The American Ambassador at NATO, Victoria Nuland, demanded Saturday that the Alliance members make the same efforts as the United States does in order to ensure stability in the Afghanistan. "We will be urgently requesting all our allies, including Germany, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, to match us soldier for soldier, euro for dollar," Nuland wrote in an article in German daily Berliner Zeitung.
Nuland wrote that NATO was confronted with the biggest challenge in its 59-year-old history. "The mission in Afghanistan is an investment in our common security and a catalyst for adapting our democratic alliance to the demands of the 21st century," she added. “Just as the Iraq war called for a change of US tactics and strategy, on the military field and that of the development politics, the Afghanistan engagement calls for changes inside NATO” says Nuland.
The United States, having 160,000 militaries in Iraq and 28,000 in Afghanistan, has been trying for the last few months to persuade the European NATO member states to assume their share in the Afghanistan war by sending reinforcements in the South of the country, where the heaviest Taliban-confrontations take place. Germany, the third NATO military contributor in Afghanistan, opposes to the idea of sending supplementary troops.
The same message was sent by the American Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, both at the Informal Reunion of the NATO Defence Ministers in Vilnius and at the Security Politics Conference in München.
(Source: Mediafax)
