Secretary General’s interview with Reuters at UN General Assembly

Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch

In an interview with Reuters during the UN General Assembly in New York last week, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed concern about armed groups operating outside government control in Libya and said he was encouraging Tripoli to accept an offer of help to reform its security sector.

He said he had offered NATO help to improve security in a meeting with Libyan leader Mohammed Magarief at the United Nations. "We have a lot of expertise when it comes to reforms of the defence and security sector and also when it comes to the reintegration of former freedom fighters to a unified security structure in the new Libya.”
 
Rasmussen said he was encouraged that the new Libyan government had taken "a number of steps to put these individual groups under control with the aim of creating a strong unified security structure”. Libya's government has sought to impose order on armed groups and the military has said it has removed the heads of two of the most powerful militias operating in Benghazi.
 
The Secretary General reiterated that NATO had no intention of intervening in Syria as it had in Libya, but stood ready to defend NATO member and Syria's neighbour Turkey, should this be necessary and warned that "any foreign intervention may have unpredictable repercussions”.
 
Rasmussen said that the NATO Defence Ministers meeting in Brussels on 9-10 October would discuss a decision to halt joint operations by NATO-led foreign troops and Afghan forces and the first steps in planning the training mission NATO will lead in Afghanistan after 2014.
 
The US Department of Defense said on Thursday that NATO-led forces were resuming operations alongside their Afghan counterparts in growing numbers. Rasmussen said joint operations remained an important element in training Afghan forces to ensure they can take complete responsibility for security and allow foreign troops to end their combat role by the end of 2014 as planned. He said that insider attacks “do not define the overall relationship between international troops and Afghan security forces and they definitely will not derail our strategy”.
 
The Secretary General said NATO's planning assumption was that the cost of maintaining Afghan security forces after 2014 would be around $4 billion annually, of which non-US members of NATO and partner countries would contribute $1.3 billion. When asked how much had been pledged, he replied: "We are not there yet but we have received announcements of quite substantial financial contributions already."