Some Allies Wary of New Troop Pledges
John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, spoke on Wednesday at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
By
ALAN COWELL
Published: December 2, 2009
PARIS — As political and military leaders across the globe pondered
President Obama’s announcement of his Afghan strategy, European allies offered a mixed response on Wednesday, with some of the biggest contributors to the
NATO coalition withholding promises of immediate troop reinforcements.
Obama’s Surge Strategy in Afghanistan
Will 30,000 additional troops be sufficient to curb the insurgency?
The NATO secretary general,
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he believed other members of the alliance would contribute 5,000 soldiers — and possibly more — to make a “substantial” increase to the 42,000 NATO troops already ranged against the
Taliban.
“This is not just America’s war,” he said at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.
But the president’s entreaties drew an ambivalent response in some European nations where the war is broadly unpopular among voters who question why it is being fought and whether it can be won.
France and Germany ruled out an immediate commitment, saying they were awaiting an Afghanistan conference in London in late January. Other nations offered only limited numbers of soldiers.
Álvaro de Vasconcelos, director of the
European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris, said the war was
“badly perceived in Europe, contaminated by the Iraq war, the killing of civilians, the collateral damage, all of which has contributed to a widespread opposition to the Afghan war among Europeans.”
“If the civilian side is as important as the military one — training the Afghan police, judiciary and doing development, which Europeans know very well how to do and consider their main expertise — it will make it easier for European leaders to get support.’”
“More troops for a very unpopular war, without knowing where we’re going, doesn’t work — you can’t sell it to Europeans,” Mr. de Vasconcelos said. “But you can sell the transition from war to crisis management.”
Mr. Obama’s plan to send around 30,000 more American soldiers was closely watched in Pakistan, gripped by a Taliban insurgency intertwined with Afghanistan’s.
There, distrust of American intentions runs deep, partly because the United States is seen as having abandoned the region after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and there is widespread fear in the security establishment of a repetition of those events. And Pakistanis remain concerned about the possible implications of a huge troop surge just across their long and porous border with Afghanistan.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/world/03reax.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
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NATO nations having the same debate on the exact same ISSUES as the USA...I'm wondering if this will make them delay all of their committed troops to support our endeavor?
