Mixed bag at the big NATO Summit this week:
Well I don’t think that anyone expected it to be all sunshine and skittles over there–not with all the bad blood over Afghanistan–so that’s not a bad showing by the president. I’m not a huge fan of bringing new nations on board, unless they’ve got troops in the queue ready to earn that NATO merit badge in Afghanistan. We’ve got enough problems integrating the current eastern European nations’ highly centralized Armed Forces into the weird multi-faceted chain of commands that make up NATO, ISAF, KFOR, and so on, so why shoulder even more baggage? The obvious counterpoint, that with critical manning shortages in places like the Helmand Province, it wouldn’t hurt to invite a few more willing souls to the Afghanistan party. Exit question: had President Bush’s missile defense plan failed and new national applicants been green lighted, would the Times article have run:
Yeah, you betcha.
