Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

17 September 2003

ESDP

• According to the Stars and Stripes, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns cautioned France and Germany Tuesday against going ahead with plans for a European military headquarters separate from NATO, warning it would be an expensive duplication of resources that risked harming Alliance unity. Burns reportedly said the Europeans would be better advised to focus on modernizing their armed forces to deal with global terrorism threats rather than building a headquarters that he said could cost billions of dollars. “The rules of the road are that NATO and the European Union are partners … that the EU will not develop duplicative institutions,” Burns said at a breakfast meeting organized by a Brussels think tank. The newspaper recalls that the United States and some European nations are uneasy about plans announced in April by the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg to set up a European military planning center outside Brussels to run military operations independent of NATO.

BALKANS

• Senior U.S. military officers are pushing the Pentagon to withdraw all U.S. peacekeepers from the Balkans to make resources and troops available for overstretched operations in Iraq, reports the Financial Times. The newspaper asserts that although the number of U.S. troops in the two NATO operations in the former Yugoslavia is relatively small, people who have briefed on the internal Pentagon debate said the army has insisted on the move, arguing, “every little bit helps.” One former top Pentagon official is quoted saying: “The (Department of Defense) wants out. It’s driven by the joint staff and the army.” According to the newspaper, a Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. But sources said opposition from some Pentagon civilians, as well as State Department officials, centers on the diplomatic impact of withdrawing, as well as whether European allies can successfully take over operations. The newspaper remarks that a pull-out would be a significant reversal for the Bush administration, which as recently as June brushed off EU overture to take over SFOR, arguing that it needed to keep a presence to hunt down Islamic militants in the region.

ISAF

• According to AFP, the leading news agency CARE insisted Tuesday that NATO must urgently expand its security operation outside of Kabul, as a spate of armed attacks has made reconstruction work almost impossible in southern Afghanistan. “NATO must urgently expand peacekeepers outside (Kabul) before the security situation gets any worse. Since September 2002, armed attacks against the assistance community have increased from one a month to an average of one every two days. It is becoming almost impossible to do reconstruction work in many areas of the South. Reconstruction cannot move forward without greater security. Without reconstruction, insecurity will continue to thrive,” Paul Barker, CARE’s Country Director for Afghanistan reportedly told a policy brief.

IRAQ

• Madrid’s RNE Radio 1 reported that at a seminar in Madrid Wednesday, Spanish Prime Minister Aznar stressed the need to achieve political unity on the international stage in order to fight the threat of terrorism. Focusing on the situation in Iraq, he reportedly called for a “NATO-style” peace force for the country. The program aired Aznar saying: “I believe it is possible to reach an agreement on military security. I believe it is realistic to think about a multinational force under a homogeneous command and clearly defined in its mission of guaranteeing peace, and I believe NATO can be valuable as a clear example of … a multinational force with a homogeneous command and clearly with a mission of guaranteeing peace in the region.”