Anna Sliwon and Ian Davis
In a Declaration released following their meetings in Brussels on 10 and 11 June on 11 June, NATO Defence Ministers set out their latest collective thinking on transition in Afghanistan and Kosovo, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, defence spending, NATO reform, missile defences and relations with Georgia and Ukraine. The fiscal difficulties throughout the Alliance and the ongoing discussion on a new Strategic Concept to be adopted at the Lisbon summit in November provided the main backdrop to the meeting.
Attempting to maintain solidarity in the ninth year of ISAF’s mission in Afghanistan was the primary task at the ministerial meeting. In an attempt to provide some much needed clarity on the end result, the declaration states that the Afghanistan mission “remains the Alliance’s key priority, to ensure that it will never again be a safe haven for terrorism and to contribute to a better future for the Afghan people”. However, outside of this scripted meeting the consensus appears less certain, with the new British prime minister saying that Britain and the US needed to move "further and faster" in stabilising the country, while US strategy has shifted towards slowing down the military assault in favour of putting civilian reconstruction efforts first.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen reiterated: “A stable, sovereign Afghanistan means a safer world for all of us. And we will do what is necessary, for as long as necessary, to make that happen”. The Afghan Defence Minister General Abdul Rahim Wardak urged that the transition should be treated as a process, and not a single event, and one that needs to be accompanied by development and governance.
ISAF’s key priority is the training and mentoring of the Afghan security forces and NATO Secretary General called on ISAF nations to provide the 450 trainers necessary to meet the 2,123 goal by March 2011, as this represents “a very smart investment” that would effectively speed up the transition.
Spending taxpayers’ resources “as efficiently as possible” was another commitment in the declaration. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the ministers agreed that any cuts in defence expenditures should not decrease NATO’s deterrence capability and efficiency, while Rasmussen urged them to “cut fat and not muscle”. The ministers remain committed to “the entire range” of Alliance missions and believe that this can be achieved through “continuing transformation, comprehensive reforms, setting clear priorities, identifying savings where possible, strengthening and modernising financial governance, and providing the necessary resources”. (For an independent analysis on options for $100 billion annual savings in the US defence budget see the report by the US-based Sustainable Defense Task Force Debt, Deficits, and Defense: A Way Forward was also released on 11 June).
During their working dinner on 10 June the ministers discussed reform of NATO in more detail. The Secretary General stated that it was a priority to make NATO a “leaner, more effective and less costly organisation”, and heoutlined some of the recent steps in this direction. These include reducing the number of NATO Committees to less than 100, improved auditing as well as a completed review of defence budgets allowing for 1.5 billion Euros of savings. No further details were forthcoming despite requests for elaboration during the subsequent press conference.
In terms of strategic weapon systems, the ministers confirmed that expanding the role of NATO’s Theatre Missile Defence programme to include territorial missile defence “would be consistent with NATO’s core mission of collective defence”. Although the final decision rests with the Lisbon Summit, it is increasingly looking like a shoe-in:National Armaments Directors have confirmed that it is technically feasible and the Secretary General repeated his assessment that it would cost less than €200 million over ten years to adapt the current missile defence system to cover not only deployed troops but also the entire territory of the Alliance. However, since no detailed budget or feasibility assessment is publicly available it is impossible to verify these claims.
Finally, one notable absence from the final declaration and any other public announcement was NATO’s nuclear role, despite a meeting of the Nuclear Planning Group being scheduled in the programme. This silence probably reflects a desire not to exacerbate further the divisions among experts and among NATO allies on the future of NATO’s nuclear posture.