Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

23 January 2004

NATO

• NATO plans to build up a security partnership with Israel and Arab states around the Mediterranean in a drive to bolster the war on terrorism, new Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said on Thursday. The plans, which could eventually lead to joint military training and exercises, are likely to play a prominent part at a summit of the U.S.-led defence alliance in Istanbul, Turkey, in June, he told Reuters in an interview. "It's clear that the Mediterranean dialogue is taken very seriously by NATO and by me. I will certainly invest personally in the dialogue with Israel and the other six partners and I would not be surprised if that were also an important element of the Istanbul summit," he said. "NATO is clearly thinking about how to give the Med dialogue body," he said after meeting Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He acknowledged that NATO had had difficulty getting the dialogue first launched in 1994 with Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania off the ground. "You cannot say that there is a big drive in the Arab world at the moment for NATO," de Hoop Scheffer said. But he said the heightened threat of terrorism meant all seven Mediterranean partners had a common interest in cooperation with NATO. "If you look at all the new threats and challenges, then I think there are all sorts of arguments for doing it and also bringing a military-to-military component into that," he said. Asked whether that might lead to joint exercises, along the lines of NATO's Partnership for Peace with former Soviet bloc adversaries, he said: "We are not that far yet. You can think about such scenarios but no decision has been made yet." De Hoop Scheffer brushed aside concerns that NATO would be embracing authoritarian governments with poor human rights records. "I don't think that is the decisive argument, because that would mean that NATO...could not go and visit central Asian countries. You always have to strike a balance, but if you were to measure all the cooperation of NATO with the yardstick of West European and United States democratic standards, you get nowhere," he said. "It is just as important for those countries to have a dialogue with NATO because we face common threats. Terrorism is not a threat which is directed exclusively at NATO countries, it is as much a problem for those countries as it is for NATO." The NATO chief said he saw the beefed-up security dialogue as a complement to the European Union's Barcelona process of partnership offering Mediterranean states trade and aid benefits in return for economic and political cooperation and reform. He said his top 2004 priority was to extend the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to provide security to the provinces ahead of elections in mid-year. Asked whether NATO could simultaneously handle Afghanistan and take on a potential greater role in Iraq without risking overstretch, he said: "It's a full plate, I realise. Afghanistan is priority number one." (Reuters 221722 GMT Jan 04)
  
• NATO is seeking to deepen political and military contacts with Israel and a number of Arab nations and may invite their representatives to a summit of alliance leaders in June, officials said Thursday. It was not yet clear at what level the countries would be represented at the June 28-29 summit in Istanbul, Turkey. Officials said the alliance wants to upgrade its 10-year-old Mediterranean Dialogue program with Israel, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The program includes regular political meetings, military exchanges and conferences, small military exercises, information sharing on terrorism and preparations to help each other in peacekeeping, de-mining and civil emergencies. Officials said plans under discussion involved raising cooperation to something similar to the alliance's "Partnership for Peace" program with non-NATO nations in Europe and Central Asia. That could involve larger, more regular military exercises and more intense political contacts, perhaps even regular foreign or defense ministers meeting. Aside from the Middle East and North Africa, the Istanbul summit is also expected to give increased emphasis to NATO's ties with nations in Central Asia and the Caucasus as the alliance seeks to widen its focus on threats from terrorism, rogue states or regional instability. (AP 221356 Jan 04)
  

NRF

• More than 90 NATO military and civilian leaders will meet Friday through Sunday to discuss ways to use the alliance's new rapid reaction force to handle emerging crises. NATO's Allied Command Transformation, which oversees transformation and modernization of NATO's military capabilities, is hosting a seminar focused on the challenges of developing the elite NATO Response Force, which is to be fully operational by 2006. The seminar will use a fictional scenario involving a small country to which NATO is dispatching the response force in 2007; few details were released. Participants will explore the potential of the force as the crisis, which officials said could include the threat of weapons of mass destruction, rapidly changes. "The NRF is NATO's most important symbol," Adm. Sir Ian Garnett, a member of the Royal Navy and chief of staff of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, said Thursday at a news conference. "It is at the center of NATO's transformation." For most of its history, NATO focused on the Soviet threat to Europe. With the response force, it now is getting its getting its first multinational military unit combining air, land and sea power for use anywhere in the world on short notice. "NATO must transform a military that won the Cold War into a modern, flexible, highly trained force that can deploy anywhere it's needed," Canadian Lt. Gen. J.O. Michel Maisonneuve said at the Joint Training Analysis and Simulation Center in Suffolk, where much of the conference will be held. Last October, the response force reached initial operational capability with an "embryonic force" of about 2,000 troops, Garnett said. Garnett and Maisonneuve said they would have liked to have had the response force ready even sooner, for use in places such as Afghanistan, for example. But "this is a very complex task," Garnett said. "It will take time to get it right." More than 90 people are scheduled to attend the Allied Reach 2004 conference in Virginia with the theme: "The NRF Challenge-Vision to Reality." They are from the 19 member nations of NATO, plus the seven countries that will formally join NATO this year. Senior participants include Navy Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., head of the Allied Command Transformation, based in nearby Norfolk; Gen. Harald Kujat, chairman of the military committee for NATO; and Gen. James Jones, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe. NATO's new secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, is not scheduled to attend but is to address participants by video. (AP 230026 Jan 04)

IRAQ

• A Japanese government airplane arrived at a Kuwaiti air base Friday, carrying 104 Japanese air force personnel on a controversial mission to support relief and reconstruction efforts in southern Iraq. They boarded three buses and were to be driven to another Kuwait airbase, Ali Al Salem, where they will be based for three months to assist with transporting relief supplies and reconstruction equipment to Iraq. Japan is committing 1,000 military personnel to the operation, which will put its troops in a conflict zone for the first time since World War II. There is widespread opposition to the mission in Japan, where the nation's World War II defeat and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered horrifying reminders of the devastation of war. Critics argue the mission could violate the nation's war-renouncing constitution. Japanese units will carry weapons but can use them only in self-defense. No Japanese soldier has ever been killed by fighting in such an operation. (AP 230601 Jan 04)