Confronting the Taliban
February 8, 2007
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to warn the NATO defense ministers that time is running out to blunt the insurgency, with the Taliban likely to mount a new offensive in the coming months.
Afghanistan's lawless border regions with Pakistan are a major haven for international terrorism, and the area where the Taliban militia have regrouped supplies much of the opium that reaches Europe.
Yet despite repeated calls over several months by NATO commanders for more resources, the 26 member countries have appeared reluctant to put more of their forces in harm's way.
"We are saying to the allies all of us need to be prepared to blunt this and defeat it. And now is the time to stand up to the military necessity. Waiting isn't going to help us," said a senior
official traveling with Gates.
"Now's the time to be ready to inflict a defeat on them, the offensive should be our offensive," he said. "That's the philosophy we are communicating to the allies."
New requirements
NATO's new military chief US General Bantz Craddock, who along with Gates faces a baptism of fire in his first official meeting, is to present the allies with a new list of military requirements for the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.
Craddock is expected to call for three more battalions for the 35,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which NATO has led since 2003 and which has assumed responsibility for security across Afghanistan.
Ahead of the talks, Germany said it planned to send six reconnaissance jets to Afghanistan, although not in a combat role, while Britain said it expects to have 800 more troops in place by the Afghan summer.
These offers came after a US offer at NATO headquarters on January 26 to provide 8.2 billion euros ($10.6 billion) in aid over the next two years and keep more than 3,000 troops already
in Afghanistan there for an extra four months.
An embarrassment for the alliance
The slowness shown by many allies has embarrassed NATO in past meetings, and before these talks officials insisted that the meeting here would not be about "force generation."
"Neither the secretary general nor General Craddock are going to be handing around the begging bowl looking for contributions," John Colston, NATO's assistant secretary general for defense policy and planning, said on Tuesday.
Yet last month, Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said: "Force generation will no doubt be discussed in Seville."
A decisive year
Some 4,000 people were killed in the insurgency last year and US officials say suicide attacks have increased four-fold since 2005. In recent days, the Taliban have held control of a town in southern Helmand province.
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic have insisted that 2007 is a decisive year to defeat the Taliban, ousted from power in late 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden, and push ahead with reconstruction.
If NATO fails to spread the influence of President Hamid Karzai's weak central government throughout the country and revive the economy, ordinary Afghans could turn back to the fundamentalist militia.
The way the Afghan mission -- NATO's most ambitious ever -- plays out could indeed determine the future of the 60-year-old military alliance and whether its vocation involves combat operations, or just peacekeeping and reconstruction.