NATO won’t stay in Afghanistan forever, UK looks for the exit

Even as NATO’s new Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the commitment to the war against terrorism in Afghanistan by the alliance and Europe is strong, he said its troops will one day be pulled out, echoing remarks by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said he wants a “clear timetable” for a transfer of security to Afghan forces and a way out for his country’s troops too. Speaking to delegates of the NATO parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh, Scotland, Rasmussen repeated his appeal for more combat troops and trainers to be sent to Afghanistan, a plea made repeatedly by the United States, even as American President Barack Obama considers a request from his top general in the country to send in 40,000 more troops to stem growing resistance from insurgents and the Taliban.
“To my mind it is obvious - that if we were to walk away and turn our backs on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would be back in a flash,” said Rasmussen, according to the Press Association. He urged NATO members to build on the progress already made to create a secure region while new strategies were being worked out. “Don’t make any mistake. We will stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes to finish our job - but that is, of course, not forever,” said Rasmussen. But he warned: “If we were to walk away, the pressure on nuclear-armed Pakistan would be tremendous. Instability would spread throughout central Asia and it would only be a matter of time until all our nations and all our citizens would feel the consequences.”
Rasmussen said the EU needs to send more soldiers and police trainers to Afghanistan.
Last year, the EU agreed to double its Afghan police training mission to 400 trainers. But its member states have so far only managed to deploy less than 300 officers as they also try to satisfy separate NATO demands for more troops and trainers. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, addressing the same meeting, advocated a coherent approach to the conflict that would combine a “clear military strategy” with a “political surge.” He said, however, that: “Our goal is not a fight to the death. This is not a war without end,” reiterating what Brown said earlier. Increasing British calls for an “exit strategy” for Afghanistan have been linked to growing public pressure on the government over the rising death toll. A total of 234 British soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001 - half of them in the last 12 months alone.
A planned international conference on the future of Afghanistan should set a “clear timetable” for the transfer of authority to Afghan security forces so that foreign troops can go home, Brown said. In a key foreign policy speech in London, Brown confirmed his earlier offer that Britain would be prepared to host a planned NATO conference on Afghanistan in January in his capital city. The venue of the meeting has not been decided, and other countries have come forward offering venues, including Germany. “I want that conference to chart a comprehensive political framework within which the military strategy can be accomplished. It should identify a process for transferring, district by district, to full Afghan control and, if at all possible, set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010,” Brown said. A BBC analyst said that Brown had not quite laid out an “exit strategy” for Afghanistan in his speech, but “pointed to the exit door.” Brown delivered a passionate defense of the deployment of international forces in Afghanistan, claiming that “significant and long-lasting damage” had already been inflicted on the al-Qaeda network. Since January 2008, seven of the top dozen figures in al-Qaeda had been killed, “depleting its reserves of experienced leaders and sapping its morale,” Brown said. This process, he said, must not be reversed “by retreat or irresolution.”
The EU’s external affairs commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, said earlier that the bloc was also prepared to provide “significantly more money” to Afghanistan. The EU is already spending around one billion euros ($1.5 billion per year in the country, much of it believed to be stolen, what EU describe as a “problem of absorption capacity,” diplomatic language pointing to rampant corruption in Kabul. EU foreign ministers called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whom the United Nations said fraudulently stole re-election, only to be congratulated by the EU, to clean up his administration, a difficulty problem exacerbated by a Transparency International index which showed it is the most corrupt country in the world.  “We want to see a really clear government commitment to reforms and also particularly to good governance. This is the most important, because only then will the international community be really ready to work with President Karzai,” Ferrero-Waldner said. Diplomats agreed that it would be crucial to see which ministers Karzai nominated to his government. “We’ll follow very closely what is the result of President Karzai ... We’ll see what is the government he puts forward,” said Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief. EU governments are also providing about half of NATO’s 71,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan. Britain, which has 9,000 troops in southern Afghanistan, has already pledged to send a further 500 to help train the Afghan army and the police, and is now urging fellow EU governments to follow its example. Afghan government officials announced the launch of an anti-corruption unit and a force to fight major crimes amid mounting international pressure on Karzai to crack down on graft in his administration. Since being declared president in a fraud-tainted election earlier this month, Karzai has been under pressure by Western leaders, who have tens of thousands soldiers in the country, to reform his administration or face the loss of international support.