he said. "Especially when they've declared that this is their top priority." NATO is boosting its force during the Oct. 9 presidential election, but Wilder said this is not enough. "For the elections they're increasing that by a couple thousand or so, but then after elections, they're planning to withdraw them again," he said.