VARIOUS: NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer seeks pledges for Afghan emergencies in lead up to Riga summit

Security was tight in the Latvian capital of Riga on Monday (November 27) in the lead up to a NATO summit starting Tuesday (November 28) which will be dominated by the situation in Afghanistan. But few results are likely at the two-day summit, with talks scheduled to last barely six hours. Proposed by Washington last year in the first flush of its new enthusiasm for an alliance nearly torn apart over the 2003 Iraq war, the summit had been due to relaunch Europe's Cold War protector as a 21st century global security provider. But weakened leaders in the United States, France and Britain look incapable of converting a gradual rapprochement into a new security policy, with a series of U.S.-backed initiatives meeting European resistance before the Riga meeting. It will be NATO's first summit on former Soviet soil. The stakes are highest over Afghanistan, where NATO is fighting the toughest ground war in its 57-year history and where success is seen as critical to the future of the alliance. Nations are resisting appeals to reinforce the 32,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and are arguing over accusations that Germany, France, Italy, Spain and others are shying away from the worst violence in the south. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer sought last week to calm the dispute over so-called "caveats" on what soldiers can do and where they can go, proposing such restrictions should be dropped at least in emergencies. "You can be assured that if I formulate my bottom line on the caveats, that is a line that is shared by the heads of state and government," he told Reuters in an interview about prospects for resolving the controversy at the summit. "The more caveats we could have lifted, the better it is because it gives the commander more flexibility on where he can use his forces, but that is a subject, not only for Germany, but for all NATO allies," he added. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed in a newspaper interview published on Friday (November 24) that Germany would not send troops from their base in the north Afghanistan to the south, where British, Dutch and Canadian troops lead NATO operations. However German officials have noted that the parliament mandate governing the 2,800 German troops currently centred around the calmer north Afghanistan does allow them to operate elsewhere on temporary missions. NATO commanders have also sought to persuade Spain, Italy, France, Turkey and others to drop restrictions on where their troops operate in Afghanistan, but the German refusal has attracted most attention. U.S. plans to forge a network of partnerships around NATO from Scandinavia to Asia and training initiatives in the Middle East will get the thumbs-down at the summit from members wary of the alliance going global, diplomats had said on Friday (November 24), but the NATO Secretary General disagreed. "I am optimistic that both those initiatives will fly and you will see them both on the communiqué. So, on the fundamentals, on the issues at hand, of course, as we speak, the communiqué negotiations are going on and you know what happens with communiqué negotiations between 26 allies is that they can be long and protracted. But I do not see any fundamental differences on the key issues," de Hoop Scheffer said. NATO took over responsibility for security in Afghanistan from the United States this year and the 32,000 troops in the ISAF force are fighting the toughest ground war in the alliance's 57-year history. Its mission will dominate discussions at a two-day summit of the 26-member alliance in Riga, Latvia, from Tuesday but nations are resisting appeals to bolster the force and differ over restrictions on what national contingents can do on the ground. Eastern states lining up to join the 26-member alliance will get only limited succour in Riga, NATO diplomats predict. Albania, Croatia and Macedonia can expect an expression of intent to invite them in 2008 to enter, but no pledges. Tensions between Russia and Georgia and NATO's widespread unpopularity in Ukraine rule out closer ties with Tbilisi or Kiev for now.

ITN Source | November 29, 2006

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