Military

Since October, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Moscow have been taking stock
of areas where they can cooperate in the fight against terrorism, including closer
cooperation between militaries. So far, alliance and Russian leaders seem to have overcome
their political suspicions that have scuttled past efforts at cooperation.

"If just a few years ago someone had predicted that NATO and Russia would explore
the role of the military in combating terrorism, I would have recommended that they needed
a vacation," alliance Secretary-General George Robertson said recently at a
NATO-Russian conference on how their militaries can tackle the new threat.

Robertson said NATO and Russia must join forces to root out terrorism and even plan
military attacks against terrorists. Besides peacekeeping in the Balkans, this level of
military cooperation was unthinkable even as early as last year. Back then, Moscow and the
alliance were still at odds over the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and NATO expansion into
former Soviet states, such as the Baltic countries.

"We clearly see a common threat, a common enemy for perhaps the first time in 60
years," Robertson said about the new relationship. "Intensified NATO-Russia
cooperation is a central pillar of the global struggle against terrorism."

Attending the same conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov agreed.

"We must create an atmosphere of total rejection of terror in the world,"
Ivanov said.

The first formal step the former foes are taking is to establish a council with the 19
NATO countries so Moscow can have full say in some alliance issues, such as terrorism and
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. They say the goals and steps of the
20-member council will be defined by the NATO foreign ministers meeting in May. The
council is expected to be approved in November at the alliance summit in Prague.

The pressure on Russia and NATO to succeed is high, according to Willem Matser, a NATO
analyst for Central and Eastern Europe. Matser wrote about the new council in the most
recent issue of the alliance's publication, the NATO Review.

"The need to deliver concrete achievements will become increasingly important as
the Prague summit approaches," Matser noted.

To that end, Russian and NATO officials have been meeting regularly since last month.
Those meetings culminated in this month's conference on how the alliance and Russian
militaries could combat terrorism.

At the conference, Robertson outline four areas of closer NATO-Russian military
cooperation:

• Identifying and detecting terrorist threats through close interaction and intelligence
  sharing between the military and civilian agencies.


• Improve force protection and the military support of civilian authorities trying to
  protect populations and infrastructure.


• Help in managing the consequences of terrorist attacks by preparing civil emergency
  procedures and creating a mechanism of cooperation on a multinational basis.


• Employ militaries to strike against terrorists, their infrastructures and facilitators.

"Without close cooperation between Europe's two major security players, no
anti-terrorism strategy can work," Robertson said. "All these potential roles
for our militaries in the fight against terrorism have one thing in common: they require a
broad base of support, political as well as practical."

Some of this support came together last week when NATO and Russia conducted an exercise
on the consequences of a terrorist attack on a chemical plant, a NATO official said.

"I'm sure we will have exercises in the future with another aim," the
official said on the condition of anonymity.

Although the aim of the rapprochement is to bring two former foes together in a common
interest against terrorism, there could be still some flare-ups, said Robert Hunter, a
former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the mid-1990s. Hunter is now with the Rand
Corporation, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

"There are limitations on common interests and differences will arise,"
Hunter said. "But while there might be problems, the general geopolitical effort is
to move past the problems they had in the 20th century."