NATO ministers to discuss Afghan strategy in Brussels

NATO ministers will discuss strategy for the military withdrawal from Afghanistan at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, even as violence inside the country mounts and more allies prepare to head for the exits.
The meeting, at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday, will prepare the ground for a NATO summit in Chicago next month which will detail pullback plans, and outline funding and measures to try to ensure Afghanistan does not collapse into civil war.
Ministers will also discuss ways to maintain defence capabilities while their budgets are under pressure. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is also expected to attend on the meeting Thursday and discuss NATO’s missile defence system – which Russia sees as a threat.
The series of high-level meetings comes at a crucial time for the North Atlantic alliance.
NATO is in the process of handing over responsibility for security in several Afghan provinces to the commanders of the Afghan troops. Half of the territory is already under Afghan command. The handover is supposed to be completed by the middle of 2013.
“We’re at a pivotal point for the alliance,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta told reporters in Washington before leaving for Brussels. “We’ll also be working to ensure that NATO itself has the right military capabilities that will be needed for the future.”
NATO is training up to 350,000 Afghan soldiers and police. This number is supposed to decline after 2014 – presumably to a force of some 235,000. This week’s “jumbo” meeting of foreign and defense ministers in Brussels will grapple with who will pay for this large security force in the future.
NATO Secretary General Angers Fogh Rasmussen, who visited Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week, said he assumed that those ISAF nations providing troops would carry the costs.
Other items for discussion include plans for a missile defence system in Europe, and for improving the pooling and sharing of equipment among the European members as military budgets across the continent are being pared down.