Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other produce, which Poles say Russia imposed in retaliation for Polish support of the so-called Orange Revolution in neighboring Ukraine). The brothers have maintained Poland's historical support for the U.S., commanding a sector of Iraq and agreeing this month to send 1000 additional troops to shore up NATO in Afghanistan...
Leaders of NATO's 26 member states gather this week in the Latvian capital, Riga, for a summit that will trumpet the solidarity of the world's most successful military alliance. The scripts have been largely written and surprises are unlikely. But as Christoph Bertram, the dean of German security experts, recently noted, the affair will be "like a Christmas service for agnostics, who for most of the year do not pray together or sing from the same hymnbook." The question of what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should do and become has been a subject of often deep disagreement...
...tough is its fight in Afghanistan? Tougher than most thought it would be when NATO first deployed forces in August 2003 to help the nascent Afghan government maintain security. "If we fail in Afghanistan it could be the end of the alliance," says Ronald D. Asmus, director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a security think tank in Brussels. "It would be like losing the Korean War at the beginning of the cold war." There's not a single NATO member state who would argue otherwise, yet the trend line is not encouraging...
...troops in Afghanistan enough? More troops could be put to good use: NATO has 16,000 soldiers in Kosovo, which is less than 2% the size of Afghanistan. But with major contributing countries already stretched in Iraq, Kosovo and Lebanon, a big infusion of new soldiers is not realistic. So the Riga horse-trading will concentrate on a related problem: that commanders often can't deploy existing troops as they would like because of national limits-or "caveats"-on their use. U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch troops are doing most of the frontline fighting; support from many of the other...
...neither the government nor the public has the stomach for putting German soldiers in harm's way. Mindful of that political reality, Bush isn't likely to push for a sea change. Nevertheless, it was only seven years ago, in Kosovo, that Germany first committed combat troops to a NATO mission at all. Over time, if Germany moves into a foreign-policy role consonant with its economic weight, a more self-assured stance might become politically acceptable...