Manley on NATO

NATO risks alliance: Manley

Mike Blanchfield
CanWest News Service

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

OTTAWA -- The NATO alliance could die if it does not get the troops it needs to fight the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan, former foreign affairs minister John Manley said Monday.

Manley's sober assessment of the transatlantic alliance was echoed by current Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, who suggested he is becoming frustrated by his repeated attempts to persuade fellow NATO countries to either send more troops to Afghanistan or remove their restrictions, called caveats, that prevent them from being deployed to the country's war-torn south where Canada and a handful of other nations are bearing the brunt of heavy fighting against the Taliban.

"This mission has created an enormous risk for NATO. Clearly, NATO has to expand out of Europe if it is to remain relevant," Manley said in a speech to a symposium of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in Ottawa.

"If it proves incapable of rallying forces, willing and able to do the job in Afghanistan, however you define that job, it could easily spell the effective end of the alliance."

Later, in a separate speech, MacKay reiterated the tough talk that he has been taking to European capitals and diplomatic audiences -- that Canada can't go it alone in southern Afghanistan and needs more countries in the 26-member alliance to send troops to the front lines or allow soldiers dispatched to other, less hostile parts of the country to join the fight in the south.

MacKay travelled recently to Hungary to meet with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to discuss the problem. After the speech, MacKay said he expected the issue to be "front and centre" when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NATO's other 25 leaders meet in Latvia next month for their annual summit.

"I think that we're obviously looking at other issues at that time but Afghanistan and an assessment of the mission will occur at Riga. And that will be a time and a place to take stock of the future of NATO as well," MacKay said.

The U.S. ambassador to NATO said NATO needs to redefine itself for its new Afghan mission.

"We want NATO to be able to demonstrate when our heads meet four weeks from now that we have an alliance that is taking on global responsibilities, that it increasingly has the global capabilities to meet those responsibilities, and that it is doing it with global partners," Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said Monday in a speech to a European foreign policy think-tank.

Nuland said NATO has to update its operating doctrine to reflect the fact it is now deploying outside its old European boundaries.

NATO's military contribution to Afghanistan is its first outside Europe as the alliance is trying to transform into a viable entity in the post 9/11 world. NATO was originally formed at the height of the Cold War to defend mainland Europe from the former Soviet Union.

Ottawa Citizen