NATO Chief Sees More Big Missions in the Future

(Oct. 8) -- Despite flagging support within NATO for its mission to pacify Afghanistan, the military bloc's leader said today he expects the alliance to take on similarly ambitious missions in the future.

Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, outlining his hopes for a new strategy document NATO leaders will debate next month, told an audience in Brussels, Belgium, that updating the alliance's crisis management ability is crucial because the war in Afghanistan has shown that "no other organization can marshal, deploy and sustain NATO's military power."

"Which is why I am totally unconvinced by the media suggestions that after Afghanistan, NATO might never take on another big mission," Rasmussen said in a speech ahead of the Nov. 19-20 NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal. "There will be other missions in future for which only NATO can fit the bill."

Rasmussen's assertion comes after a year in which NATO has struggled to secure troop commitments from its member states for combat operations in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission against the Taliban. There is also a need for more troops to train Afghan armed forces. Both missions are key to U.S. President Barack Obama's hope to make Afghanistan stable enough for the U.S. to begin withdrawing its forces from the country next year.

Roughly half the American service members in Afghanistan play a role in ISAF, and they make up more than half of the nearly 120,000-strong international force, which also has troops from 47 NATO and partner countries. Those additional contributions range from the three Austrians and six Jordanians in ISAF to 3,750 French troops and 9,500 from Britain.

Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark, said the Afghanistan mission shows that NATO's new strategic concept, set to be updated at the summit for the first time since 1999, needs to help the alliance engage with the wider world.

"When our last concept was issued in 1999, NATO could still -- just about -- achieve its goals with its own membership alone. Partners were welcome but not essential," he said. "No more. Today, our partners provide troops, transit, financial support and political backing."

Another of the Afghan "lessons we have learned at a very high price," Rasmussen said, is that "there is often no military solution solely to crises and conflicts. It's true in Afghanistan, it's true in many of the other conflicts under way today."

While it has become the accepted wisdom in Afghanistan -- and a frequent point made by the U.S. commander there, Gen. David Petraeus -- that military and political leaders must work together there, Rasmussen said that on the ground "our military operations often operate in a vacuum, because the civilian progress we need isn't there."

"We've also learned we need to do training from the beginning," he added, "because the sooner local forces can handle security, the sooner we can go home."

NATO's training mission in Afghanistan didn't begin until 2008, seven years after the conflict began, but the U.S. and NATO exit strategies are now based on helping Afghanistan secure itself.